TVRs and Stuff

:: Diary - June 2025 ::
:: Sunday, 1 June 2025 ::

Not much progress on the Vixen, mainly because there's not much left to do, and also because I've been kept busy with other stuff anyway.
Did get a call from Hugh on Thursday though - he has his car in a garage, who have employed an auto-electrician to try and sort out a few wee repairs, including a broken indicator switch. This auto-electrician has apparently bought 3 different switches for various models of Ford Escort and Fiesta, none of which turned out to be the right one. That's because the correct switch is Ford Sierra Mk1. Not a Mk2 because that doesn't have a horn push in the end, and it has a round hazard switch in the top, not a square one.
Just to confirm, I removed the switch from my car yesterday, and noted the part number - definitely Sierra Mk 1.

So with that confirmed, I order a second-hand switch for Hugh from the bay of dreams, due for delivery on Thursday. The cost is extortionate though - people are buying all these now-rare Sierra bits and relays etc for their Cossies (real ones and pretendy ones) and the prices have risen accordingly.
On to today, the day of the TVR Car Club meeting. Eric and I meet up at Dave's house, where he shows us that...
he has his Griffith's engine back together, and installed in the car! To prove it, he starts it up.

There seems to be a few bits left over though...

So after a discussion of the likelihood of rain (about 30% according to the weather forecast) Dave and I decide to go roof-off for our wee run. We get over the Forth Bridge and the heavens open - it's absolutely pishing down. We divert off the motorway to put the roof on.
Onwards, and the rain goes off, and it turns out to be quite nice. We're already late though, so we're last to arrive at the lunch venue (albeit after a brilliant wee run).
Hugh is already there, and we have a chat about indicator switches. He has brought one of the switches that his man bought - and it IS the correct one! Apparently, though, it doesn't match the wiring in Hugh's car, so doesn't do what it's supposed to do... I can't see how that can be, it's the same switch with the same Ford part number. I've ordered another one anyway, so we'll see what we get eh?
I forgot to say that Claire is with us for the first time in ages, and we end up talking about one of our first TVR trips, to a show in Newark in June 2008. This is quite cathartic for me, since Friday was the 4th anniversary of my son's death, and it's nice to hear stories.
We also talk about other stuff like Hugh's ongoing organisation of the "Pilgrim's Walk" from Culross to St Andrews, a journey of around 60 miles which they are completing in 6 or 7 stages. The original pilgrims didn't have sat nav, an out of scale map and an air ambulance on speed dial, though.
Back home, and I fit the radiator air guides to the Vixen's bonnet temporarily with white cable ties (I have thousands of those so don't want to use up my black ones at this stage). All fits well, but now that they are fixed in position, I find that I need to shave a tiny bit off the back edge so that they don't foul on the radiator and stop the bonnet closing.

Here's the nearside one from under the wheelarch, with the bonnet closed...

and here's the offside one.

So that's it - I'll take those off again and it's all ready for the paint shop - booked for 30th of June after my holidays!

:: Wednesday, 4 June 2025 ::

I've been left without responsible adult supervision today, so I've completed a few wee jobs.
On Sunday, Dave showed us a photo that he has put up in his garage, of himself and Jim in a couple of armchairs. I thought that was a nice thing to have, so on Monday, when I was at the shops, I got an enlargement made of a photo from our last Scottish Tour last June. This was at our cake stop in Inverness at the north end of the Caledonian Canal.

Yesterday, I decided to have a look at other items on the Vixen that I had noted before its little accident in April. First, a slight looseness in the sliding yoke in the offside driveshaft. I lift the car on the quickjacks and unbolt the driveshaft. It's held on by 4 nuts and bolts in each end, and while they're fiddly, it doesn't take long to remove.
There's definitely slight play in the sliding yoke, so then I mark up the UJs and the shaft so that I can make sure that I can put it back together in the same alignment.

Then I can cut through both of those cable ties and slide the yoke apart. It's pretty well greased, but I add a good dose of that molybdenum CV grease and push the joint back together and replace the rubber boot and cable ties. There's no perceptible play in the joint now - it might not last, but let's see if it makes a difference.

With that re-installed, I go to the front of the car and remove the two radiator air panels by cutting through those cable ties. The panels need slight modification so that the indicators will fit, then they need to be painted before final installation (once the rest of the car is painted too).
Also yesterday, the postman arrived with a replacement indicator switch - not new, but in better nick than mine. Before I pass this to Hugh, I want to check that it is the same, and that it's wired the same, and that it works the same.
The connectors on the back are the same, with the same pin numbers...

