after a gloomy start to the day and too much paperwork and phone hassle…
(more and more of each day seems to be taken up with just trying to organise basic things and battling against bureaucracy run riot. even the simplest thing like ringing my phone company to query an item on a bill turns into a david and goliath battle where the phone company is a cross between goliath, an ‘i speak your weight’ machine and charles clark the home secretary telling me that he can’t tell that he cant tell me what he’s not allow to tell me becaus eotherwise i might know and be able to do something about it and that would mean that i would know what it was that he thought i had done…)
and this is just dealing with the phone company. dealing with, for instance, the Inland revenue (who are soon to be combined with HM customs and excise !!!! can there be a worse scenario for the population ? a government department with more powers than the police combined with an department with the record keeping acumen and accuracy of a bontempi ‘play shop’ till????????

anyhow… after doping the phones etc for a bit i advanced out into the yard, armed with my new replacement trolley jack (the previous one was stolen from the samba last year) purchased at halfwits, that purveyor of fine tools across the land, last evening i decided to shuffle the panel van across a bit. every time i jack it up it moves across a few centimeters (aha! did you see that, i deliberately stopped myself writing inches and put centimeters! wow, i feel more european already, (maybe i’ll give up binge drinking and join my intellectual peers in the cafe this evening for a few glasses of wine and some petanque)…
the upshot of this shuffling is the gap to get the hightop wedge in and out of the yard is diminishing, to the point where the width of the hightop is diminishing as it gets rubbed and dinked and bumped between the wall and the racebus…

so i jack it up and snap…

the jack failed…
… i took it back to halfwits and got a surly refund with a sympathetic ‘so what?’ when i explained that it had nearly dropped a bus on me..

ah joy!

off to machine mart on the other side of town, just to check prices…

honest…

then back to the yard with a REAL trolley jack. the kind that takes two people to lift.. also got more bottles of argon. unfortunately the welder only takes little bottles of gas and i think it leaks a bit from the regulator… can you believe that these steel cannisters are disposable ? ie NOT recycled ???? it’s all a bit wrong.

anyhow i got on with some work and started with the starter motor, removing cleanign etc… all seems fine but i think i need to chase back all the wiring for it… will attack that later..
onto the header for the turbo, using the t1 baja header from ebay i’ve got ports one, two and three to fit but number four is a problem, the exhaust port sits next to the water pump and on the 2.1 wasserboxer block there is an additional oilcooler curcuit underneath the base of the oilfilter. This makes it a few inches wider at this point and makes a constriction between the oil filter and the main waterpipe running from the water pump….

after lots of fitting and fettling and swearing i admit the inevitable conclusion that i must either re-plumb how the water system flows or re-engineer the header.

i decide to go for the header…

cut and turn and tack and cut and bend and hit and swear and …. relax..

it just isnt happening..
i start to hack up lumps of the old exhaust and it looks like something from bluepeter… only with grinders and welders…

(fun thing of the day, wait for one of the numerous yardie types/wannabe yardies to pull up in a badly modified Calibra and turn his badly put together stereo up in an effort to impress whoever is in the vacinity of the corner shop opposite and just fire up the grinder!
‘yeman! aye! boom boom boom GRRZZZZZTTTZZZ, KRAAARKKKKK< ZUPPPPSSTTT GRZZZZZZZTZZZZZZ‘ fun for all the family

anyhow i finish the day with some progress, i have most ofthe leg on the header of rnumber four port sorted out and if i can get the motivation for it i might get it finished tomorrow. it’s full of holes and looks like a mad concertina. i might not be able to fill all the holes but if not i have a pattern to bend up fresh steel from.

my thinking is that this might not be the best way to do it, that i might revisit it all later to tuck the turbo away neatly down by the oil filter but that can wait for another day…