On The Road

After much waiting its finally on the road, Tracy has been popping home during her lunch to see if the registation and tax have arrived. It still hadn't arrived this lunchtime. I did get a call though when she got back from work. There was an anonymous looking brown envelope with a birmingham  post mark so she had a look, it contained my cover note, the original factory receipt, no registration doc, but lucking in the bottom was a Tax disk. She very kindly took the envelope too the local motor factors to try and get some number plates made. They said they really should have the reg doc, but agreed to make them based upon the info we had.

Tracy was then going to pop out so phoned to say she had left the number plates by the car. A short while later she phoned again to say that it was throwing it down. Just my luck I thought.

So I got home to some number plates and a Tax disk. I already had rivet nuts ready for the rear number plate. so I made a template out of cardboard and using a couple of the cut down rivets pushed into the rivet nut (I had previously used them to mark the scuttle) to mark the card board template allowing me to drill the number plate correctly. I also used rivet nuts on the front. Though not sure how long it will last as it is very vulnerable. I think I will end up with a stick on plate on the nose.

It has stopped raining and had dried up nicely but was a little threatening. So now for the first proper road legal drive, took tracy the long way to see her mom, then took her mom and dad for a spin. Back home for a bit of tea and then some more spins with various friends.

It is really very easy to drive, though at the moment I am being quite gentle with the revs and using 4000rpm as an upper limit, it still goes like stink though. I found its not to bad in the rain as long as you keep moving, initially the wipers work reasonably well but after a short while you need them on both sides of the screen.

it's now got about 85 miles on the clock, 50 from the IVA day and 35 this evening running people about, the weather looks bad tomorrow so it may not get an outing, but Friday looks ok and then I have a week off so hopefully I can get some miles done.

One job I need to look at though, it bottomed out a couple of times, initially it was very worrying as it felt like it came from the rear and I feared for the diff or something. After a while it dawned on me what the problem is, the seat mounting bolts have a couple of cm of thread showing and I think it was these that were catching, need to get the car up and the threads shortened. Not sure how yet but it will come to me.

Looking forward to a long hot summer.