anglia4

I’ve just opened it all back up, peened the nut edge, reassembled. Fluids done. Also new clutch cable, chain and sprockets, mounted the extra fuel tank, made a mount for a kick stand. She’s pretty good to go bar the new cdi.

There was no tricking it. There must be a feed-back loop type thing wired in so any attempt at tricking the wiring with simple solutions ends with it shutting itself off when you get to the tricked gear. I've ordered the new CDI, fingers crossed it gets here in time for the east cape ride. https://japan.webike.net/products/25012482.html It left Japan nearly two weeks ago so hopefully its not far away now.

I made a start on replacing the clutch last week. What a ball-ache of a job... First snag was that one of the clutch cover bolts, and hence the clutch cover, are tucked in behind the frame. So I had to pull out two engine mount bolts and an exhaust mount to jack the engine up slightly in the frame. Next I discovered a special tool was required, which pretty much put the brakes on the whole exercise. Trademe came to the party on the tool pretty quickly. So last night, Bucket Barry and I got set on finishing the job. I had overlooked buying a new gasket, so BB spent the best part of 2 hours making one. Buzzed the clutch nut off with the new tool. Whammo its all back together. Completely assembled, just waiting for new fluids. Then Bucket Barry texts me at 11pm last night... He must have woken in a cold sweat... "Did you remember to do the lock tab on the clutch nut?" Fuckety Fucking Fuck

You wouldn't be the first person to suggest keeping it aluminium! That's not the target look though, and there are some dents and dings that it will be nice to smear some goo into to.

Pretty much paint free now! I'm hoping to get into the etch and primer this weekend. I'm also really tempted to pull off the J-rails and Awning rails and redo the sealant behind them. It would suck to go to all this effort only to find I've created a leak somewhere with the paint stripper. But it does look like a shit of a job...

The lego plenum is brilliant! So so good

This is coming round mighty quick now!

Finding time to work on George is a bit of an effort with a young family. Most of my shed-able time is after the kids have gone to bed. Read: When its dark and damp outside. So I made a wee habitat from a tarp and my fence. This is also good for keeping the sun off as you can't strip the paint in the direct sunlight. The next issue was sunlight related. How was I going to strip the roof? I managed to commandeer a nearby workshop over labour weekend and got organised with some trestles. This kept me out of the sun and I made really good progress. Not too much more paint to get off now. Hoping to get onto the etch priming and water-proofing the roof in a week or two.

George has sat pretty idle in the driveway since xmas time. He left the property for his EWOF which he passed with flying colours. Recently we decided to bite the bullet and make a start on the exterior. The paint was really badly crazed and cracked. I don't know what it was painted with, but it doesn't seem like it was the right stuff. Where I had needed to use some duct tape to hold the hatch door together had peeled the paint off. It was just rubbish. So I made a start. Out with an array of sanders and varying grits to see what worked best. The verdict was that none of them worked all that great, and it was going to take forever and leave me with carpul tunnel syndrome. So I got some chemical stripper and tried that. Much more effective. I started with Selleys Qwik Strip, but now am using Septone Paint Stripper, which seems to be working better. I don't recommend adjusting your safety glasses with this shit on your gloves. It starts burning your face very quickly... The photo below shows how much cleaner I could get the last part of this side for about 1/5th of the effort.

Yeah thats looking very cool. I might need to get a second set of wheels to motard my CRM50 for office duties

As they say, "once you go black you'll never go back"

Because it’s got a fucking speed limiter!! I took it for a good 20km ride today, during which my fault finding brain was working hard to diagnose the conditions causing the poor running. The only consistent variable was speed. So I disconnected the Speedo cable hoping it would solve the problem, it didn’t. So I googled it. It turns out they have a rev limit which varies depending what gear it’s in to limit it to 50km/h. A new CDI is the proper solution, but we are gonna try and trick it into thinking it never goes over 3rd gear.

Who is doing support this year? @Itchybear are you gonna ride a bike?

