kws

https://vehicleinspection.nzta.govt.nz/virms/in-service-wof-and-cof/motorcycles/vision/rear-view-mirrors

With old cars, it always seems to feel like you're taking it for a WOF. Six monthly WOFs for old cars is a bit mean, but I wouldn't trust it any other way, with the state of the rubbish on our roads. So its been almost six months since my first WOF inspection after getting the car on the road, and according to the previous WOF sheet, I've done a grand total of 186 Miles in that time. That's almost embarrassing, but in my defence, we did have COVID lockdown, and carpet replacement in that time. With the car sitting for as long as it had, with minimal driving, I noticed last time I drove it that the tyres had gone a little out of round and the car shook quite badly at speed. This was to be expected, apparently on lower pressure big sidewall tyres like these they can get a flat spot from sitting on concrete, in about a month. To fix this, and check the car was ready for its date with my WOF guy on Saturday, we took the car out for a decent run around the back roads. Mid-winter with the top down, a clear sky, and rugged up from the cold, its always an experience. An assault on the senses. My Wife is incredibly understanding sometimes. Sure enough, the shakes quickly went away and the car ran and drove better than ever. Pulling well in all gears, and just a pleasure to drive. The improved shifter feel is great; very direct. After that shakedown I was pretty happy, and ready for the WOF the next day. Of course, if everything went to plan, it wouldn't be my car. Driving along the motorway, just cruising along, not a care in the world as I head in for my WOF. I get to a set of traffic lights, and as they go green and I pull away with some gusto, BAM, the engine starts to splutter and cut out. As I back off it comes right again. That was weird, so I give it another squirt, and sure enough, it's spluttering and cutting out. Oh no, I look around and assess my options just in case I need to pull over if it dies. I don't want to be that guy, stuck at the side of the motorway. But then I had a thought, I remembered something.... I have just under a quarter of a tank left. The wise words of my Wife pop into my head; "Does it have petrol in it?" Yes, but once again, no. Its the same issue I encountered early on, cutting out under acceleration as the fuel sloshes away from the pickups. Stupid design. I carefully nurse the car along, and it has no more issues along the way. I fill both the tanks, Fitting a total of 37L in before it starts ejecting from the opposite side filler. With a 60L capacity, It leaves me with about 10 litres or so in each tank. It's not a problem if the tanks are half full, but its maybe an issue I will need to look into later, by adding a swirl tank or the likes (as TVR did in later production). Anyway, the car gets inspected for its WOF, and comes away with a new sticker and a clean sheet. My WOF guy is very impressed with the car, and the work I've done since the last WOF. Because my WOF guy is awesome I was allowed to pop under the car and take some photos of its general condition and get some reference photos for where the exhaust could be run. Its a bit dirty, and oily, but otherwise very good. Certainly none of the rust issues these cars are known for in the UK. The rear diff and brakes are looking good still. Nice even wear on the rotors, and the diff has nowhere near as much oil on it as it used to. There appears to still be a small leak, as there was some moisture near the drain plug, but very minor. Nothing from the output shafts anymore. These are the main pipes, hanging down under the chassis. I'm quickly wearing down the front of these due to a lack of ground clearance Its a bit oily under the engine and box, but I've had worse. A good degrease would probably help, but I'm running it in an honest, "Its British" condition instead of pretending it doesn't leak. Up front looks pretty good too, although I really should clean up the mess from previous radiator overflows/burps And finally, a shot of the exhaust, back to front, including ugly clamp fitted when I cut the exhaust to refit the diff. I need to talk to a real good exhaust maker, and see if there is any way they could redo the exhaust so it would fit into the chassis backbone, instead of hanging down. There isn't much space, but I think I might know how it can be done, and not above the gearbox either. In the meantime, the car is still road legal, so I best make the most of it, and try and put more than 186 Miles on it in the next 6 months.

Wow, it's been almost six months since I got this back on the road and warranted. Took it in for its WOF check today, and passed with a clean sheet. Good feels. I better get my arse into gear and do more than the 186 miles I've done in the last 6 month period! Before the WOF I thought I had better take it for a quick shakedown, so went out for a hoon last night.