I remove the switch from my car, and install the "new" switch. After an initial bit of fuckaboutery caused by me forgetting that the headlight switch has to be in the second position before the headlights actually work, and after cleaning one connector (for the left-hand indicator) I confirm that it fits and works fine. I need to re-package it and sent it on to Hugh as a "tried and tested" item.
Then it's back to the Vixen, and I re-install that offside drive shaft, which now has no play in it...
Unfortunately, that shows up that the nearside driveshaft also has a little bit of play in the same place, so I'll need to repeat the process on that side.
So it's back out to the garage after dinner, to while away the evening while Mrs Git is at her yoga class. She's on her own because I've obviously been working on my own yoga techniques, such as the wriggling worm to get under the car, the stretching baboon, the leg-cramped penguin, the band-aided mummy and the downward arsehole, which looks to the untrained eye like "sitting doing absolutely nothing" but actually requires intense meditation and self-control while you exercise your internal muscles digesting a bag of cheddars, two cakes and a caramel wafer that you have grazed your way through, between performing the other exercises listed above.
So I start by removing that other driveshaft and pulling it apart, where I discover that the rubber boot is split in two places. I have to order a new one before there's any point putting it all back together.

Another wee task - I think I should make the car look reasonably street-legal so that I can drive it to the paint shop, so I decide to install the headlights and indicators.

I also wire them up so that at least the indicators will work.

At this point Mrs Git appears back home early, she's not feeling too well. All this healthy exercise isn't good for you, see? Far better to wear yourself out fixing old cars - but even that seems to be getting more difficult as the years go by!

:: Saturday, 7 June 2025 ::

I noticed yesterday that they have just updated Google Streetview for my street, and have managed to capture the Vixen (and my arm) in the driveway.
This seems to show the Vixen while it was being dismantled just at the start of the process. The only day that it was pointing inwards, with the Range Rover over at the other side, was Saturday 12 April - if I look back, even the kneeling pad is in the same place! I turned it round the other way and reversed it in that night, and it has pointed outwards until earlier this week when I turned it round to do the driveshaft near the garage door (mainly to let more light in).

There's not a lot that I can do to either of the cars today, because I'm still waiting for delivery of the rubber boot for the driveshaft (which I only ordered on Wednesday night) before I can put that back together.
What I do decide to do, is get my grease gun and grease every available nipple - one in eaxch rear hub, two in the nearside driveshaft (but none in the other one, strangely), two in the handbrake cable, one on each front trunnion and one in the steering rack.

:: Tuesday, 11 June 2025 ::

This must be the last website on the internet that’s not written in some web-writing software that does all the layout and formatting for you, so you would only need to write “content”. And even then, that “content” seems often to be written for you by some back room “Artificial intelligence” add-in that starts with a vague knowledge of what might be a fact, and spins it out into 14 paragraphs and 3 completely irrelevant and uninformative stock photos. A bit like the Daily Mail (other bullshitting daily bulletins are available).
Not here. What you get here is written in a no-nonsense notepad text page, so it's the equivalent of a monk in a dark room with a quill, in a world of supercompouters and AI plagiarism. No, this is a real person who demonstrates daily that artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
However, in a rare break from that trend, Hugh phoned me yesterday to say that the indicator switch that I bought for him has now been fitted, and appears to work perfectly. He’s a happy scone. Still doesn’t explain why the switch he showed us on Sunday, which looks identical, doesn’t work. I’ll get that from him, check it over and see if I can repair it at some point, as a spare. They're so expensive that it's worth a shot - after all, it can't be more fuckeder than "already fucked", can it?
Meanwhile, back to the Vixen. The wee rubber boot for the driveshaft yoke arrived yesterday, so let’s get that fitted first so that the car is mobile again. First pull the joint apart and slip the boot over the narrow section.
Then grease the splines and push the joint together, and fit the boot overall the wide section, and secure with two cable ties.
Then it’s a simple matter of fitting the shaft back on to the car - 4 fiddly bolts on each end and it’s done!
With the car back down off the lift, I start it to check that the carb inlet isn't still leaking since I tightened it at the start of May. That seems to be ok too!

