To be honest, he may be right as I spent large parts of the holidays talking/thinking/researching about my car (I worked 3 days this week and it was dead, so I spent most of my time on the web).
I've been concerned about my seats as I realised that in the IVA manual, if the seat belt rests on the slots, then that becomes the load bearing point for the tester to check and a piece of plastic and vinyl is probably not up to it. As my seats aren't the GBS ones and are a bit higher, the mounting points are below the level of the slots and the belt will rest on the seat. Panicked (as usual) and then learnt that it should be OK because it depends on how they sit with you in the seat and they should be clear of the seats in that situation.
My biggest worry now is the electrics. I'd love to save the money and do my own engine loom but I'm not sure I'll be able to work it out. GBS have kindly sent me pin-out details but at the moment, they aren't helping me. If a pin says 'tachometer signal', I'm assuming that's for the rev counter but where does it go to? On everyone else's blogs, the electrics are an hours work to plug the marked up connectors together. Doing it manually is going to be much longer but it grates on me to have to spend £500 or so on the GBS looms. I'll have to think about it a bit longer...
Back to some actual garage time - I was going to make up a blanking plate to cover up the gap between flywheel and sump but then I realised that there's also a bigger gap higher up, so for £23, I ordered a dirt shield from RetroFord which goes all the way round the bellhousing. Obviously being this time of year, it hasn't arrived yet so I can't consider putting the engine and gearbox together.
All I could really do was the seat runners, so made a start on them. For some reason, there are no instructions about how to fit them anywhere and everyone's blogs seem to skim over it so I'll try be a bit clearer.
I decided the best way was to attach the runners to the seats, then put some masking tape on the floor, put the seats in (mine are such a tight fit, there's no sideways movement possible) and mark on the tape where the runners are. Then remove the seats, measure where the holes need to be and then drill through the floor.
Great plan but hit a slight snag when it took me an 2 hours to screw in 4 bolts. Or, to be precise, just one bolt. One runner went in ok:
... but the second one wasn't playing. Firstly, the holes didn't quite line up so it took 30 minutes with a small file extending it a few mm. Then, the thread was rusted and I couldn't screw the bolt in. And did I have an M8 tap? Nope. Amazingly, most of the shops were open and I finally found a branch of Toolstation that had a cheap tap and die kit containing an M8 tap. Short trip out, tap bought and thread cleared, second runner in. But now it was too late to do any more - kids wanted my attention, so maybe more tomorrow.
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