Big Blue

Big Blue is a 1980 LWB 2.6l petrol SIII Land Rover. We bought it as an MoT failure and are going to re-build with a 3.5 V8 and some other refinements. This is part three of the diary of the re-build.

Date Event Spent
Total spent to date £5584.20
January -
June 2002 Paul: The first half of this year was written off by some excitement I had at the start of February when I had a stroke, which kept me and Beth occupied for the next few months. Luckily (touch wood) the long term effects seem to be relatively minor, although it was pretty scary at the time. The biggest downer is that they've taken my licence away for a year, so I can't drive Big Blue if we do finish it before next February.
Meanwhile I sold Troc the Range Rover (it was a considerable amount of grief stripping the head and I decided I didn't want to maintain an elderly complicated vehicle). We also bought Aragorn, a very late (1984) lightweight which seems to have been stored for much of its life.
Aragorn
It's in excellent condition and we're going to keep it pretty authentic, for now at least, while we concentrate on Big Blue.

July 2002 Paul: Beth had the last two weeks of July off and, apart from an outing to the War and Peace Show at Beltring in Kent she spent most of the fortnight working on Big Blue and got a lot done. The picture below shows some of it:
engine bay
The list included:

Water plumbing

adjusting the position of the header tank
finding the right hose to cannabilise to finish off the plumbing to the radiator (part number RH 1785 from Discount Auto Parts, probably from a Peugeot 205 TDi)
making up converters to bit the hose together, and a filler point (bottom right) on the top hose welded together from pipe and a tow point nut and bolt
putting a tap in the bulkhead wall to we can adjust the water going through the heater circuit
plumbing the tap, the Kenlowe pre-heater (out of the old Lwt) and the heater matrix together

Fuel system

connecting the carbs to the fuel line
devising a working throttle linkage from pedal to carbs
sorting out the choke cable
installing carb breather plumbing

Body work

tying down the rear body to the rear cross member
tying down the rear body to the chassis immediately aft of the seats (which required two plates to me made)
offering up, and modifying, the seat box
offering up the windscreen and doors (of which more below)

Plus ...

advancing the exhaust installation
adjusting the length of the rear prop shaft (one for a 130, it needed to be shorted a little) and installing same
installing the distributor and coil
filling it with oil and water
setting the static timing

It really was an amazing blitz and very impressive to watch!
One thing I found slightly scary was that it wasn't until the last weekend, after Beth had tied down the rear body, that we finally thought of offering up the windows, doors and door sills. It turns out that they do fit together, after a fashion, but the roof is slightly tilted relative to the windscreen and bulkhead and the holes for the doors seems smaller than it should be. However after some pushing and shoving we think it will all go together.
Meanwhile as Aragorn's valve guide seals were clearly shot (judging by the smoke at start up) I finished doing a head swap, which I'd started the week before, replacing the head with a Turner Engineering unleaded, gas flowed head, which not only sorted out the smoke but improved the grunt at the middle and bottom end of the range. Especially after Beth tuned it - yup, she had time to do that too!! Oh yes, and she finished a service on Rudolf, the 90, and investigated its passenger footwell (rotten as hell)!!! Is there no stopping the woman!!!!
While this human dynamo worked away I also sorted out the wiring for the fuel pump on Big Blue but at the start of the second week some of the after effects from my stroke flared up so I didn't get much done on Big Blue but I did "deconstruct" the somewhat curious add on wiring, most of which I've stripped out, and spent quite a lot of time scratching my head over SIII and Rover SD1 circuit diagrams trying to fathom what I needed to do to get the ignition going. The main complication was that the SD1 has a ballast resistor, with all the additional wiring that entails.

03/08/02 Paul: Last night we popped out to Halfords and bought a battery so today we were ready to start Big Blue for the first time. Once I'd laid in the last few wires and connected the battery leads (with quick release clamps: a good investment given that we were continually connecting and disconnecting the battery for the rest of the day) we were ready to go ...
Well sort of. It's been an interesting day with some problems. Join us on a voyage of discovery:

When we connected the battery we found we weren't drawing power at all, on any setting of the key. We traced it through and found that the ignition switch was totally dead. All four connections were open circuit relative to the others. Damn. Phoned Marshalls. They don't have any in stock. So Beth managed to fish the switch out (she has smaller hands) and break it open. It has full of cacky grease. Once she'd cleaned it up it worked fine.

