igor

Love how that POS 80" started near enough straight away after sitting so long. I'm a Ford man but I'll give Holden a point for that.

As others have said it sounds like it's running way too rich. Nothing helpful to add though. Good luck with it.

Quite like the new colour combination. Doesn't look silly at all.

Sounds like school camp. Children to bed early, parents on the piss till all hours.

Strong Brothers used to be the go to place for Mini and other A series bits in Aucks in the '80s and '90s. They still got that stuff?

Landlord sounds like a complete cunt. You must have been desperate for a house to accept that shit. Think I would have told him to fuck off. I know Chch is a tight market since the earthquakes but garages are for cars and cars leak oil. It's just the nature of the beast. He needs to suck it up and start living in the real world.

...with quad tyres for traction off road.

I thought this too but I'd be very happy to be wrong.

Got away with reusing a head gasket on a mate's 3.6 XR coon once. In the absence of a new gasket we applied paint thickly to the mating faces of the head and the block and slapped it together while the paint was wet. Was only a quick survival job on a motor with around 250,000 miles on it though and definitely not to be recommended.

Looks tidy. All original nana spec, not buggered by someone who thought they were fixing it up.

I don't think I've seen a Skoda driving around since the '80s or early '90s. One of our scout leaders had one in the '70s and then a guy I worked with in the '80s had a couple but I never saw them run cos he always drove his PB Vauxhall. He did reckon they were very hard to kill though. There was a Sabre that I used to see regularly in Whangarei back in the day. Rather liked the look of that. I thought it had more style than the later ones but each to their own. Good to see that they are not extinct anyway. Used to have a VHS tape of classic crashes from Scandinavian rallying. It was full of Skodas, Saabs, and old Volvos going hard so yes they did rally them.

I think I have an incomplete one of those among my bike junk. Now I know what it is. Lucky to get the tyres.

Re dodgy wiring causing random shorts, does the trailer cable happen to pass close to the exhaust? Might be worth checking. One of my EA coons had a similar issue on a family holiday once. It broke the tail pipe off the back of the third muffler somewhere in North Canterbury on the afternoon of Good Friday. We drove on from Cheviot with the windows down for fresh air just in case it was sucking fumes back in. Lost the dashboard lights somewhere in the lower half of the North Island, carried on. Desert road at night unable to see the speedo, still with windows down. Taupo for breakfast, so far so good. Day time again, don't need dashboard lights now. Stopped for juice at Hamilton and no indicators or brake lights working either. Drove on to Northland without indicators or brake lights cos Easter weekend and nothing was open. Described symptoms to ex wife's new husband who'd done his time at the local Ford garage and without even seeing the car he identified the problem having seen it before more than once at his old work. Heat from the broken exhaust had melted the trailer cable and blown multiple fuses. We had just enough functional circuits left for the car to start and run.

Have you considered the old school method with a rip saw? Will take a while but not impossible. Can remember grandfather hand ripping demolition rimu 6x2s to get 3x2s for the purlins on the shed we were building. One does some strange things when one has plenty of time but little money.

House truck drag racing? Might be worth a watch. Do you measure the ETs with a stopwatch or a calendar?

I'd be inclined to make a prototype out of cardboard and figure out all the bends and which ones to do first before starting to cut steel.

Heard a story in the '80s about a rear drive Starlet rally car that somehow dropped the front end of the driveshaft and polevaulted off into the bush. Guess a driveshaft loop would have saved that one.

That makes no sense all by itself at the top of the page.

It's still a bollocks rule when swapping something that goes straight in using all factory option parts fitted to factory bolt holes.

It has been a requirement for fifty years at least for farmers to provide decent tanker access so the driver does not have to back up to turn. At least it was with the local co-op we were with before the advent of Fonterra. I'm picking the others were similar.

Weird one here. While slaughtering pigs on the weekend with a mate and his son talk turned to things mechanical as it often does here. In particular an unsubstantiated rumour is circulating that the bosses at Fonterra wanted to get their mechanics to remove reverse gear from all their tankers. Fuck knows why as it would make them very hard to resell later but the real question for us was, is that even legal? We reckoned not but maybe one of you guys knows the real answer.

You're sweet with the old black plates as long as they are both in good condition. My boss recently got an old Celeste back on the road with its long dead black plates still on it.

Anyone else ever noticed that the left rear door always starts to rust before the other doors on these? I've seen so many that are pretty good apart from the left rear door. Lines of them in the wreckers all good except for the door I want.

Always good to have another BMC enthusiast around.

So it goes a lot like it would have with the 4M that they got factory in some other parts of the world then? Or perhaps a little better even?