I can't see a sensor being happy so close to the exhaust port if you were to put it in a single runner

Thanks but not enough space here for one, cant even get a car into our small backyard.

Im considering taking on a rather silly project that will involve space I currently dont have in my own garage (because TVR) so im on the lookout for somewhere I could store a car, but also work on it. I would need at least power for lights, but not necessarily for tools as I have cordless (but I wouldn't say no to a socket). Im under the understanding most storage unit places dont want people working on cars in their units, so does anyone know one that might be a bit more friendly for that? Wont be hugely messy, but it's more or less mechanically rebuilding a car. Size needs to fit at least 1.5 cars wide, and long enough to easily fit a car (enough space I could easily work around a car, and maybe have some parts next to it). Needs to be secure, and if shared the other people need to be proven trustworthy. @Unclejake place sounds ideal, but thats almost as far from home as I could go and still be in the wellington region. Thoughts and ideas?

Im pretty sure these predate any sort of plating, but I might grab one of those for the future anyway. Cheers

Thanks guys. I didn't really notice how bad the shifter was until I removed the old stiff boots around it and it was just floppy. Its like the boots were acting as part of the shifter mechanism lol.

The final part of the interior job was to recondition a few of the switches. The window, panel and headlight switches all needed an overhaul. It was pretty obvious just by looking at the window switches why they needed a strip down and clean It's no surprise that the windows were a tad slow, and the connectors had taken a real beating with excessive resistance melting the plastic around a couple of the pins. A sure sign of bad contact. I decided to start with one of the window switches. These were filthy, having soaked up any fluff and muck that has been in the center console for years. Start by removing the top casing from the bottom, using a small screwdriver to unhook the clips on each side. Before I removed it, I marked the top of the switch so I could refit the casing in the same orientation. With the top casing off you can see the switch guts Using that same small screwdriver carefully lever the toggle legs off their pins and lift the toggle up off the base. Take care, as under the toggle are two small plastic spring loaded pogo pins. Don't let these ping away. After a quick wipe down to remove the dust and dirt, this is what we have Make sure to note which way the metal strips go as they aren't all the same. These are the little pogo pins in the toggle. They should face the other way with the spring going first into the toggle. Remove the strips and inspect the contacts. Mine were coated in old dry grease and corrosion I took the time to clean both the contacts and the strips and then using fine sandpaper give them all a good polish The outer casing was given a good degrease and clean inside and out The holes the pogo pins go into in the toggle had to be scraped out as old grease had solidified in there too. The pogo pins didn't escape the cleaning, they carefully had all the grease removed. They needed it. Once everything was clean it was time to reassemble. The strips and contacts got a thin coating of dielectric grease, as did the pogo pins and the toggle was refitted to the base. The casing was reinstalled and we were ready to go. The action was now quite nice and solid. The muck in it previously must have been dampening the feel. The other window switch wasn't any better, so that got the same treatment. Next was the panel light brightness switch. Unfortunately, this was in a pretty sorry state, with cracks and missing plastic in various places. Thankfully with switch doesn't get a lot of use. The contacts and strips in this were disgusting Everything got cleaned up as much as possible The cracks in the casing were glued up, and it was refitted. The headlight switch was the last one I wasn't to overhaul. The connector was in very bad shape, so I wanted to be sure the switch wasn't causing it. Looking at how clean the switch was, I suspect it was recently replaced with a New Old Stock item. This was mostly just old congealed grease. All that got cleaned out and the contacts polished And that's the switches done. Easy to strip down and clean, with minimal moving parts. They are quite a reliable design, but let down by not having the housing a bit better sealed, and the old grease drying out. Before I could refit the center console and switches I had to do some quick repairs to the connectors on a couple of the switches. The headlight switch, in particular, had an issue with one terminal falling out as the plastic had melted from around the pin. I had obtained replacement plugs from Minispares (Part PM03) as they sell a kit to replace the connectors for the Classic Mini hazard light switch. The plug isn't identical, as it's missing the locking tabs the TVR has, but it's a nice tight fit regardless and shouldn't fall out. The kit comes with new pins too, but as my pins were OK I chose to reuse the existing ones in the new housings. Using a small flat blade I pushed the locking tabs on each side of the pin in and slipped it out the back of the housing. Flip the tabs back out again, and into the new housing it goes. The big white plug is the old one, the black one is the new one. The only other one I needed to replace was the blower fan switch, as for some reason this didn't even have a plug at all, just bare terminals stuck on the pins and wrapped in tape! Bodge city. This was as easy as just transferring the pins into the housing in the correct order The center console went in next, and it was finally time to refit the switches into their freshly wrinkle-painted panel The radio blank needs to be stuck in, but it looks good with the rest of the console The switch panel looks a damn sight better than the old peeling and rusty look The windows are still slow, I'll need to get in there and clean and grease the runners as I did for my SD1 (same regulator), but the blower fan and headlight switches work more reliably, and it appears I've gained a new full brightness setting on my dash lights. All in all a good achievement, even just to know the switches will keep working for a bit longer.

