The new wings are safely in the garage, excellent.  Following the hectic weeks up to Christmas I didn't get into the garage at all so I am looking forward to some good Healey time over the festive holiday.  I need to set up the gears on my wife's road bike having replaced the cables and sort out the stuff that I have piled into the garage over the last month or so before I start.  I'll be putting the rear wings and the boxes of bits from Norfolk into my in-law's shed, and then onto the main event.  I have a plan and everything I need to execute it which is better still.  First of all I am going to fit the front shroud which will require welding the last part of the chassis back on, the front vertical section with the bonnet hinges.  Then the wings, then the A posts for the door hinges, then the doors, then the rear wings.  Then all I'll need to do is paint it and fit it up.  Simple.  I think I may have had too many glasses of pop over the past few weeks.

On a more serious note the wing man (thank you), suggested that I have the wings dipped rather than sand blasted as it is less damaging and I think he has a point.  So I need to find somewhere to get them dipped near London.  Dad used to get internal house doors and cast iron radiators dipped locally but I don't remember where and I'm not sure if that is the same process I require.  I'm not worried about doing this before I use the wings to fit the doors etcetera so at least I won’t be held up by it.  Having said that though it would be best to get it out of the way, urmm, food for thought.

The only other thing I would like to sort out over Christmas is the Audi's roof which stopped working whilst we were in Rome last summer.  We pulled into a supermarket on the way back from the lake at Bracciano, if you get the chance it is worth going to, beautiful, and discovered that the roof had just stopped working.  To say I was cheesed off is an understatement.  The only reason we had sold the old car and borrowed money was to have a month in the sun with the roof down and the damn thing broke.  I managed to disable the hydraulic lift mechanism and raise and lower the roof manually for the rest of the holiday which caused the panic to subside.  I discovered on the tt forum that this is most likely to be a £70 sensor, phew.  However, to find out which sensor I need to patch the car up to the Audi software which is not easy, that or I could hand it over to a dealer/specialist and pay about £400 to get it fixed and I can't be doing that now can I?  How can I be rebuilding a Healey and give up on a roof sensor on the tt, especially at an extra cost of £300 plus.  My wife and I could have a couple of nights out at the Oxo tower for that and as we haven't been there since I chucked in the sales job and became a teacher, so that is a no.  Having returned from Italy and back to the life of a teacher I decided to wait until I got the car serviced to get the reading from the software.  The specialist Audi garage,  motorcontinental.co.uk, in Crouch End did a good job and were really easy to deal with however, I didn't realise that the fact that I had disabled the hydraulics would be the first and only fault that shows up so I am none the wiser.   I have since discovered that my old pal Rob at K-Max, www.kmaxmot.co.uk, has the software required so I intend to get to Barnet and see him over the next two weeks.  I'll keep you posted.