igor

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?

Good to see the 186 fits in sweet. Still got the original gearbox or something stronger? I had dreams of doing this to the RX30 I had back in the '90s cos seriously underpowered with 18R but had no money and then lost the car in a marriage breakup. Pissed me off. Liked them when they first came out and always wanted one.

Have you opened it up to see if the problem is something obvious? When I took the non working starter motor off my tractor and turned it upside down rusty water came out and I thought it was buggered. When I took it apart I found that one of the springs that hold the wee carbon brushes had been immersed in said water for long enough to rust it out. A good clean and drying followed by careful reassembly and it was functional enough to crank a 3.6 litre diesel even with one dodgy brush holding spring. Even if you don't have any real auto electrical training, which I don't, you may at least discover enough to know what the problem is when you take it to a proper sparky.

I too would be surprised if they notice.

I think somebody's head is a bit fucked but not necessarily the one off the engine. What kind of nut job would do this?

Cool collection. Is it still possible to buy the white tyres that the Raleigh 20 came out with new? Mine has them but they are a bit perished and have some bad cracking.

When I worked as a milkman in the '90s the boss registered the quad we were using as a tractor so we didn't need helmets to drive it on the road. Not sure if that was legal even then but I never got pulled up for it and it'd do 40 mph with twelve crates of full glass bottles on board. It was even set up to ride side saddle so we could get on and off faster when delivering round the houses. Probably just as well it never got wof checked.

The alarm in my EA Falcon pisses me off cos the fool that put it in (before I got the car) disabled the central locking. My auto sparky reckons it'd take ages to find which wire got cut to fix it. Also I can't leave it unlocked without the keys in cos it knows it's got no keys and the alarm goes off when I open the door.