With the last parts of the interior reinstalled today, I could finally test a couple of other jobs I did as "while I'm here" things when the interior was apart. One of those jobs was to rebuild the rather floppy shifter. I rebuilt this a while back, as I was doing other work in the interior. There is no better time to do it than when the center console is already out, otherwise its bit of a pain to get to. The shifter on the TVR, like the Classic Mini, isn't a sprung gate, so it doesn't self return to the center of the neutral gate, instead, it just chills out where you left it (either on the left between 1st and 2nd or on the right between 3rd and 4th). I kinda just got used to this feel and adapted to its vagueness thinking it was normal. It had a large amount of lateral play when in gear (to the point you could think it was in neutral). I had missed gears a couple of times when driving due to this vagueness, but hey, its a 40 year old car with 40+ year old technology, how good is it meant to be? Well, its meant to be a lot better than that. The interwebs indicate it should be fairly direct and tight. Removal This is what the shifter looks like on the gearbox (note this shifter is back to front, the offset should be towards the front of the car) That offset, and top of the shifter, is a TVR Engineering special. The original Capri gear lever looks like this Removal is as easy as unscrewing the large cap that covers everything. It sounds easy in theory, but it took a bloody long time and lots of swearing to get it undone. I tried everything I could throw at it until I got mad and used a long flat blade as a chisel and a BFH to smack it off. It seems this is the only real way to crack it off as there isn't enough room around it to actually get much else on the cap. The only access to it is through the small, jagged hole in the fibreglass tub, which will happily shred your wrists if you arent careful. I have the scars to prove it. Once the cap is undone the whole shifter will just pull up and out. Just as a note, don't bother trying to undo the three bolts on the turret and remove the shifter that way, it's not possible due to the shift rod. The Problem and the Bodge With the shifter out it was immediately obvious something wasn't quite right. This is what I had And this is what I should have Yup, I'm completely missing that large inverted mushroom bush. This bush is what locates the shifter and stops it from being moved around in the turret. The ball on the bottom of the shifter locates in a plastic bush in the selector rod (which you should check whilst the shifter is out as its also prone to failure; mine was OK). Having the base located, but not the middle of the shifter leads to a lot of excess movement. The Fix This is the replacement nylon bush from Racetech Under the large cap there is a smaller dome which is forced upwards by a couple of washers and a spring pushing against that mushroom bush. This creates the nice solid shift feel, and stops any upwards movement whilst allowing the shifter to move as it should (without the spring and dome the whole shifter could be lifted upwards and disengaged from the selector rod). The spring and dome create the friction needed to give a firm shift and not be floppy. As the cap screws down onto the turret, it's pressing against this dome and spring, compressing it. Now, this is where I discovered the bodge. I suspect at some point someone has had this shifter out, noticed the mushroom bush was in pieces and removed the remains of the bush. This resulted in the cross pin taking all the forces and load. This bent the pin, as well as wearing into the sides of the cap, as it normally wouldn't be able to move far enough sideways to touch the cap. In order to fit the new bush I had to remove this bent pin, which I did with a hammer and punch The rubber visible above the dome is another bodge. Its a section of rubber hose (heater hose?) that has been fitted in order to compress the spring and take out some of the play. The mushroom bush can now be fitted and the pin replaced. I straightened the pin in the vice first and then tried to fit the bush. This is where I struck my biggest issue. I managed to get it all together (with much effort) but it was super tight, the spring was heavily compressed, and it was damn near impossible to refit the cap and screw it down as the dome was pushing it away from the turret with more force than I could push down. Far too much time was spent trying to do this; shredding my wrists on the fibreglass and wearing the skin raw until I rage quit and left it. I did some research and noticed something. My spring was sitting on top of the stem of the mushroom, instead of over it like the example a couple of photos above. This means the spring was being compressed about twice as much as it needed to be. I tried to alter it and see if the spring would fit over the stem, but not a chance, the stem was too thick. In the end I cut the stem down to half its length and tried to fit it This actually worked, I could screw the cup down and it all went together, but by golly was the shifter tight and stiff to work. It almost felt good to use, every movement was deliberate, but two things concerned me. One, the wear on the cap and dome would be excessive due to the friction of the two being forced together hard. Two, there was zero play in the shifter, which meant when you slotted it into gear it didn't move by its self at all. If you're familiar with manual shifting you will know that when you shift into a gear the shifter kinda moves its self slightly and finds its happy place (which is usually not hard up against the end of the gate, but slightly towards the neutral gate). This wasn't happening, and I didn't want to risk the excessive wear on the shifter forks or synchros. So out it all came. This time I cut the stem almost completely off This was much better. The spring didn't need to be compressed to fit the bush and pin, and there was just a little play before the spring touched the bush. Refitting was a breeze, and the shifter had what I would consider the right amount of free play in it. It now popped nicely into gear, had zero lateral movement when in gear, no vertical movement, but was easy to move and shift. I had also added a coating of grease to the pivot points and to the top of the dome just to keep everything sliding nicely. The Result It took a while to get the rest of the interior finished so I haven't been able to drive the car until today, and the results were immediately obvious. The shifter is now very direct and it's hard to miss the gates. You can shift it quite quickly now too as it inspires confidence. The shifter just by the nature of its design is a bit strange. Because of the offset, when shifted into 1st and 3rd it dips down, whilst 2nd and 4th the shifter actually raises slightly, and the throw into 4th especially is quite long. All part of the TVR charm I guess. A worthy repair, and something other 280i owners should check if they have an excess play in their shifter.

