Holes in thumbs and hoses

The Bus is halfway through its status change … from Aussie ‘S’ to Pommy ‘S’. A re-built distributor, with advance instead of retard vacuum and some Bosch internals (harder wearing than Lucas), plus a Crane optical ignition system was stage 1. In a week or so I hope to be fitting some rebuilt carb’s (courtesy of Greg Tunstall )to replace the sad current ones. At this point the emissions kit will be stripped off, blocked up, re-routed. I don’t envisage it transforming Bob into a real snarler, of course, but it’s a logical start at least.

I finally removed the tacky sheepskin covers from the front-seats … to see what they were hiding. The seats beneath are in really good condition, barring the door-side top corners of both seats, which have faded and worn right through. It’s a real shame. For now they can be patched up I think. At some point I will fit some modern car seats instead, as my back gets pretty sore driving at the best of times. I’ve had two Saabs and the seats in those were both excellent, so maybe they will do the trick.

I haven’t really had much of a chance to do anything else around the car, though, on account of my own stupidity. I had an altercation with a fast moving 10mm drill bit … and it won! It basically snapped my thumbnail in two and tore the base out of the finger, which has made ‘handywork’ somewhat less practical for the meanwhile. I have a nice photo, but it’s a bit gory, so unless I get requests I will keep it to myself!

Yesterday I had my first breakdown adventure with Bob! A nice easy fix though. Ella and I went for a drive out of town, and after about ten minutes on the road I noticed the temp. gauge was a bit high … Uh oh! The bonnet goes up at the side of the road, and there’s lots of coolant sprayed around everywhere making it tricky to spot the leak (fingers were crossed hoping it wasn’t the radiator!). Eventually we traced the split hose next to the fan thermostat, sneakily hidden on the underside of the hose-clip. Luckily there was enough hose to chop it down and stick it back on. It was a bit of a pain trying to fiddle around with hot hoses, coolant, metal, etc. with my right thumb out of action. We filled the rad. back up and carried on without any further hitches.
Isn’t it nice when you break down and the fix is really easy?