So we started again and found that we were drawing a lot of current with the ignition on (we didn't have the fuel pump connected at this point). Very odd. We blew the multimeter fuse while finding this out. Eventually we traced this to a dodgy brake light switch, so we just disconnected that.

We tried again. Only minor current draw on ignition, as you might except. So we cranked it. Still no fuel bear in mind. It seemed to be cranking very slowly. And the second time we saw smoke rising from between the carbs. Ooops. A bit odd as there are no wires near there. And then it dawned on us: we hadn't earthed the engine. D'oh. So the poor old starter motor was earthing ... down the throttle cable. We really should have remembered this one as Beth had exactly this problem years before with the old Lwt.
So Beth went off to Wilco for supplies of earth straps and connectors and we put in two earth straps, one on one of the bolts holding in the starter motor and the other on the opposite side of the engine on one of the engine mount bolts.

So we cranked again. And this time it was running at full speed, but the ticking I thought I had heard before was now very obvious. A sort of metallic clunk as if two bits of metal were hitting each other. It took several short cranking sessions before I spotted the problem: the timing marker, which Beth had fabricated herself the week before based on an SD-1 original which someone had lent us, was hitting the marker on the pulley. So we whipped that off and it then dry cranked fine.

Then it was on to the fuel. We put some fuel in the tank and powered up the pump. It ran for ages but no fuel appeared at the sharp end. We read the pump instructions and it suggested that we bleed the air out, so we cracked the fuel pipe off at the filter, put it over an old oil bottle and ran the pump again. Still nothing. We pulled the pipe out of the tank, and realised that we'd been mean on fuel. Putting some more in solved the problem, and we soon had petrol at the carbs.

And so on to the next problem: the passenger side SU float needle valve wasn't closing properly, so the carb flooded. Beth took it off and open it up only to find some aluminium swarf in there. So she cleaned it up and we tried again. Nope, still not closing.
Looking again she found that a bolt she had put in to blank off a hole was too long, and was obstructing the overflow pipe. Shortening it solved the problem.

And so, at 6pm, after a very long day, we finally cranked it over and nothing went wrong. It fired once or twice on the second short crank. On the third crank it ran for a few seconds before I switched off. We stopped for a quick hug. And then the final time I cranked it, it started, and it ran. It sounded good, firing on all cylinders, a little noisy because the exhaust was blowing but other than that just fine. It ran for a good few seconds before we turned it off.

So that was that. We had a working engine. Hurrah!

04/08/02 Paul: owing to a surfeit of beer the night before I didn't do much today but Beth, bless her, carried on and fitted the internal sills under the doors, managed to get the seat box to the point where it would sit correctly over the transmission and found the right position for the hand brake.

Then she put the seat in, and we both got to sit it in and make "brmmm, brmmm" noises. It was great!

w/e 09/08/02 Paul: this week we've been doing some research on how we're going to install the on board computer and the glass dash. We've discovered this guy in the US who's way ahead of us. He's using a VIA Eden mini-ITX motherboard which is compact, low power and, most importantly, you can get a case and power supply for it which expects 12V DC input and produces ATX power out. Details of both here.
This solves our biggest worry: how to get power without going via 240V AC and also gives us a motherboard that looks very promising. Only one PCI slot, but build in 10/100 ethernet, VGA, USB, serial, parallel, PS/2 etc.
We've since found a UK supplier for this sort of kit too.
I also looked again at the Velleman K8000 PC Interface board. This offers 4 A/D, 9 D/A and 16 I/O ports which can be either inputs or outputs (for switching and switch sensing). The interface with the PC is via the parallel so it doesn't use up that PCI slot, and you can daisy chain up to four of them. There's also a Linux driver for it. Hurrah! The down side is the price. They're £100 from Maplin. And given it only has four analogue inputs we may need more than one. More research needed methinks.