Yeah the indicators in the hood vents are factory on a 68.

Yeah another mustang! I thought the washers on these have a mechanical pump on a pedal, which would explain the hose going inside. I could wander out to the shed for a look at mine, but it has also never worked in my 12 years of ownership. No WOF man has ever cared about it, nor have I. I'm fairly sure the vented bonnet will have been standard equipment, but probably not the fog lights. Mine is exactly the same. Except that when I brought mine the fog lights had just been bolted through the grille mesh all floppy like and weren't wired in at all. Again, yours is very similar to mine being a 289 from 68. The rear side marker lamps point to it being from late in 68, when most of the cars were starting to be produced with the 302W. Do your seat belts have a separate buckle for the lap belt and shoulder belt? On mine the shoulder belts were a dealer installed option, so are literally just a second belt over the top of the lap belt. Tire wise, I was always told by the old boys in the mustang club that 225's are as wide as you can go in the rear. Mine had 245's, which I changed to 235's (225's not available that day) and I've rolled the guards a touch as well. The power steering units are a bit of a ball-ache. I've found it really difficult to bleed properly in the past, and it gets a bit weird and notchy if its got air in it.

Unsure... More investigatory nangs required.

Yup, all my bucket bike exhaust stuff is in SS bends from aliexpress. Too cheap vs Too expensive is a no-brainer when it doesn't need to be full hygienic dairy factory spec tube.

Freeing up the clutch turned out to be as easy as simply kicking it into gear the next time I started it up. Happy Days. But then it became very apparent that the clutch is absolutely on its last legs. I've ordered a new one from the land of the rising sun, hopefully it will be here very soon. In the mean time I've been for a couple of short rides to see how things are going. Its awesome around the 50km zones, plenty of grunt and runs nice and crisp. The speedo isn't working, which is annoying so I will sort that. I've fitted a whites rear light bracket which fits quite nicely and looks nice and tidy. Problem now is that it runs like dogshit when you start getting to higher speeds. It really doesn't seem to like being loaded up and having the throttle opened further. I've replaced the spark plug, but that doesn't seem to have helped. It is also spewing out mass amounts of blue smoke. Enough to leave a film of oil on the number plate. I'm trying to remember what fuel mix I did, and I'm a little suspicious that I may have mixed it up as 25:1 for the lawn mower. I might drain the tank soon and do a fresh mix to test that. The airbox also has the inlet cut out quite a bit, I have an un-modified airbox that I might try as well if the fuel mix doesn't solve the problem. Time is running out to get it running mint!

The next big trip was to Nelson. We have family down there, so had booked in nearly 2 weeks at the Mapua Leisure Park. This was always going to be a BIG trip. All loaded up and ready to head to the ferry, the caravan had heaps of gear in it, I had made some roof rack mounts and got the bikes up on the roof of the jeep. We were off. We got to Hawera, just an hour into our journey to the ferry and decided to stop and grab a coffee from the service station. Pulled away, the jeep loaded up, started to move, and then the revs flared up with no drive. Not good. I rang my dad, who was very luckily on his way home from work nearby, in his VX Landcruiser. So we hitched George onto the Landcruiser, threw the bikes in the caravan, changed over the car seats etc. left dad on the side of the road with a dead Jeep and got on our way again. We rang the ferry to let them know we were now running late, they told us the ferry was also running late due to weather, but that if we didn't make it, we were unlikely to get another crossing for days as this was just before xmas. Stressful! By the time we got to the ferry, we were quite late, and the ferry had got back on schedule. We had been on the phone to them multiple times on the trip down, letting them know what our ETA was. They let us on-board, as they were expecting us, and then turned away the people who had pulled in behind us. It was the biggest feeling of relief I've ever had. God it towed awful behind the Landcruiser. I had to stop a couple of times to shift some weight forward, but never got it right. In the end we decided it was because the tow-bar was too high and that was unsettling it. Now the Landcruiser has always been the most reliable old workhorse, so we were fairly comfortable with it... But such was the luck we had on this trip, that the Landcruiser decided it wasn't quite up to it either... Looking on the brightside, it was a beautiful day for a roadside picnic on the Whangamoas while we waited for it to cool down. Eventually we made it to our camp site and again had an awesome holiday. We spread out into our gazebo a bit more for this trip just because of the duration. George is just the right size for us along with the gazebo for mum and dad to hang out in after the kids have gone to bed. The trip home was very gentle. We took the Whangamoas at about 20km/h with the heater on full, all the windows and the sun-roof open. 21km/h or turning the heater off would start the temp needle climbing again, but we made it. Dad has since overhauled the cooling system on the old truck and its back to pulling the big loads. Meanwhile the Jeep lived up to its name of Just Empty Every Pocket, and required a transmission rebuild from top to bottom. It was eye-wateringly expensive, but supposedly now it will be stronger than when it was new. I definitely find I don't like to give it the whole 500Nm when I'm towing any more. This whole thing is not something I want to re-live.