:: Friday, 27 June 2025 ::

I've been quiet. I've been on holiday. While I was away, the man who is painting the Vixen's bonnet phoned, and said that he had a big insurance job that he didn't want to turn away, so could I wait another couple of weeks? Now, I'm not too happy about that, but business is business, and I would rather wait and get a proper job, than ask him to rush it, when he's distracted by more shekels from elsewhere.
I went to see him on Wednesday, and "a couple of weeks" has extended to mid-August... Fortunately I don't really need the car, so I agree. Well, I have to, don't I? I know, I could take the car somewhere else, but will that be any quicker? Aaannnddd... I've seen some body repair and paint jobs that look absolutely shite (see "Lexus repair" in the menu on the left there, for an example), so I'll stick with someone who does know what he's doing. It's easier to get it painted properly once, than spend ages afterwards trying to rectify paint that looks like it's been blown on through a straw from 20 feet away...
Anyway, that gives me a wee bit more time to think about other wee jobs, particularly the front registration number.
I've had a bit of a think about this... If you look back to the photo on 13 April, you'll see that the letters are mounted by star washers on wee pegs through the grille. The old grille had a horizontal mesh which made it easy to line up the registration letters and numbers. The new grille is the "proper" larger diagonal mesh, which looks better, and lets more cooling air through, but you can't line up the letters using the fixed pegs on the back - the grille mesh gets in the way of correct spacing and alignment.
On 18 May I was thinking about going for a stick-on number plate, rather than the individual plastic letters fixed to the grille. Much easier and I've seen others with that, but I would have to wait until the paint was properly dry (a couple of weeks minimum, which now takes me into September) and even then, there's a risk of paint damage.
So I have returned to thinking about how to mount the plastic letters without damaging the grille or the letters, and came up with a possible solution.
First, I bought a metre of thin aluminium bar from B&Q, and cut it in half.
Then I spaced out the letters, face-down, using the stick-on plate as a guide, and marked and drilled 4mm holes at the peg positions along the top of the letters (the bottom bar in this pic). Then I marked and drilled the holes for the bottom pegs. Miraculously, the holes are so precise that it all holds together, for now, even without the starlock washers on the back!

Take it all apart again and spray the bars in primer then matt black.

Then I fit the assembly temporarily to the grille using a couple of black tie-wraps, just to see what it looks like. It's all a matter of opinion, obviously, but I like that better than the stick-on!

I have ordered new starlock washers, so I'll take it apart and fit those, then I'll probably make proper little screw fittings to hold it onto the grille, rather than cable ties.

:: Saturday, 28 June 2025 ::

I'm in the process of retiring. When you're a one-man company, you can't just stop - there are still jobs that you're half way through, jobs that are waiting for somebody else to respond (and that can take a very long time...) jobs that coe back to life when you think they're finished. Being a consumate fecking professional, I don't want to leave anybody stuck, but I'm definitely easing off the work pedal.
As a result, I have far more spare time than I have been used to all my life, and I don't know what to do with it. One pastime is playing with tools in the garage, and today, I have spent an inordordinate amount of time making 6 wee brackets to hold the number plate onto the front grille.
First, you mark on the frame you made yesterday for the registration letters, where to drill holes that will line up with existing holes in the grille.
While that's drying at gas mark "whatever the temperature is in Scotland in June", you fart about tidying random stuff that isn't in the way, but needs to be moved to a permanent place of storage.
Then you take another bit of that aluminium bar (or aluminum if you're American - although I read yesterday that the American pronunciation is technically correct) - periodic tables, convention for naming of elements etc. Anyway, you cut it into strips about 2 inches long, and drill a 5mm hole in the middle of each bit, then paint them all black.
While those are drying at gas mark "ditto", I remember that I need to re-charge the spare battery for my cordless drill.
Then I rake through my tin of wee bolts and find 6 M5 cap screws, spring washers and wee nuts.
Right - next I cut through the tie wraps and take the reg numbers off the grill, and drill 5mm holes where I marked them.
At this point, I realise that I can't do any more until the starlock washers arrive in the post. Bugger. Oh wait, the postman just crossed the end of the drive! I run inside like a 5-year-old trying to catch Santa, and they're here! (So is a parking ticket and another bill, but we'll forget about those for now).
I put down a towel to protect the face of the letters, then use a 1/4 inch socket and a wee hammer to knock the starlock washers onto the pegs on the rear of the letters. No breakages!

After a few celebratory laps around the workshop, I use the cap screws and brackets i made, to fit the reg numbers back on to the grille. That looks all right, that does!

Here's the view from behind the grille.

I'm happy with that! I'll need to take it all off again though when the car goes in for painting (including painting the grille mesh itself).
I've spent another hour writing this website, and it's still not even tea time... what am I going to do now?

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