11/08/02 Paul: another good weekend's work done after some pottering about in the week. Saturday was exciting although for the wrong reasons. After a trip to Mackays for more supplies of aluminium angle I made a start on the battery box, which is to go under the driver's seat. All went swimmingly right up to the point where, while drilling holes through the angle and base plate in order to rivet both together the drill bit jammed and then pulled itself out of my hand (I has drilling one handed, holding the metal with my other hand, silly boy) and continued running while it wrapped itself around its power cord and then proceeded to smoke! Eeeek!! No permanent harm done although I did have to replace the power cord and we were both a bit shaken by the experience.
Meanwhile Beth did some more work on the exhaust, welding a new hanger on from one of the gearbox mounts.
See! The garage floor!!
On Sunday I started off by tidying the garage side of the workshop, which had become something on an obstacle course. By the end of it I'd thrown out a lot of crap and you could see the garage floor again. So that was a result.
instrument panel
While I was doing this Beth installed the auxiliary instrument bracket from the Lwt in Big Blue. She'd stripped this out of the Lwt in the week and sprayed it black so it looked the part. I then installed the wiring for the instruments: volts, water temperature and oil pressure. Looks neat and tidy I think. It'll certainly do until we install the glass dash.
We tested the instruments during a quick run of the engine. Water temperature wasn't working but the others were. It also seems that the alternator is not doing its business as the ignition light doesn't go out, so that's something else to investigate.
new transmission
tunnel panel
While this was going on Beth was working on the body. On Saturday she had loosened the rear body bolts and we installed the windscreen on Sunday after she had poured lots of waxoil into the corroded bulkhead top (which I painted eons ago). She then tied down the roof to the windscreen, pulling the passenger side body down about 6 or 7mm while doing so, and then tightened up the other bolts. She also did more work on new body work to go around the transmission.
Beth sorts out
the rear door bolts
And, finally, we installed the back door, which I'd removed from the garage during the morning's tidy up. So, all in all, a successful weekend.

16/08/02 Paul: looks like we've got a sweltering weekend coming up so I thought I'd get a day in ahead of time and installed the new rear lights. Putting in better rear lights has become something of a crusade for me ever since I followed a Series Land Rover down the motorway in poor weather conditions and realised how crap the standard rear lights are. So we now fit trailer lights to our Land Rovers. Rudolf has the same ones I've used here. The only problem them is that they've clear on the inboard side to illuminate a number plate but I've got some translucent red tape to solve that.

I cleaned all the crap off the rear top too. Contrast this photo with the last one. The lights are held on by four 4.8mm rivets and I used trailer cable to wire them up as that gave one neat black cable to route down inside to the loom behind the original lights. I finished the passenger's side but run out of steam before I got the driver's side completely wired up. Routing the cable down the inside of the rear body is very fiddly to do properly.

17/08/02 Paul: I wasn't wrong about the weather. It's been a scorcher today. I got on with the battery box, drilling a tremendous number of holes and inserting more 4.8mm rivets than the mind can comfortably conceive (OK, about 150, thank goodness I'd ordered a box of 500 from Screwfix earlier in the week).

Meanwhile Beth replaced the water pump, which was leaking, with a new one from Rimmer Bros which also came in the post this week. As with the last one she had to cut off the mounting for the viscous coupling for the fan in order to get it to fit.

Once that was in she commissioned the brakes with the aid of an Eazibleed. Finally, at about 4:30pm when I was starting to flag we ran the engine for a bit while Beth tracked down and fixed couple of places where the exhaust was blowing and then she ran it for long enough to pressurise the water system. It sounded lovely now the exhaust wasn't blowing: it's really starting to sound sweet now. Oh yes, and the water temperature gauge worked.

17/08/02 Paul: we ran out of steam by Sunday afternoon but by then I had finished the battery box and it's now ready to install under the driver's seat box. I also spent some time struggling with the +ve wire from the solenoid back to the battery. Meanwhile Beth cut more bits of plate for the passenger side floor and transmission tunnel and also put in some anti-freeze to keep the heads safe from harm now we've got a water tight cooling system.

25/08/02 Paul: The August Bank Holiday weekend was a mixed one. On the up side I installed the battery box (at last!) and we also tried the power steering which worked a treat, and Beth then drove Big Blue up and down a few feet. All of which was quite excellent and we had a bottle of bubbly with supper on Sunday night.
On the down side the clutch seemed to be dragging a bit. Which we didn't get to the bottom of that weekend.

01/09/02 Paul: a bit of a frustrating weekend for Beth this weekend (I was indoors trying to get clive, our new server, working). She got the gearbox out so she could get to the clutch. We had suspect the spigot bush might be tight so she loosened that, although we were both not entirely convinced that this what what was causing the clutch drag. We were also suspicious of the wear marks on the flywheel, which didn't look right for the clutch plate.
When she got it back together on Sunday night ... the clutch was still dragging. Damn.
And meanwhile, by Sunday night I had a server which was crashing at regular intervals for no apparent reason. So neither of us were very happy bunnies.
We think the problem with Big Blue is that the clutch plate has warped, having been in for two years unused, so it's not lifting off. So I've now ordered another plate, a Borg and Beck, from Andrew of CPE, who have now inherited Milner's conversion business.
(Oh yes, and I discovered later that clive's problem appears to have been an MRi network card which didn't get on with SuSE 8.0. When I swapped it with one out of my SuSE 7.3 box both machines worked fine.)

08/09/02 Paul: this clutch is becoming a bit of a pain. The new clutch plate is better, but it's still not completely disengaging. Arse!

15/09/02 Paul: after some discussion this week we've decided the next step it to try washers under the pressure plate to pull it back ever so slightly. However this weekend what we've actually done is slightly different. Beth knocked down some of the wall (which she started last weekend: it was getting in the way while she was trying to fit the Borg & Beck clutch.
Meanwhile I wire brushed and silver hammerited the passenger side seat box inside and out as it was a tad rusty inside from being in the outside for a fair old while.

And so we continue on into 2003 with a long hiatus followed by a rush of progress towards the end of the year.

Total spent to date £5584.20

Date	Event	Spent
	Total spent to date	£5584.20
January - June 2002	Paul: The first half of this year was written off by some excitement I had at the start of February when I had a stroke, which kept me and Beth occupied for the next few months. Luckily (touch wood) the long term effects seem to be relatively minor, although it was pretty scary at the time. The biggest downer is that they've taken my licence away for a year, so I can't drive Big Blue if we do finish it before next February. Meanwhile I sold Troc the Range Rover (it was a considerable amount of grief stripping the head and I decided I didn't want to maintain an elderly complicated vehicle). We also bought Aragorn, a very late (1984) lightweight which seems to have been stored for much of its life. It's in excellent condition and we're going to keep it pretty authentic, for now at least, while we concentrate on Big Blue.
July 2002	Paul: Beth had the last two weeks of July off and, apart from an outing to the War and Peace Show at Beltring in Kent she spent most of the fortnight working on Big Blue and got a lot done. The picture below shows some of it: The list included: Water plumbing adjusting the position of the header tank finding the right hose to cannabilise to finish off the plumbing to the radiator (part number RH 1785 from Discount Auto Parts, probably from a Peugeot 205 TDi) making up converters to bit the hose together, and a filler point (bottom right) on the top hose welded together from pipe and a tow point nut and bolt putting a tap in the bulkhead wall to we can adjust the water going through the heater circuit plumbing the tap, the Kenlowe pre-heater (out of the old Lwt) and the heater matrix together Fuel system connecting the carbs to the fuel line devising a working throttle linkage from pedal to carbs sorting out the choke cable installing carb breather plumbing Body work tying down the rear body to the rear cross member tying down the rear body to the chassis immediately aft of the seats (which required two plates to me made) offering up, and modifying, the seat box offering up the windscreen and doors (of which more below) Plus ... advancing the exhaust installation adjusting the length of the rear prop shaft (one for a 130, it needed to be shorted a little) and installing same installing the distributor and coil filling it with oil and water setting the static timing It really was an amazing blitz and very impressive to watch! One thing I found slightly scary was that it wasn't until the last weekend, after Beth had tied down the rear body, that we finally thought of offering up the windows, doors and door sills. It turns out that they do fit together, after a fashion, but the roof is slightly tilted relative to the windscreen and bulkhead and the holes for the doors seems smaller than it should be. However after some pushing and shoving we think it will all go together. Meanwhile as Aragorn's valve guide seals were clearly shot (judging by the smoke at start up) I finished doing a head swap, which I'd started the week before, replacing the head with a Turner Engineering unleaded, gas flowed head, which not only sorted out the smoke but improved the grunt at the middle and bottom end of the range. Especially after Beth tuned it - yup, she had time to do that too!! Oh yes, and she finished a service on Rudolf, the 90, and investigated its passenger footwell (rotten as hell)!!! Is there no stopping the woman!!!! While this human dynamo worked away I also sorted out the wiring for the fuel pump on Big Blue but at the start of the second week some of the after effects from my stroke flared up so I didn't get much done on Big Blue but I did "deconstruct" the somewhat curious add on wiring, most of which I've stripped out, and spent quite a lot of time scratching my head over SIII and Rover SD1 circuit diagrams trying to fathom what I needed to do to get the ignition going. The main complication was that the SD1 has a ballast resistor, with all the additional wiring that entails.
03/08/02	Paul: Last night we popped out to Halfords and bought a battery so today we were ready to start Big Blue for the first time. Once I'd laid in the last few wires and connected the battery leads (with quick release clamps: a good investment given that we were continually connecting and disconnecting the battery for the rest of the day) we were ready to go ... Well sort of. It's been an interesting day with some problems. Join us on a voyage of discovery: When we connected the battery we found we weren't drawing power at all, on any setting of the key. We traced it through and found that the ignition switch was totally dead. All four connections were open circuit relative to the others. Damn. Phoned Marshalls. They don't have any in stock. So Beth managed to fish the switch out (she has smaller hands) and break it open. It has full of cacky grease. Once she'd cleaned it up it worked fine. So we started again and found that we were drawing a lot of current with the ignition on (we didn't have the fuel pump connected at this point). Very odd. We blew the multimeter fuse while finding this out. Eventually we traced this to a dodgy brake light switch, so we just disconnected that. We tried again. Only minor current draw on ignition, as you might except. So we cranked it. Still no fuel bear in mind. It seemed to be cranking very slowly. And the second time we saw smoke rising from between the carbs. Ooops. A bit odd as there are no wires near there. And then it dawned on us: we hadn't