Early start on Saturday morning...
Yesterday’s pile of parts:
Took the angle grinder to the other rear shock bolt, which took all of two hands and two minutes. Rear suspension now off:
Then we had to take the 5spd shifter out, which was made a lot easier by the fact my exhaust was already repaired just behind the cat. Took the repair sleeve off, let the cat hang off the flexi which turned out to be totally knackered. While
@Prawn took the heatshields out of the tunnel, I stripped the interior, we undid the old shifter, and I was greeted by the following view:
I then refitted the interior about three times because I forgot bits, while Prawn put the heatshields back in and re-repaired the exhaust with a shiny new sleeve.
The new clutch and flywheel went in (apparently special stuff from Spec; an SMF and some type of fancy clutch, came with the 6spd gearbox), while I fitted the rear brakes. It was about this time we got raided by the police:
Once we bribed policeman Sam we carried on working. One of the mounts had two bad threads, turned out they’d already been helicoiled. Removed the old helicoil with a clever trick:
Then cleaned up the threads, new helicoils in, and it was time for the gearbox to go up. Due to BSMS we just used a rope instead of the hoist, because the hoist was “cumbersome”.
Got the gearbox in, Prawn did up many bolts, at which point it turned out that one of the two helicoils didn’t take, and the mount was knackered. We scavenged the mount off Prawn’s engine, along with some other bits that didn’t come with the gearbox. Prawn did his favourite thing ever and rewired the speed sensor and reverse lights.
Come 7pm, the engine bay was back together, so we decided to refit the dogbone and fire it up. Prawn got down in the pit, decided that fitting the dogbone was rather difficult without a subframe present, and we concluded we were very tired at this point.
Further proof of exhaustion came in the form of a very loud bang when turning the key, followed by the unmistakable noise of a tool clattering to the floor. Big scare at this point.
As Prawn looked at me with an expression of utter horror, I realized what’d just dropped on the bottom of the pit. We’d forgotten the breaker bar that was still on the crank, which had slammed into the chassis rail and then sheared its drive clean off.
At this point Prawn’s BSMS kicked in again, he decided he’d hold the engine with his bare hands, acting as a human dogbone mount. The brilliance of this idea was all the motivation we needed to call it a night, have a meal and drinks at the pub, and race tiny F1 cars over Monaco:
Prawn failed to heed my warnings about the special Dutch beer I brought him, and I was amazed he made it up the stairs afterwards. Another long day, progress not quite what we’d hoped for, but we got a lot done in the end