The final piece of the puzzle for getting the interior finished was the gear and hand brake boots. The old ones were worn out, torn and manky. I couldn't refit them, they're letting the team down. Old Gross Stuff From day one I wasn't really happy with the boots and knew I was going to have to do something about them. The shift boot in particular just looks gross, all loose and full of splits and holes. The top of it didn't seem to fit either. And the hand brake boot was old and hard, with a big split down the back. Not to mention it was glued to some of the worst looking carpet in the car So I knew what I had to do. I could hardly just buy these off the shelf, so it was up to me to make replacements. Singing Machine The first step was to decide on a sewing machine and obtain one. We were lucky enough to use our Airpoints to get this, so didn't cost us any "real" money. Its a Singer Heavy Duty 4411 Its still a consumer machine, but its meant to be gruntier than your average dinky little white plastic thing. At the advice of my sewing pro Sister in Law, I also purchased a teflon coated plastic foot, some "leather" needles and heavy-duty dark blue thread. These items are highly recommended when sewing vinyl as its quite thick and hard, but will also stick to a metal foot if used. Automotive upholstery grade vinyl was obtained from Trademe cheap, as someone that had redone their interior had some leftover. This was perfect as it was dark blue and cheap. I did some initial practice on an offcut of the vinyl, just to see what the machine could do. It seems as long as I get the settings right, it actually does pretty well through multiple layers. Its been probably 20+ years since I last touched a sewing machine, but hey, I still kinda know what to do. Grotty Tracing In order to make copies of the old pieces I needed to unpick all the existing stitching and flatten them out for tracing around. I started with the hand brake boot as I thought this would be easier as there are only a couple of stitches. It was pretty gross. To be fair, most of it is old contact adhesive (why there is so much INSIDE the boot, well, who even knows?) This is the template I made on brown paper. I flattened the original out as much as possible, including the folded over edges. I then traced this onto vinyl, cut it out and whacked a needle through it a few times. The trial fit actually came out looking pretty decent The shift boot was more complex. For a start, it was all one piece, not four panels stitched together. This is the one real join, the rest are all just "fake" stitches. Eww, grotty. This resulted in a weird looking template Which I decided was too hard, so turned it into four panels, two short and two long (as the recess in the center console is rectangular). In hindsight I would make these from scratch instead of tracing the original, as it ended up with those weird looking shapes. Stitch Up With the templates traced up and cut out of the vinyl, it was time to get sewing. The trick here was to sew the inside seam of the two pieces, to join them together, and then stitch the outside to reinforce them, and give it a nice external stitch like the original had. If I didn't do that external stitch, you just get this ugly fold With all four sides stitched, and only a couple of issues (probably user error), it was time to trial fit The top didn't look right, so I tried folding it over and attaching it to the rubber boot under the shift boot It was better, although still needed some tweaking at the top. Unfortunately, the new vinyl is thicker than the old stuff so appears bulkier. It also needs a lot of free and loose material as the throw of the shifter is so long into 4th gear that the boot gets quite tight when shifted. This was an issue with the original boot too. A little bit of tweaking at the top and we had an OK result. I was planning on remaking it, but tbh its OK as it is and I would probably make it worse if I did it again All that was left to do was to staple the boot to the underside of the console, glue the carpet and board to the handbrake boot and install it all. One note is that the handbrake boot cannot be attached to the console, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to install it all in one go (or it appears that way anyway, the old one shows no signs of being attached previously). Jobs a good 'un.