earthed the engine. D'oh. So the poor old starter motor was earthing ... down the throttle cable. We really should have remembered this one as Beth had exactly this problem years before with the old Lwt. So Beth went off to Wilco for supplies of earth straps and connectors and we put in two earth straps, one on one of the bolts holding in the starter motor and the other on the opposite side of the engine on one of the engine mount bolts. So we cranked again. And this time it was running at full speed, but the ticking I thought I had heard before was now very obvious. A sort of metallic clunk as if two bits of metal were hitting each other. It took several short cranking sessions before I spotted the problem: the timing marker, which Beth had fabricated herself the week before based on an SD-1 original which someone had lent us, was hitting the marker on the pulley. So we whipped that off and it then dry cranked fine. Then it was on to the fuel. We put some fuel in the tank and powered up the pump. It ran for ages but no fuel appeared at the sharp end. We read the pump instructions and it suggested that we bleed the air out, so we cracked the fuel pipe off at the filter, put it over an old oil bottle and ran the pump again. Still nothing. We pulled the pipe out of the tank, and realised that we'd been mean on fuel. Putting some more in solved the problem, and we soon had petrol at the carbs. And so on to the next problem: the passenger side SU float needle valve wasn't closing properly, so the carb flooded. Beth took it off and open it up only to find some aluminium swarf in there. So she cleaned it up and we tried again. Nope, still not closing. Looking again she found that a bolt she had put in to blank off a hole was too long, and was obstructing the overflow pipe. Shortening it solved the problem. And so, at 6pm, after a very long day, we finally cranked it over and nothing went wrong. It fired once or twice on the second short crank. On the third crank it ran for a few seconds before I switched off. We stopped for a quick hug. And then the final time I cranked it, it started, and it ran. It sounded good, firing on all cylinders, a little noisy because the exhaust was blowing but other than that just fine. It ran for a good few seconds before we turned it off. So that was that. We had a working engine. Hurrah!
04/08/02	Paul: owing to a surfeit of beer the night before I didn't do much today but Beth, bless her, carried on and fitted the internal sills under the doors, managed to get the seat box to the point where it would sit correctly over the transmission and found the right position for the hand brake. Then she put the seat in, and we both got to sit it in and make "brmmm, brmmm" noises. It was great!
w/e 09/08/02	Paul: this week we've been doing some research on how we're going to install the on board computer and the glass dash. We've discovered this guy in the US who's way ahead of us. He's using a VIA Eden mini-ITX motherboard which is compact, low power and, most importantly, you can get a case and power supply for it which expects 12V DC input and produces ATX power out. Details of both here. This solves our biggest worry: how to get power without going via 240V AC and also gives us a motherboard that looks very promising. Only one PCI slot, but build in 10/100 ethernet, VGA, USB, serial, parallel, PS/2 etc. We've since found a UK supplier for this sort of kit too. I also looked again at the Velleman K8000 PC Interface board. This offers 4 A/D, 9 D/A and 16 I/O ports which can be either inputs or outputs (for switching and switch sensing). The interface with the PC is via the parallel so it doesn't use up that PCI slot, and you can daisy chain up to four of them. There's also a Linux driver for it. Hurrah! The down side is the price. They're £100 from Maplin. And given it only has four analogue inputs we may need more than one. More research needed methinks.
11/08/02	Paul: another good weekend's work done after some pottering about in the week. Saturday was exciting although for the wrong reasons. After a trip to Mackays for more supplies of aluminium angle I made a start on the battery box, which is to go under the driver's seat. All went swimmingly right up to the point where, while drilling holes through the angle and base plate in order to rivet both together the drill bit jammed and then pulled itself out of my hand (I has drilling one handed, holding the metal with my other hand, silly boy) and continued running while it wrapped itself around its power cord and then proceeded to smoke! Eeeek!! No permanent harm done although I did have to replace the power cord and we were both a bit shaken by the experience. Meanwhile Beth did some more work on the exhaust, welding a new hanger on from one of the gearbox mounts. On Sunday I started off by tidying the garage side of the workshop, which had become something on an obstacle course. By the end of it I'd thrown out a lot of crap and you could see the garage floor again. So that was a result. While I was doing this Beth installed the auxiliary instrument bracket from the Lwt in Big Blue. She'd stripped this out of the Lwt in the week and sprayed it black so it looked the part. I then installed the wiring for the instruments: volts, water temperature and oil pressure. Looks neat and tidy I think. It'll certainly do until we install the glass dash. We tested the instruments during a quick run of the engine. Water temperature wasn't working but the others were. It also seems that the alternator is not doing its business as the ignition light doesn't go out, so that's something else to investigate. While this was going on Beth was working on the body. On Saturday she had loosened the rear body bolts and we installed the windscreen on Sunday after she had poured lots of waxoil into the corroded bulkhead top (which I painted eons ago). She then tied down the roof to the windscreen, pulling the passenger side body down about 6 or 7mm while doing so, and then tightened up the other bolts. She also did more work on new body work to go around the transmission. And, finally, we installed the back door, which I'd removed from the garage during the morning's tidy up. So, all in all, a successful weekend.
