2nd May 2007
MOT Day. Got up bright and early to finish getting the car ready and head off for the MOT test. I needed to remove the bolts which were holding the harness slots in place whilst the adhesive set - seems to have worked ok so far, but we'll see how it goes.
Once all packed up and ready, I headed off. I took the slightly long way round to the MOT station in order to allow me to try to get the brakes cleaned up before the test. As I was passing the post office on the way there I called in for my tax disc (using last years not-yet-elapsed MOT). A good blast and a few hard stamps on the brakes on the back roads, and I arrived for the test.
The test went just fine, and the nice thing about using a local friendly garage is that they understand that you know a bit about a car if you built it, and were happy for me to hang around helping with the test, etc. I had taken the torque wrench of doom with me, and fortunately the garage had a 41mm socket which fitted through my wheel centres, however it turned out that my hubnuts were ok. When I explained about the bearing they said just to keep an eye on it. Anyway, after not too long I was the owner of a new test certificate, no problems.

Once that was all done (and I had obliged the garage when I drove off - they told me it was obligatory to leave two black lines as long as I could up the road!) I headed off towards town to see a man about a tonneau. I showed him my template half door, and talked through what I wanted. The good news was that he could do what I wanted, the bad news is that he is fully booked up until June - so I can't get it done before the tour = a wet tour for sure :-/

5th May 2007
Whilst the weather was good I decided to head out for a bit of a test drive, to get some mileage on the car as a method of ensuring that all is well. So I took myself off for about a 90 minute drive, which included a mixture of conditions. It is fair to say that the car always feels rather quick when I've not driven it for a while, though I soon settled back into it. I didn't really notice any issues other than a bit of squeaky suspension or brakes, which I hope will sort itself out and probably isn't a problem.

6th May 2007
Something which I had noticed whilst I was checking the car, and the MOT tester commented on, is that the rear tyres are wearing a little quicker than the fronts. So I decided that it would probably be a good idea to swap fronts to rears and vice versa, to even the wear out. So I got the car back on the axle stands, and set about swapping them over. This is a mild pain on my car due to the fit of the front cycle wings - I have to undo the cycle wings to remove the wheels.
Once I thought I'd done the first side, and I'd done everything back up after cleaning the threads on the cycle wing brackets, I remembered that I tried to do this trick last year, but was also scuppered then by the weights on the wheels fouling the brake calipers. So I decided I'll get the wheels re-balanced with the weights on the edge (as I had to do with the other pair) so that they can be swapped.
In the afternoon I started working on the replacement grilles for the bonnet and nosecone. I bought some wire mesh yesterday, with slightly large holes than I'd prefer, but it was the best I could find. So I spent some time working on finishing tidying up the nosecone where the old lower grille was removed, and then carefully cutting and shaping the mesh to fit. I also carefully roughened the inside surface of the GRP where I intend to bond the grilles on, hopefully this will help them to grip and I won't get a recurrence of them falling off. I need to get them painted next, but time ran out for today.

11th May 2007
Throughout the course of the week I have been progressively applying coats of paint to the grilles on both sides, and then I started the task of bonding them in. Again this takes a bit of time, well waiting for the adhesive sealant to dry takes a while at any rate. I got a new tube of some transparent stuff which seems to dry fairly quickly though, so not too bad. It also generally requires balancing various bits of wood and heavy objects on the grilles to hold them in position as the adhesive dries.
     

12th May 2007
Something which I managed not to get around to during this week was going to get the wheels re-balanced. So that was a priority job for this morning. It was simple enough, or so I thought until I actually got them back out of the boot of the car, which was when I noticed that the monkey at the tyre shop decided it was a good idea to double-stack the weights on one of the rims. Typically I'd checked one of them as I put it in the boot, but not the other one. Anyway, I wasn't particularly enthused about this, but I tried it anyway - it actually clears the caliper by a few mm, but is far too close for comfort on the track rod end (which does run close to the rim). So I could only re-attach one wheel, the other will have to go back to be done again.
I also spent some time finishing off the work on the grilles by re-attaching the main nosecone grille (I'd repainted that too), and putting the nosecone back on. Unfortunately, only having three wheels on the car meant that I couldn't get it back on the ground and out for a final test run as I had hoped. So I couldn't really (be bothered) to do much else. Still, I'm a bit more organised this year than last...
     

