July 2022

 

July 2022

I have missed a few months of recording things and I am doing a catch up with this posting. It is not because I have not been busy but time and energy to record it all has escaped me. The Spanish Adventure and whinging about the service from the RAC abroad now time to get up to date. The end of June I was due to do a Charity Run with the Rotary of Chipping Sodbury but a bout of Covid meant I nor Gita could attend so a trip out in the Burton did not happen. I had even made the rally plate.

 I was very disappointed about it. I also suffered some lethargy during recovery but did do something on the van. This was to fit a stainless strip over the joint on the floor between the steel floor and the glassfibre van body. Looks much tidier now. 

I have had made a cross member to support the front floor section in front of the rear suspension pivot point. To do this required the cab and the van part separated and the van part moved back a little and elevated to put the beam in position. My brother Adrian came to visit for a few days to help me with this job at the end of July. After his visit I ordered two long drills so I could drill through the holes in the chassis through the glassfibre floor to secure the van body in place. I now have the drills but have yet to do the drilling.

While away in Spain our neighbour’s fence, which had a very over grown ivy tree, bush, big thing that became so heavy it fell off the fence taking a number of panels with it. I was accused of sabotaging it. Needless to say I was not the engineer of this however I did have to remove everything that I had attached to the fence posts. Of course with so many plants around I had to create a plant stand to put them on. Basically I constructed a heavy duty Chelsea planter. This had a bonus that I used up quite a bit of my stock of wood. This meant I could store more of the garden furniture under cover.

Also early in July I had a trip to see a new friend Coops in Whitchurch, Hampshire. He had acquired an industrial sewing machine and had made a cover for his Mehari and offered me the opportunity to borrow said machine to make a replacement cover for my El Cid or he could do it as he had more expertise in making covers than I did. We hatched a plan for me to buy the materials in and he do the sewing during the winter months. A project worth waiting for.

I did a little more fettling o the Valiant with messing about with the ignition and carburetion and got it running a bit better but there is more to be done. My problem is test riding. There is the A 312 the main artery that links the M4 to the A40. It is a 24 hour dual carriageway and no forgiving motorists so do any sort of riding I must go up it or down it or across it so I choose my time usually between ten and eleven in the morning or face huge queues  that require filtering to get anywhere. So after a test ride I need to wait until the next day to try things again. As a result adjustment and test sometimes have quite a long time in between.

Lastly I had a trip to Whitewebbs Museum to a model railway show and I’ll go to the next one at the end of September