The Himatangi Beach trip was awesome. We had a great time. We were a little later arriving at the camp ground than we had hoped, and had never assembled the awning before... It was getting dark really quickly, so I just threw it all on the ground and asked the neighboring group if they had ever put one up. Suddenly there was a team of about 6 of us assembling this awning, and we were friends with our camping neighbors just like that. Successful trip. Yay! Camping!

There wasn't much needed to be done to get him ready for our first adventure. The little hatch in the side where the awning gets stowed fell to bits on the gloriously bumpy piece of tarmac labelled State Highway 3. That resulted in a garage sale of wheel chocks and shit down 800 odd meters of the highway out of Whanganui. Fun. So I rebuilt the hatch from a solid piece of Aluminium rather than sandwiched hardboard as the original was. No more drama there. I had to go around the bodywork and add a bunch of extra screws where the edges of the Aluminium were starting to lift. Beyond that, he passed his WOF and we were away. This was almost exactly a year ago, so we booked our first trip. We wanted to go somewhere within a ~3 hour radius from New Plymouth so we could pack up and come home if it wasn't going well. A spot at Raglan was secured for labour weekend 2021. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018814892/covid-19-raglan-wakes-to-alert-level-3 Well fuck. So we started to phone camp sites going south and ended up scoring the last powered site available at Himatangi Beach just out of Foxton. Probably a cancellation from some poor bugger in the Waikato.

To start at the beginning, my wife and I had been on a few tent camping trips since we had our first child. We had a great time, but as we expanded it was getting harder to take all our gear in the car. (Our last tenting trip below - Only one child at this point, and inside the car was stacked to the roof everywhere that there wasn't a human sitting) So part of the idea behind the trailer build was to carry our camping gear. Shortly after I committed to building the trailer, we decided that actually, a caravan might be for us instead. So that is part of when the trailer started getting out of hand design wise, to be less of a "handy camping trailer" and we started looking for a caravan. We were pretty keen on a Zephyr as we like the shape. Post covid, the caravan market seemed to be going insane; they were getting more and more expensive, and the ones we were looking at were more and more shit. It was starting to look like our budget was going to land us a big project. Then one day I happened to be scrolling trademe just as this little zephyr came up for sale for a reasonable price. I rang the lady straight away, and asked when I could collect it. She was very surprised as she had only listed it some 5 minutes prior, but nonetheless some organizing was done and my mother in-law and I went for a drive to Paraparaumu to collect George. George was named by his previous owners after George Lucas, as he is from the original star wars era. George ticked a lot of boxes for us. He is not too big, around 13 foot, 3 bed, which has been OK so far as last summer the littlest was still in a bassinet. He is clean and tidy and dry inside with fairly new squab covers, curtains and carpet. He's a little rough around the edges and needs a repaint outside which brought the price down to our budget. Completely useable with room for improvement.

This is actually coming around pretty quick! I need to pull finger and get my bike sorted.