13th May 2007
A little more pottering around in the garage today. I needed to finally take the drill to the battery box for the radio for the Autocom - that is almost all sorted now, just got to get power into the battery box. I also had a bit of a general nose around the car, checked a couple of fuel hoses at the front of the car where they are wrapped in heatwrap, as I thought I could smell petrol a bit strong, but it turned out to be ok (I think it is the open vent on the regulator). I also wanted to check the diff oil, as it makes all sorts of horrid noises - it was ok, still plenty of stinky oil in there. Finally I spent some time cleaning up around the bootbox, removing the residue from last years gaffa tape boot lid - I must do this sooner this year as it was a pain to remove!

14th May 2007
Got the wheel re-balanced again at lunchtime today, so got it back onto the car this evening, and got the car back down onto the ground. As it looked dry, I went out for a quick test run to ensure the balancing was ok. All was well, so that is good news, and I officially signed the car off as fit for the tour!
The only thing left to do now is to finish the radio for the intercom, and work out finally where and how I am going to attach it all to the car. So I finished off (hopefully, pending some glue drying) the fitting of the power wire to the battery box for the radio, and tested it out and it worked ok. Once that is all done it is just a matter of gathering and packing stuff to take with me.

17th May 2007
So, as predicted the last couple of days have been spent doing the final gathering together of various bits, as well as other little jobs like creating some way of keeping the radio dry whilst it is strapped to the roll cage. Today I "just" needed to finish packing everything into bags and into the car. It still managed to take all morning, although I did fit in a sneaky clean of the car, as it was a bit dirty after the recent garage works.
After lunch myself and Richard were all packed, and headed over to our meet up with the other local tourers. This was actually the first time I have used the intercom and radio whilst driving - it seemed to be working ok but I was getting a ticking sound from something. Once we were all ready and leaving the car park, I glanced up at the radio and noticed the transmit light on it was flashing in sync with the clicking I could hear. I reset it and tried again but seemed to have the same problem, so at this point I gave up on the radio (as random transmitting is really annoying for everyone else!).
We had a simple and uninteresting enough run up the A1 to our pre-tour overnight stop. The car seemed to be quite happy, although I was running a bit higher oil temperature than normal, which is probably down to me having re-covered the oil cooler, perhaps a bit more effectively than before. One to keep an eye on. After some discussion and experimentation with the others, I discovered that the clicking on the radio was caused by the car power adapter I made, so I switched over to the battery at it seems to be sorted.

18th May 2007
Day One.
So day one of the tour proper (although we'd had about 20-odd people on the "Thursday Club" this year), and it was a pretty easy start for us as we were about 20 miles from the start point at the Yorkshire Air Museum at Elvington. We had time for a nose around the museum whilst we were waiting for all the other tourers to arrive, and lunch. I even had time for a few photos, but they were done on my phone, so the quality is not great (and it's the only pictures I did get around to taking).
After lunch, we had a 110 mile route which took us from Elvington, north-east towards Scarborough, then on through the North Yorkshire Moors up to Whitby, before heading north-west back across the moors to our first hotel at Guisborough, just on the northern edge of the moors.
Whilst this was of course enjoyable, I found some of the roads were a bit narrow and very twisty, which made it difficult to make good progress, as you cannot see very far ahead at all, which means extra caution as you have no idea what is just around the next bend. Some of the roads were a bit more open, which was more fun.
The hotel was really nice (if a bit of a maze!), though as ever I'm not sure what they made of all the dirty tired tourers arriving!

