I managed to visit John last week and collect a new shock, well a refurbished one that is.

I enjoyed talking with John and as usual learnt a lot about the workings of shock absorbers.  In the second photo it is easy to see the extra length of the arms on the suspect item.  Apparently it isn't an MGB one though.  Anyway, back on the car and the wheels look to have much better vertical alignment although as it was raining I was unable to take the car out of the garage, maybe tomorrow.

Back from holiday and on to the car.  I start by procrastinating again.  I just spend ages looking round it to decide what the way forward should be.  I have the panel that sits on top of the front of the inner bodywork that supports the shroud resting in place having previously removed it.  The shroud is mounted along with the wings.  I have the shroud twisted slightly so that the front is in a more neutral position when compared to the chassis rails and bonnet brackets.  From the front the car looks good.  Both lines created by the shroud/wing joints appear even and go in similar directions when looking from a distance.  The near side looks good.  The off side is not good.  The wing looks too short and possibly is.  Also, the rear of the shroud that is in effect the cockpit edge is out from the door edge by about 1 to 1.5cm.  The area just looks wrong.  On looking round for other potential causes for concern I notice that the shocks appear different.  I remove them and when I place them on the work bench it is obvious that they are not the same.

I consult with John, once again and get the impression that one of them is probably from an MGB.  I am off to see him again on Sunday to rectify this issue.  It does mean though that I am unable to proceed with the car for the time being.  So I turn to the engine.

Whilst on holiday I discover that it is generally the done thing to carry out a modification to the rear oil seal carrier when engines are refurbished.  I am not sure if this has been done to my engine so I need to get to the area in question by removing the clutch cover and plate.  Once done the flywheel was removed and I took a picture to post to the forum (AHEXP.COM) to establish if the engine has had the treatment.

I write this in sunny France.  I kid you not, my wife and I are doing a house swap in Aix-en-Provence for 4.5 weeks.  It is lovely.  The people whose house we are living in are going to drive to England and stay in our place in London.  They haven't left yet which could be odd but it is isn't.  Catherine is visiting family in Corsica and Alain is working deep in the bowls of the house.  We are living in an annex which is quite separate to their main living quarters.  Essentially my life consists of eating bread, cheese, meat and drinking coffee & beer whilst reading.  It's a hard life in the sunshine.

So why am I writing this you may ask?  Well my wife met me in Nice on the south coast of France, a long story which I will skip for now.  I drove the TT down from London at the weekend.  It should have been a very chilled drive, roof down, sunshine, empty roads (they really are empty in France) and nothing to worry about apart from 6 weeks off work.  However, the French customs officers had a strop on following Brexit and terror attacks so kept me (and everyone else) waiting 4 hours extra to get through the port at Dover.  This meant that I had 600km to do to get to the booked hotel and I wasn't starting out from Calais until gone 16:00.  Now the French have a rather generous speed limit of 130km/h but in the interests of a Saturday night I sat at 150 all the way.

After about 300km I noticed the familiar sight of a Healey 100.  I also realised that I wasn't catching it very rapidly.  When I did catch it I realised that it was going about 110km/h with two people in it which seemed very fast.  I couldn't help myself and leant out of my car and waved like mad at them.  The lady driving had a very cool scarf on and the two of them had an intercom of some description.  They looked very cool and very happy.

I did later see two French Healeys in a service station but no more on the road.

It was fun.

Well it is fair to say that I have been a little laid back on the car front lately.  Mainly due to the intensity of the end of year push that every teacher experiences in the run up to the GCSE exams and the half Ironman in Staffordshire last weekend.  Well the exams are over and the Ironman completed so the car has slipped back into focus.  I tided up the edges on the bulkhead top panel that I removed last time and sat it back on the car.  I then fitted the shroud and established that I can move it around a little so I bolted the wings on along with the wheels and take it out of the garage to have a god look from a distance.

The shroud sits in a different position now; the lower front edge looks more evenly spaced between the chassis legs and the same is true of the bonnet aperture and the bonnet mounting brackets.  That is all good.  The wheels look better, the nearside still sits further out than the offside  but not by much and I suspect that when I address the shroud it could well take care of that, still all good.  The issue is that the offside wing is now a little too short, not good at all:

The wing is now 1 inch shorter that the shroud

This is going to take some pondering as I don't want to make a whole lot of changes to the wings and then discover that I need to do it all over again at some later stage.  Essentially, the top panel is sitting on the bulkhead at an angle so there are potential issues everywhere I look at from lining up the aluminium cockpit trims that sit on the shrouds and doors to the position of the dash panel.  Fundamentally though it looks healthier so I am happy with the development, I just need to think far and wide on the implications.

So after a period of lots of intense procrastination I finally made it back into the garage.  This isn't actually the truth, I have been in the garage lots but I have been working on anything but the Healey as I can't work out what to do with the misaligned front end. So with all my excuses used up I get back to it.

Easy start, welding the front chassis section back on that supports the shroud and radiator.

I go through the rigmarole of measuring everything again to see if it is out of line and decide that I need to do something about the bulkhead and specifically the top panel, like cut if off.  So I did.
Now obviously I have yet to put it back so I am well aware that I have done the easy part but it still felt positive.  Next week is half term and I am hoping that I can get a bit of time on the car.

Equipped with the porta-power I unlocked the garage door and got busy.  It didn't really hit the spot though.  I managed to push the scuttle back but it didn't have much effect on the positioning of the shroud.  I started measuring again and felt a little perplexed as the scuttle is pretty square to the main chassis rails.  This is a puzzle.  I took the shroud out side to get a long distance view:

It looks anything but correct.  The photo above shows the worst of the two worries.  One is that the bonnet aperture isn't great, it looks like the righthand side front edge drops too much.  Two, the righthand section of the shroud that the wing mounts onto looks compressed.  It was hard to make any meaningful conclusions though as the thing looked different every time it was moved.  I feel a little frustrated though as I paid a professional to sort out both shrouds and he assured me that they had both been put on a jig and sorted; clearly they hadn't been.  I decided to give it a break for the day and come back to it later on.

I did however notice that I hadn't put the front cross brace section on that well and so took it off again.  I have a distant memory of doing this before,....

I had made arrangements to borrow the porta-power from my panel beater friend but when he called I was eating Easter Sunday lunch so I ignored the call.  I sent him a text but he's not great with texts so I never heard back from him.  I know he was planning to go away over the holidays so I didn't call him on bank holiday Monday, instead I headed for the garage and decided I should find something else to do.  This proved harder than I thought it might do.  I ended up renovating some bits that I am in no rush for:  Pedals, pedal bar spacer, clutch linkages, anti-roll bar and mounting brackets.  Why, well they were clearly visible and in need of a refresh.

It was quiet enjoyable work but I was struck by the length of time it took me to get it all done, coated with POR15 pre-paint metal ready and then painted.  It took the whole day.  I used a variety of wire wheels to get the bulk of the paint and rust off then dug the sand blast cabinet out to finish off the places that were hard to get to.  I tried a few things with the sand blast cabinet that I had not done before, initially I replaced the fine sand/grit with the medium stuff that I had bought some time ago and this made a massive difference.  I could almost see what was happening in the cabinet and it actually worked.  The second thing I tried was to put the compressor outside so that it didn't inhale the fine dust that filled the garage; it still lives to this days.  

Anyway, I had a lovely day procrastinating in style and ended up with some lovely shiny bits:

Pedals ready for painting

And then painted: