October 2025 Update

I have had quite a few messages recently enquiring as to whether I am still about, many folk have noticed that I haven't done many updates at all over the last 2 or 3 months. It's all down to this house move really, it has taken up a hell of a lot of time and has had a massively negative impact on my mental health. I am holding it together just about but at times have found it hard. Anyway, this blog isn't about that, this bit is to just update on some projects that I started talking about some time back and seemingly did no more on.

Most of my bikes have been sold now, I only have two left - the Honda RC163 tribute and the Bianchi Stelvio 250, everything else has gone. The new place only has a double garage, I am keeping the hot rod so I just don't have room for anything else, it has been a serious wrench to get rid of all my stuff but needs must and all that. 

First one to talk about is the 1998 Vauxhall astra GTE project that we started back in January, it was a good little project that one but it didn't get totally finished before being sold at auction. We had done just about everything except for the boot lock, a couple of bits of trim and the roof liner. The car had come to us without a roof liner and we had been searching for one for months. Eventually one came our way via a chance discussion with somebody in the Vauxhall owners group down in Bristol or somewhere don there. He knew of one in Wales, a deal was done and our good friend Paulo at Alliance Transport in Freiston collected it and brought it to us. We were delighted until we went to fit it and discovered the hole for the sunroof was in the wrong place! we think maybe it came from a car that had a sunroof retro fitted. Malcolm kind of gave up with it at that point and decided to pass it on. I can understand why but it was a pity, a bit more work would have made the car far more valuable. It made a couple of grand profit, it was fun getting it going, we got an MoT on it so it was job done as far as it went.

The Audi Quattro has been an absolute nightmare from start to finish, I am not going to say too much about what went on there as I don't want to upset anybody but the car was simply not as described. It took many months of hard work by Russell to bring the body and chassis up to where we thought it was when purchased. We were promised all the parts would be made available yet here we are 6 months later still asking for many of them. We were promised a complete low mileage 20v engine, what turned up was a short engine, a separate head and a loose head gasket that was the wrong one. It had no ancillaries and most of the parts from the 10v engine we had from the donor car did not fit.  It is still a very long way from finished, I started putting the engine back together months ago but am still waiting for parts. It's a similar story with both the front and rear suspension, it's been taking up a lift since we brought it home at the beginning of April. I don't know what's going to happen to it from here, getting parts for these cars is both hard and very extensive, we are a very long way from having everything we need and most of the parts we have been sent by the seller have been unusable, either the wrong parts or just knackered beyond belief. A real shame, it would be a great car if we could finish it.

The Integrale now has an MoT on it, Malc was asked to take the Son of one of his key staff members to his prom in it. It ha a couple of advisories but that was about it. I was supposed to be going with Malc and Russ to test it but something came up, can't remember what but I was well pissed that I couldn't be there. the brakes are fine now but it still has a strong smell of fuel in the cabin, we need to replace the fuel lines. The engine seems to be happy now it's getting the right fuel pressure but it still turns to foul it's plugs when cold, we have to run start uplugs in it ans swap them when it's hot. It's a bitch to drive on tarmac, especially at low speed as it has limited slip diffs on it, it wants to scrub the tires and protests loudly where the wheels can't slip. It scares me because if that gearbox fails the chances of finding another are miniscule, it took long enough to find the one currently in there.

The 6r4 got an outing, another one that I missed, the MG day at Croft circuit up in Yorkshire. The house moving activity stopped me from going to that one, emptying out our barns has been a far bigger task than I could ever have imagined. I am told the event was a big disappointment, it used to be held at Silverstone and was massive, sadly this event was tiny by comparison. I hope it does better next year, it would be a shame for it to end. The metro was running well though, it had a tiny oil leak when hot but nothing to worry about. It's British, of course it's going to leak somewhere.

The Lotus Cortina has been naughty, it dumped all it's clutch fluid on the floor, just a failed hydraulic hose, easy fix, they are  readily available.

I haven't done anything further on the hot rod except to acquire yet another pair of cylinder heads, this time the very latest ones with valve stem seals on both inlet and outlet valves, wasted stems all round and the best flow of any standard head. I have cleaned them up a bit to remove any casting flashes etc so they should work really well. They are later small combustion chamber ones so I will have to use thicker composite gaskets to make sure the compression ratio doesn't get too high and cause chronic pre ignition.

So that's about it really, I am now sat amongst piles and piles of boxes, the house is all packed, as are the workshops, I can't find a bloody thing, God knows how long it's going to take to sort stuff at the other end. The whole process has been a complete nightmare, made much much harder by the very people you pay a fortune to, that are supposed to make it easy. Our buyers had paid a surveyor a small fortune to do a full and complete survey, she therefore had to justify that by finding every single little tiny fault that she possibly could. The 120 page long report went in to such detail that it included the fact that when we painted the ceiling in the dining room we missed a tiny patch. I give her massive credit for noticing it but does it really need to be noted in a structural survey? She was delighted when she found a small patch of damp in the lounge. It's a 110 year old farmhouse, our surveyor had noted it when we bought the house, it has never bothered us. his advise was that the disruption required to eradicate it was such that it wasn't worth the hassle, we followed that advice and believe he was correct. This surveyor suggested our buyer should pay for a separate survey to establish the extent of the problem and recommend a fix. That involved having to lift the carpet and a floor board, the guy that did it said it really wasn't bad, there was no sign of live worm and that the problem was pretty minor.  While he was at it he looked at the dining room floor, which has the original Terracotta tiles. He found the grout between them was slightly damp - about 8 per cent I saw on his meter, I am led to believe 15 per cent is the point at which one should start to worry.  I was pretty surprised, therefore, when he suggested his firm needed to do work that totalled nearly 12 thousand pounds!! Consider here that we are only talking maybe 500 quid in parts, that's something like 9 grand in labour plus the VAT. He reckoned he could do it in a week. That's some fucking pay cheque!! Long discussions were had and our buyer spent a few days researching on the internet before concluding that it required a DIY job that would indeed cost about 500 quid and that it wasn't so urgent that it would stop them going ahead.

Our solicitors are terrible at answering the phone and want to do everything via an on line portal - they are one of these cut price non local outfits recommended by our estate agent, who get a cut from it. I suspect most of them work from home. It took over 2 months before our file was even handed to one of the conveyancers, prior to that it was handled by a low level clerk. The process has been going on for months now, the only time things seem to have happened is when I have thrown my toys out of my pram. This will definitely be our last move, it costs a fortune these days with ridiculous levels of stamp duty and all the other charges that go around it. Our solicitor wanted to charge us over 500 quid for the searches, we did them ourselves at a total cost of 14 quid!! Only took half an hour, mind you I did have a bit of a short cut because the guy that used to be head of MG racing is a good mate of Malc's, he lives in the village we are moving to and is head of the council. He told me all I needed to know about the local stuff, on line searches ie Environment agency for flood risk were simple, quick and free. They had mentioned a search for Radon gas risk, yet the interactive map at www.radon.co.uk tells us there is an incredibly low radon risk in this area anyway. I have yet to be convinced that the presence of radon gas is a health threat anyway, if you look at where the concentrations are there is no noticeable decrease in life expectancies. Just another scare tactic to extract money from the masses. Anyway, now you know how to save yourself 80 quid. The only searches that cost are the title searches which you can do on the land registry web site at a cost of 7 quid each.

I guess it will be a while now before I do anything interesting but I will be back, I have 1001 projects in mind, including building furniture for the new house, installing the heating system and sorting the new garage / workshop. Thanks to all for your interest in my mad ramblings.