Thanks. No, the backing on this carpet is flexible enough that it takes to shapes pretty well, but the TVR is all straight lines and right angles anyway so not many places it needs to bend/fold.

Once again, it has been a bleeding long time since the last post, but of course, I haven't just been sitting around doing nothing. It may be a whole new world out there thanks to the current chaos, but the free time I suddenly had was enough to kick start work on the TVR. Way back before Christmas last year I ordered new carpet and underlay. Until now it's been sitting in the garage waiting for me to get around to pulling the old carpet out and replacing it. It's not a job I was looking forward to. I'm not a huge fan of working in interiors due to cramped access and lots of kneeling on the ground. This is what I was dealing with. Old faded carpet which had started to come apart, especially in the footwells, due to being exposed to moisture for long periods of time. When I got the car the whole floor pan was soaked in water and had been for a while I suspect. Even after drying the carpet out it always had a certain smell, and the carpet was dry and crunchy to the touch. What I didn't realise until later was that the carpet wasn't mean to be that tan colour, it actually used to be dark blue. There were some spots, like this section in front of the hand brake and under the center console, that hadn't seen the sun and were still the original blue (albeit in this case, filthy and squished). The first task was to remove the center console. First the surround on the center stack has to be removed, then the gear knob comes off, and there are three screws holding the console in. One at the back under the flap of carpet in the cubby, and two behind the radio in the cubby. Don't forget to disconnect and remove the switches too. It was pretty dirty under the console, with lots of shredded bits of insulation floating around. Lots of black wiring and heat wrap Next, the seats should be removed. I tried to remove the rails from the floor but had real issues. The rails are held in with two bolts, one on each end, which go through the floor and are secured with nuts from under the car. A combination of a little rust buildup on the threads, and a bolt head that isn't captive but is also inaccessible (no space for a socket or spanner) with the seat in place almost made me rage quit. I got a couple of the nuts off but got stuck fast on the passengers side, where the whole bolt was just spinning. The usual method is to jam the bolt head with a screwdriver to stop it spinning and wind the nut off, but this bolt wasn't having a bar of it. I rounded the head off quite nicely. Thankfully, as is good practice, I walked away and left it for a bit, and when I came back I had a new game plan; remove the seats from the rails. This is FAR quicker than messing with the rails, as there are four bolts under the seats, easily accessible with a 13mm ratcheting spanner, and then the seat just lifts off. One last thing that needs to come out are the roof struts. They are held in with a nut on the top hoop of the roof, and then nut/bolts through into the boot. Since the roof will not stay up without them, a couple of bungee cords were employed to keep it erect. One went between the two bolts on the hoop, and another from the wiper spindle to the cord between the bolts. A third was later added to hold the rear edge of the soft top up against the hoop for better access to the parcel shelf and rear bulkhead. I quickly added some offcut underlay under the cord where it touches the top of the windscreen frame to stop it damaging the paint. Now it was just a case of pulling, tearing and cutting the old carpet out (but keeping the sections in one piece). The carpet on the sides of the tunnel was barely stuck on, but some of the other carpet like the parcel shelf was a real prick to remove since it had really thick jute underlay. I don't think this was the original carpet, there were a few telltale signs it had been replaced at least once before, but obviously a long time ago, and not that well. This was a real time consuming and back-breaking process. Once all the carpet was off I needed to try and remove as much old adhesive as I could. This was done with