Busy summer bees

I know its been a little quiet recently, but I have been busy - honest! In non-car related news, Megan can now ride her bike without stabalisers! It took quite a few hours of cajoleing but she has now got it and we went for a lovely bike ride today along the local cycle paths.

In car news, Molly has had some attention (the screen seal is still annoying me though!) and Jessica (as usual) has been hogging my time. I managed to finish off the step area - (don't look too closelly). And get the door back on, again it isn't pretty, but it does the job. There are a few things to finish off, like trimming back the door skin (its a little too long and has scraped some of the paint off) fitting new door seals and sorting out some door cards.

I also had a chunk of work to do at the back. It looks as through a chunk of this portion of the chassis has been cut out it may have happened when the rear step was being cut off...
Anyway its MOT able (it was last year too so I have know idea why it passed!) Problem was though the fuel tank and filler was in the way, so they had to come out.

fuel tank bay took a lick of paint.

as did the top of the fuel tank.

So what it left to do? Well there is something missing from the side of the engine...

And I'm sure the carb shouldn't go on the dashboard...

One step forwards and eight back...

I managed to get a few cheeky hours in on the van yesterday. The ongoing challenges which are between her and the MOT are:

• front step and drivers side door
• the inlet manifold
• some rust at the rear corner
• other things I'm sure I've not found yet

I've made a lot of progress on the first two. The door has been whittled to a rough shape and squirted with filler and a spodge of paint - and I can honestly say it is apalling... (you can't tell by the photos...)

I managed to get the manifolds off to sort the blowing exhaust manifold gasket. That was a bit of a pig to do. The carb, exhaust and starter had to come off too. Along with the starter motor. I finally managed it without snapping any studs/bolts (yay!), but I discovered that there was a small crack in one side of the exhaust manifold.

After dropping the whole assembly (the best way to test things I find) it snapped. It looks as though it was ready to go - and to be honest I'm rather it did it now than having to do it all over again.

The manifold of horrors also showed up this:

The studs are quite well mangled, this is what has been eating my 3/8" BSF manifold nuts....

Bank holidays,

British bank holidays are superb. They are an institution. As a nation we feel the need to toddle off round the country and do stuff....

Now we at littleyellow towers like to join in and keep this going. This weekend we went off to North Berwick for a random holiday.

Friday night was a quiet affair with the now traditional friday night fish and chips for tea - rather good.

On the Saturday morning we bagged North Berwick Law , the kids had us up at 5:30 so we were up and down the law by 10:00 am!

We were off to the seaside for kite flying in the late morning and the new kites seemed well suited to the west Lothian westerlies.

In the afternoon we met up with Megan's friend (and her parents) and Megan's friends dad showed off his 2 line stunt kite - a bit of a hand full, followed by a good few hours bothering the aquatic wildlife with 99p fishing nets.

We headed home on the Sunday, but decided to pop into Longniddry bents, which appears to be the place to be if you're a kite surfer. So we took the opportunity to crack out the box kite.






And of course, the wildlife got bothered by those 99p nets again...