0008 Getting the car ready for a transplant

18^th – 24^th May 2017

Wiring, fuel, and bootwork.

Boot floor, with hole for fuel tank pick up sump

When you take a 63 year old car apart, I guess it is not unexpected that you will get a few surprises and problems.  And this week we have found a few unwanted ones !    Following  Ashton’s visit last weekend, we have arranged for the car to go over to Mark Boldry at Classic Car Clinic on the Gold Coast to have the rusty  floor panels cut out, replacement ones welded in, and to change the passenger side footwell area to provide more room for the exhaust to run down the side of the car rather than underneath.   So to have the car ready for this work, we had a lot of cleaning up to do.

0007 A weekend working on the car

13^th/14^th May 2017

Some ugly truths revealed ?  And a party !

Ashton & Joe getting serious

Ashton arranged his busy work / car schedule to allow time to come up to Queensland for the weekend so we could take a serious look at the car, and finalise our spare parts order so it gets on the way soonest.  On Friday evening we had a couple of hours to sit down and go through some of the stuff, but work started in earnest on Saturday morning.   Fortunately the weekend was quite poor weather, so we weren’t distracted to go surfing or anything silly !

0006 Searching for spare parts in England

24^th – 29^th April 2017

And a side trip through Wales !

View over London from The Shard

We had been planning this trip to England for some time – It was my old (!) school chum John’s 70^th birthday, and we had booked the trip many months ago because I had planned to be there for his 60^th in 2007, but that was when I was having my bout with throat cancer, and I wasn’t able to travel.   So there was no way we were going to miss his 70^th !!   And now that our foray in the 2019 Peking to Paris (going to call it P2P from now on) is planned, it was an ideal opportunity to take some time to hunt for sources of the spare parts we need for the Healey.  Our search was to take us up to Pontefract near Leeds, so we set aside a week.