a mixture of a wire brush and a grinder with a twist cup on it. It was very messy but quick to strip the glue off without damaging the body. As each section of carpet was removed I tagged them all with a paint pen, according to the official layout in the parts guide. This was so I always knew where the sections came from and where to refit them. With the carpet out it was time to start the job of measuring, cutting and fitting the new underlay and carpet. First was to lay out the underlay and trace the sections I would be fitting it to. The underlay I purchased although isn't waterproof (yeah, I know, but I was struggling to find any decent padded waterproof underlay and this car now has a phobia of water, so shouldn't be an issue), should work well. Its sold in 1.8m sections, and in the end I only needed to use 1.8x2m total (I'm not sure why it's slightly longer than advertised but I ain't complaining). I wasn't going to pad the whole car, only select sections, which were the inner tunnel walls, footwells, rear bulkhead and parcel shelf. Mainly places that will be touched, pressed or rested upon. I used the removed carpet sections as templates to trace around. All sections were also numbered with their identifier (or named for the obvious bits like bulkhead), and if needed, an arrow to show direction. We also got our first glimpse of the new carpet colour. TBH its not as dark or as "blue" as I had hoped, but it ended up looking better than I was expecting. Cutting the underlay with scissors literally tore my hands to bits. I ended up with a couple of gnarly blisters from the effort needed, as this underlay does not cut well. Regardless, I pushed on. Once the sections were cut, they were test fitted and trimmed Once I was happy with the fit, they were glued on with copious amounts of Ados high temp F38 contact adhesive, applied by a large brush. This stuff stinks (You MUST use a decent respirator as this stuff will get you as high as a kite before you get too far), but flashes off quickly and is as sticky as anything. I initially got two tins of this but had to buy two more later on as I ran out (and if I didn't change to spray adhesive for the rest of the work I would have needed a fifth tin). Work quick and get it in the right place first time as this glue isn't here to fornicate arachnids and sticks quick and sticks hard. The underlay didn't need to be perfect as the carpet was going to cover it anyway, but any bumps, creases and edges in the underlay will show in the carpet over the top of it. The bumps in the sections behind the seats are from the wires and fuel tank brace strap that reside there; they do end up showing as bumps in the carpet too, but not much I can do about that. Next was to trace and cut the carpet sections. This is where I made a fairly major whoopsie. I had been told to make sure my carpet "grain" was always going in the same direction on each part otherwise sections will look "shaded" as the grain will be going in different directions. Well, guess who immediately forgot this advice, and instead used his awesome Tetris skills to make all the carpet fit into the smallest space possible? Sigh. By the time I realised what I had done, I had cut all the sections out and couldn't start over. But hey, I got it all onto the carpet with some spare! As you can see in the later photos its not that big of an issue but might look a little more obvious if I had used a thicker pile carpet. I used engineers chalk to mark the back of the carpet, which was quick and easy to see. Everything was marked slightly oversize as it's far easier to trim it down than to make it bigger. A combo of scissors and a brand new knife were used to cut the carpet. Slight colour difference Trial fit, and then some trimming On went the glue. I did this in two sections so I could ensure it was all lined up front to back. Before these side sections went on there are little sections on the floor that cover the humps inside and out, these were fitted too. The corresponding outer section went on too. This was a real prick to do. I wondered why it was in two sections (split just aft of the A-pillar) when I removed it and thought "oh I'll just make it one piece, how hard can it be?", well, it didn't work and I had to cut