16/08/02	Paul: looks like we've got a sweltering weekend coming up so I thought I'd get a day in ahead of time and installed the new rear lights. Putting in better rear lights has become something of a crusade for me ever since I followed a Series Land Rover down the motorway in poor weather conditions and realised how crap the standard rear lights are. So we now fit trailer lights to our Land Rovers. Rudolf has the same ones I've used here. The only problem them is that they've clear on the inboard side to illuminate a number plate but I've got some translucent red tape to solve that. I cleaned all the crap off the rear top too. Contrast this photo with the last one. The lights are held on by four 4.8mm rivets and I used trailer cable to wire them up as that gave one neat black cable to route down inside to the loom behind the original lights. I finished the passenger's side but run out of steam before I got the driver's side completely wired up. Routing the cable down the inside of the rear body is very fiddly to do properly.
17/08/02	Paul: I wasn't wrong about the weather. It's been a scorcher today. I got on with the battery box, drilling a tremendous number of holes and inserting more 4.8mm rivets than the mind can comfortably conceive (OK, about 150, thank goodness I'd ordered a box of 500 from Screwfix earlier in the week). Meanwhile Beth replaced the water pump, which was leaking, with a new one from Rimmer Bros which also came in the post this week. As with the last one she had to cut off the mounting for the viscous coupling for the fan in order to get it to fit. Once that was in she commissioned the brakes with the aid of an Eazibleed. Finally, at about 4:30pm when I was starting to flag we ran the engine for a bit while Beth tracked down and fixed couple of places where the exhaust was blowing and then she ran it for long enough to pressurise the water system. It sounded lovely now the exhaust wasn't blowing: it's really starting to sound sweet now. Oh yes, and the water temperature gauge worked.
17/08/02	Paul: we ran out of steam by Sunday afternoon but by then I had finished the battery box and it's now ready to install under the driver's seat box. I also spent some time struggling with the +ve wire from the solenoid back to the battery. Meanwhile Beth cut more bits of plate for the passenger side floor and transmission tunnel and also put in some anti-freeze to keep the heads safe from harm now we've got a water tight cooling system.
25/08/02	Paul: The August Bank Holiday weekend was a mixed one. On the up side I installed the battery box (at last!) and we also tried the power steering which worked a treat, and Beth then drove Big Blue up and down a few feet. All of which was quite excellent and we had a bottle of bubbly with supper on Sunday night. On the down side the clutch seemed to be dragging a bit. Which we didn't get to the bottom of that weekend.
01/09/02	Paul: a bit of a frustrating weekend for Beth this weekend (I was indoors trying to get clive, our new server, working). She got the gearbox out so she could get to the clutch. We had suspect the spigot bush might be tight so she loosened that, although we were both not entirely convinced that this what what was causing the clutch drag. We were also suspicious of the wear marks on the flywheel, which didn't look right for the clutch plate. When she got it back together on Sunday night ... the clutch was still dragging. Damn. And meanwhile, by Sunday night I had a server which was crashing at regular intervals for no apparent reason. So neither of us were very happy bunnies. We think the problem with Big Blue is that the clutch plate has warped, having been in for two years unused, so it's not lifting off. So I've now ordered another plate, a Borg and Beck, from Andrew of CPE, who have now inherited Milner's conversion business. (Oh yes, and I discovered later that clive's problem appears to have been an MRi network card which didn't get on with SuSE 8.0. When I swapped it with one out of my SuSE 7.3 box both machines worked fine.)
08/09/02	Paul: this clutch is becoming a bit of a pain. The new clutch plate is better, but it's still not completely disengaging. Arse!
15/09/02	Paul: after some discussion this week we've decided the next step it to try washers under the pressure plate to pull it back ever so slightly. However this weekend what we've actually done is slightly different. Beth knocked down some of the wall (which she started last weekend: it was getting in the way while she was trying to fit the Borg & Beck clutch. Meanwhile I wire brushed and silver hammerited the passenger side seat box inside and out as it was a tad rusty inside from being in the outside for a fair old while.
	And so we continue on into 2003 with a long hiatus followed by a rush of progress towards the end of the year.
	Total spent to date	£5584.20