Now I wasn't expecting that...

Molly's MOT that is, all was fine except, well it was all bad. Over a sheet of failure. Now Moll is no garage queen, she gets used in the rain and not maintained enough, but a full page?! It turned out that most of the failure was due to a coincidental Morris Minor feature. Morris Minors have two fuses, one for all the things which are on all the time, and one for all the things which are only on when the ignition is on. It turned out that the ignition one had corroded a little between the house and the MOT station. So she failed on wipers, indicators, brake lights etc. etc. you get the idea. Well that lot was easily sorted, however there was a more worrying item on the list. And it involved that most scary of substances - MOT man crayon. For those of you without older cars (what are you reading this for?) when a car has a structural defect, usually due to rust, and the MOT man finds it, he circles it with his scary crayon.

Well Molly was unlucky enough to endure the embarrassment of the crayon. It turned out to be a previously bodged repair (not by me I hasten to add).

It was in the region of the rear nearside spring hanger - a notorious rust spot. As it turned out, when the nearside sills were repaired, they hadn't done a very good job, and left a very small gap inside the hanger, and this was what the MOT man had found (not very rusty at all). Being me, I decided to do the job properly and change the spring hanger completely. Which was just as well as it was actually a little tatty - the MOT man couldn't see as the Owen Burton anti tramp bars were covering some actual grot.

With that done (and the fuse cleaned up) we were back to see the man- this time he was more than happy so we were given a ticket to drive for another year.

Crabtastic

A few weeks ago I decided to get out and spend some quality time with the kids. So how better to do that but to take them crab fishing! I remember doing this as a kid and pulling loads of the things out of the sea. So ebay supplied some crablines,  half a pound of bacon from tesco along with a picnic and we were off to Fife.
I don't remember this being so hard but after a couple of hours without a bite, we gave up and headed for the beach.

Again with the mots. ..

Hardly seems like a year since the last bout of mot madness, but here we are again. Jessica was done a couple of weeks ago. She got a fail on the brakes which was quickly sorted. So Molly is in now and I really have no idea what will happen. My pre-checks were ok but you never know. Neither of the cars have had much use over the past few months, mainly due to the new arrival being in the way. Yeah the bike. A suzuki gs500 to be precise. It seems to fit in the niche between the classics. An interesting and fun vehicle which i can work on and use for getting to work. Problem is, it is parked on the drive in front of the cars. So what to do? Monoblock the front lawn! Just need to sort the budget now.