my section into two pieces too as I just couldn't get it to line up at all. Working up under the dash and into the A-pillar space wasn't much fun either. The little strips of green tape behind the seat rails is to indicate the position of the now covered seatbelt mounting holes on each side, so I could cut the carpet in the right place later. Both sides had their inner and outer sections glued on, and then the front bulkhead, under seat and footwell sections went in Now, keep in mind this looks easy and seems to be progressing quickly, but in reality, the work was slow, painful and very hard to motivate myself to keep going. I also couldn't do too much in one go as I needed to wait for other sections to cure before moving forward with the next part. Stripping the carpet was about four days work, there were about ten days between finishing the underlay and fitting the first piece of carpet, and the last piece of carpet was fitted almost a month later. Anyway, with the footwell and tunnel done it was only the rear bulkhead and parcel shelf to do. These were never going to be fun due to their location and size. Before the bulkhead went in I had to fit the little sections that cover the arches. Now, I thought it was doing this right, and it looked right, until I later went to fit the interior trim panels, and found that I had placed them in the wrong order, but not until I had already screwed screws through them. I had glued the carpet to the arches Which was bad when the trim went on But what needed to happen was to have the trim panel screwed into the arch and then the carpet glued in over the top of that, not the other way around. It's obvious now but wasn't at the time. Now the parcel shelf carpet can go in. I did this in a couple of stages. First I trial fit it, trimmed and then using the Ados high temp I ran a strip of adhesive along the very back edge, making sure it butted up nicely against the bulkhead carpet. After 24 hours I came back and using ultra strong spray adhesive (which I had moved to for the footwell carpets and bulkhead due to ease of use and speed, but not needing the high temp for those sections) sprayed the top section This allowed me to place the top section perfectly, and then once that was cured to move onto doing the lower section on each side. In the very unflattering light, the bumps in the carpet behind the seats from the wiring/bracing is very obvious but in person, it's not that bad and is mostly hidden by the seat backs. But that was it. I had finally glued in the last section of the carpet! This is about the point where I was finally starting to feel happy with the work I had done, as getting the parcel shelf carpet in really tied it all together and made the difference. Before this, I just wasn't really feeling it and wondered if it had even been worth the effort. Now it was a case of refitting the seats, after a quick clean. I also cleaned and greased the rails. There has been a lot of other work going in during this. Since I had the center console out the switches got overhauled, various bits got painted, the shifter got rebuilt, and new shift and handbrake boots are being made. There will be another post on that work later. Today I decided to see what the carpet looked like out in the real world, not from under the harsh cold lights and out in the overcast day. I connected the battery up, primed the fuel system and turned the key for the first time in about two months. The engine turned and sprang into life. I still can't believe how well it starts and runs hot or cold. Reverse gear was selected, and I slowly backed out of the garage into the driveway. This is what I had done. Enjoy. I know I did. It's not perfect; there are still some bits I'm not 100% happy with, but overall I'm pleased. My first time working with carpet, and not even having a pre-cut or moulded carpet to work with. It was hard work, but the transformation from the old carpet is huge.

I've had good results with evaporust, but only when the items were fully submerged, and it did take a while.

Speaking of, do the fuse ratings for those continental fuses directly translate to the modern blade fuses? ie 5A is 5A? I think i read somewhere that its glass fuses that arent a direct swap for blade fuses?