I thought this one was worth a quick few lines as it had me perplexed for a while and is perhaps a useful lesson that sometimes things that seem difficult are quite simply explained and fixed.

Just a short one this - the steering wheel was in quite bad shape, it looked like Abu Hamza or Captain Hook had been driving it and Stevie Wonder had attempted to repair it. I thought it would be an easy repair but I couldn't find anybody that could supply the correct colour leather dye. It turns out it's a modified acrylic paint so in theory it's a fairly simple job to get a paint that is fairly close and then mix in some art paint to change the colour slightly. The stuff I ordered was called cream, I got it from a company called Scratchdoctor. Sadly it was a mile out so I ordered some different stuff from another outfit called Car Shine system - such a catchy name. Anyway, they had a colour called Buttermilk that looked n screen like it would be virtually identical so I ordered it. I had to buy a big bottle because they didn't have any small ones but I thought 17 quid would be a small price to pay to get things looking right again.

Progress has been made but a couple of issues are still challenging me - the speedo and the key situation being two of them, a knocking exhaust being the third. Mike, the previous owner had told me he backed in to something or someone - can't remember which. The result was the same either way, the driver's side exhaust got bent, it looked quite obvious from the rear of the car. I had adjusted it and it looked better but now it knocks when driving over bumpy ground so it needs a different fix. I'm hoping I can do it without having to purchase exhaust parts with their associated Bentley tax. I have an idea of what to do but it's still 30 degrees outside and I find that very draining these days. I might wait until late this evening when the heat has gone off a bit.

That is the question that many people have asked me over the last couple of weeks, to be fair I am still wondering it myself. Those of you that know me best will know I was actually lusting over an earlier Turbo R, a car that I have admired since the mid 1980's, I have covered the story before so won't repeat it here but it's been a long burning itch that I have only recently felt in a position to scratch.

I knew the aerial was knackered when I bought the car, I had hoped to fix it but my efforts proved inadequate. Perhaps not too surprising that something that has been outside for much of it's life should pack up after 28 years, the mast sections were rusted solid. I kind of got it working but it was never going to be reliable so a replacement was sought. The nice thing about the original Bentley item is that it sits nearly flush with the body, it's very neat, a proper quality item. Trouble is finding one in working order is not at all easy. I found one but it was £350, which I thought was fairly hefty, I couldn't find one off anything else that looked similar so in the end I bought a cheap universal one as a stop gap solution. It was a wee bit cheaper than the Bentley one at a mere £26 including delivery. To be fair it doesn't look too bad, it works perfectly, gives a decent signal and means I can have radio, which is nice. The original aerial was also for the built in phone, which being 28 year old tech has long since gone so it no longer mattered that the new aerial wis for FM only. The head unit does not support DAB so that isn't an issue at this point anyway.

As stated in my previous article one of the rear seat switches was broken = you could feel it and the seat would not go back from the fully reclined position. I had read somewhere about some switches being unreliable so I set about looking in to my own particular situation.

The trouble with buying old cars is that sometimes they throw up problems that you really should have spotted before you handed the cash over. There is no finer example of this than my recently acquired 1998 Bentley arnage. I knew the central locking and driver's door mirror didn't work, I hadn't realised the interior lights didn't work and nor did one of the rear seat adjustment switches. To be fair I hadn't even realised the rear seats were adjustable, I just never really paid much attention to the back, I never go in there. Things got a wee bit worse when I phoned the last people that serviced the car to ask what they had done. The guy I spoke to remembered the car, said they had done a minor service then casually mentioned that there was loads wrong with the car, although he wouldn't tell me what!. It's been recently MoT'd and some issues were raised at that but only as advisories. When I mentioned the door locks he acknowledged that was one of the problems. And it is a very big problem if you go to Bentley because they will want to put 3 new locks in at a price of around 5 grand. I'm well on the way to fixing them now at a cost of half a tin of switch cleaner.