Jason's Blog

Passprot (and Visa) turned up today, phew :-) That's a weight off my mind, everything else is within my power I think. I went back to the hospital to get my toe checked out, hurts when I walk but wasn't too bad driving. Having said that I haven't tried driving the Vitesse yet, the clutch is pretty light so I should be OK. It'll take a few more weeks to heal fully and I need to keep it strapped up for another week or two. Tomorrow the work on the car starts in earnest, whilst I've been laid up I've made a list and prioritised it, it won't all get done and to be honest I think if I just jumped in the car now and went it would be OK but I will feel better after I lay hands on the car! I also heard today that Carl Shakespeare with whom I did the run last year has just got a ticket for his Sprint. He's built this up from a bare shell and has put some serious hours into it. He's coming round tomorrow so I'm looking forward to seeing the car then.

Well the pain has subsided in my toe and I drove for the first time today. I had some shots for India yesterday and that seemed to go OK and I had a call from my company's travel people to confirm that my Visa has been granted. That means my Passport is on the way back to me :-) Should be with me tomorrow when I also go back to the fracture clinic. The weekend will be the first time I've touched the car for a month, fortunately it's pretty close but I do need to pack!

So imagine the scene, I am back from holiday, tanned and completely knackered, been travelling for 12 hours through the night and I'm a bit, well, clumsy. I have some bad news and then some good news on the phone, more about that later. Whilst I'm taking and making these calls I'm thinking "I need some sleep". Then I hear my mobile ringing but I've put it down somewhere, I walk quickly out of the study and with my bare foot I clout the door frame, hard, very hard, as hard as I can! Ouch, that really hurts, I hobble about and miss the call, I look down and my little toe is at the weirdest angle you can think of, it's well broken!! So that's a few hours in casualty, a couple of x-rays and some "manipulation", a little bit of swearing and a bucket of pain later and I'm done. It's all strapped up now and quietly turning blue and yes, it still bloody hurts! I should be able to drive so the 10CR is still on, I should be able to walk on it i...

Well here I am in sunny Cyprus, lying by the pool with nothing to do but eat, drink and relax. So far I've seen a Herald and a Cortina estate - OK the Herald is the same one I've seen every year for the last 15 :-) I lst two days reading Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows and tomorrow I intend going on a quest for some alloy tube to make my velocity stacks with - other than that it's just the daily grind of beer, wine, BBQ food and sunshine, it's a hard life!

Well it's not my relay - I haven't got one!! GT6s had a relay, Vitesses didn't - go figure!! That kinda blows that theory doesn't it. Anyway, I've run out of time really, I have been working in Newcastle for the last 9 months, well there and Dundee with a bit of Belfast and the inevitable Norwich thrown in. That job has come to an end, great people in Belfast and Newcastle and I was sorry to see it come to an end to be honest. It had to end, my employer was pulling Claims out of these locations and my job was to migrate the work to Dundee and ensure an ordered and business like withdrawal - oh and my self appointed job was also to make sure everyone had a bloody good party at the end with far too much beer - mission accomplished! So, to the next job - well I have a holiday for 2.5 weeks starting Tuesday so my mind wasn't really on anything but that. Queue an approach to manage another function - a real job not a project and back in my spiritual home of Claims. N...

Connect both and they don't work. Trace the circuit and it all seems OK - horn push and "pencil" work, connections are OK. Unplug one connection on a horn and the other works fine, unplug two connection and nothing work. Swap the horns around, same thing. Power up the horns independently with some wire from the battery and they work OK. WTF is going on? Replaced my steering coupling with a Canley Classics "uprated" one - in fact it's a 2000 UJ type version. The old one was sloppy, the new one is tight and big! New one on the left below. The old one was a recent replacement not a Stanpart one - they don't last! The new one took some fitting, it's much longer than the original and generally beefier - I fitted it and the bolts I used obviously fouled. I took it off and cut the bolts down, it fitted BUT caught on the suspension turret - I cut the bolt down a little more, took a smidgen of the face of the nut and smidgen off the faces of the coupling - it...

Well Blogger is getting easier and easier to use, I've now added a poll function and an RSS feed - not sure why or what for, perhaps just because I can :-) Today has been a good day, I've re plumbed the PI so that the low pressure spill from the metering unit returns to the low pressure fuel filter union and the higher pressure spill from the PRV is totally isolated from that circuit and returns direct to the tank. I was concerned that having this high pressure spill joined to the low pressure in a "T" and then routed into the tank could allow the metering unit to become pressurised again. A pressurised metering unit will at best run rich and at worst, as we found out, run full rich and cause unnecessary but spectacular flame splitting form the exhaust! Still looks like a rats nest in there! Once I'm happy with the thing I'll tidy it up! Running the car with the various spills disconnected showed me that although the pressure is not great there is signifi...