19th May 2007
Day Two.
The route for the morning of day two was quite long, 160 miles. This means that we needed to make a reasonably prompt start, as guessing the types of roads, that is a good 4 hours driving time, let alone any breaks along the way. The route took us back south over the Yorks Moors, on a road known locally as "The Yorkshire TT". The roads here were much more suited to me / my car, as they were more open and you could go a bit quicker and see alot further ahead. We continued south towards York, before the route turned west back over the A1 towards the dales, here the roads turned back to being a bit more twisty. Then we headed north-west and into the Yorkshire Dales National Park. We were seeing some great scenery, and the weather had been holding out until this point where we encountered a shower or two, but nothing too horrendous. It was a long route, too long for me, as after a couple of comfort/petrol stops, and we had one stop to fix a broken cycle wing, we eventually got to the lunch stop at Bowes Museum at 3pm!
After lunch, the route was a more sane 70 miles (a somewhat unbalanced day), so whilst there was some temptation to try to cut some corners to make up some time, we decided we would go for it anyway, as it wasn't too far. I'm somewhat glad we did as the roads for the afternoon run were amazing. We were taken firstly north-west through Teesdale, before turned back eastwards to Durham and our second hotel. Many of the roads were very open (including roaming sheep and various other wildlife) and over the top of moorland. This was an excellent opportunity to press on a bit and I was finding these roads brilliant fun, and perfectly suited my driving and my car :-)

20th May 2007
Day Three.
The route for day three promised much more of the same sort of roads we had on the second part of day two. In fact, some parts of it were a re-run. As we were in the same hotel for another night, we didn't need to carry all our luggage either, which is always nicer. The route was basically a figure-eight route from Durham, out towards Carlisle, with lunch at the Hartside Pass.
It all started very well, I was at the front of the group, and zoomed off a bit enjoying myself on the moorland roads. When we then dropped back down onto a more major road, I heard a message on the radio that Williams engine had stopped. To cut a tedious story short, we then lost 2 hours trying to fix his car and waiting for the truck to come and rescue him. Once he was loaded up and sent to find a new coil (it had cracked and was arcing, so he lost his sparks), the rest of us continued on up the Hartside Pass to lunch at the cafe at the top - this was another cracking bit of road that I really enjoyed driving at the front.
Even though the morning part of the route was only 60 miles, we lost alot of time with the breakdown, so arrived quite late for lunch again. We considered cutting the route down again to make up some time, but figured we were here and might as well get on with it - after all the roads were great fun and bit quicker today.
We needed fuel, but the first few petrol stations we came across were closed. In this sense it was a good job we didn't have Williams greedy V8 with us! There was also another stroke of luck. We stopped for fuel about half way through the afternoon route, where the figure-8 crossed over itself. After we had filled up, Richard spotted that there was an old Rover P6 rotting in the corner of the garage, and wondered if it had a coil on it. A quick look showed a completely empty engine bay, apart from the exhaust, the propshaft, and... a shiny coil - it was even the V8 model! A bit of scrapheap challenge style work and we got ourselves a coil for William! Classic. The rest of the afternoon route was also great fun, back up over the moors, some of which we have covered on day two.
We arrived back at the hotel, just about the last car on the road, and a bit tight on time for dinner. William tried the coil on his car, as he'd not been able to find one during the afternoon, and it worked first time! A long, tiring, but ultimately rather fun day.

21st May 2007
Day Four.
Today was in the main a trackday, for those that wanted it. I decided that I would have driven the car enough over the previous few days, and needed to ensure I get home in one piece. That meant that we could have a relaxed start to the day, and we ambled over the track to see what was going on for a bit. The track looked like great fun, and of course I would have loved to have a go, but my sensible side prevented me! Maybe I'll head back up here one day when the north east guys are having another day at the track. After an hour or so, we decided we would head homeward, and have a break along the way for lunch. This was just a rather uninteresting drive back down the A1.
Arrived back home in the early evening, emptied all the stuff out of the car, and pushed it back into garage looking a bit grubby, for a rest. Time for a rest myself too...

©2002-2009 David Hackett UDM4