Ta Daaaa

Finally after months of waiting and tons of super conibear research things forever before you buy stuff umming and ahhhing, i have finally bought myself a new welder, got a good deal from one of our former neighbours too, so all is good.

Sooo here it is in all its dayglow orange glory. I wont bore you with the specs either you into your welding or your not.
Of course it needs accessories to make it go so i had to splash out on a gas cylinder too and then i need the gas that goes inside said cylinder.... good job i'm a saver.

problem with this type of inverter welder is that you really need a trolley to put it on and somewhere to keep the gas cylinder from falling over is a good idea too.
Voila, i picked this up for free, some peoples idea of thowing things away where we live is to put it somewhere near the waste room and hope it disappears, well this did, i shouldn't encourage them really.

just needed a nut, bolt, washers and a spacer, in this case bodged with a bit of tubing, to get rid of its wobble and i could start customising.

needed a platform for the welder so i got my angle grinder out (did i ever tell you how much i love powertools?) and cut up some sheet steel, marked it out and bent some edges in the steel bending machine.

there was way too much unneeded crap cluttering things up too so i stripped all that off and then did a mock up...



handles are too long , choppety chop.



and that was about as far as i got... next is putting it all together, propper like, and that will mean welding stuff. :-)

Fault codes

So a first for me, i got to attach a computer to my car to read the fault codes,

and what exciting news did i get - P1423

there you go.

I reset the fault and it didn't come back on the way home so there might even be progress without actually doing anything, somehow i doubt it though, i'm sure the lamp will back in due course.

In the mean time good old google provides the answers...

Happy new year... maybe not.

Ahh new year the same old thing, could have been worse though i guess.

So i delivered the kids to nursery, takes say about 15 minutes, came out to find a note on the windscreen of the car....
at first i thought i might be a parking ticket but no....

at least they left a note




for those of you who need a translation...

Hi,
I brushed against your left front wing. Sorry.
Please call me.

yours sincerely

Søndre



some quick phone camera photos in case i need them, no it's not the biggest damage, but pretty visible and the wing is a bit crumpled, meh, more of a PITA than anything else. Bah.

Warning

Ggggggrrrr.....

modern cars with all this computer jiggery pokery, a nice little yellow engine shaped warning lamp burst into life and glowed at me one morning at start up. A frantic scrabble for the handbook revealed nothing more than exhaust gas emission warning or something, so i have now driven with it like this for a couple of weeks with no ill effects so far. With sensors for everything on these cars it might hopefully be just a case of replacement but it might also mean a exhaust system part.
I just found out that Jens-Erich from the workshop has just the diagnostic cable i need to connect TPW to a laptop so i can read off the error code and find the culprit. I was thinking of buying one but they are 150 quid, unfortunately he has lent it to someone else right now so it'll have to wait till the new year.

I did as a, clutching at straws, i need to start taking things apart again just to see how it fits together, i like changing stuff anyhow, kind of way, change the air filter. Now the car was serviced at the local VW stealership just before summer but no sign of this having been replaced. Probably some new fangled 'long life' service item these days - so that would be a filter with bigger holes in it then so it doesn't clog so fast, eh?
When i were a lad and looked over my dads service bills on his car, yes i really did that, the first things on the list were always Air Filter, Oil change + filter, points and plugs. Ah the good old days eh.

grubby and good to change it but a spangly new one didn't stop the light from coming on. PAH. This is probably going to cost money.

OCD cleaning maniac

One carburettor, i daren't dismantle both i case i forget how they should go together again, totally dismantled into a billion pieces some quite big and some teeny tiny. Now this is where the Conibear cleaning OCD really kicks in, lots of grubby carburettor parts needing to be cleaned, I not only cleaned them but polished them too. HA!
6 hours work? totally worth it. Added bonus is that the fellow from the parts store has sent the bits i need to start putting it back together again too ... bonus, hope they will get her in the nest few days. Thanks!

Supremely satisfied with that lot i then decided to take the lid off the steering box which has always leaked it's contents of gear oil onto the floor. Admittedly i only tried filling it up once, now i know why it all leaked out.

anybody spot the problem with the gasket here...?
decidedly crusty gasket, could well be the original judging by the state of it.

A, probably temporary, lovingly hand crafted gasket, a 10 minute Blue Peter job except that i got to use the extremely sharp craft knife all by myself.
Immensely fulfilling doing stuff like this,...
yeah i know.

Not put any more oil back in yet i leave that until next time, you can hardly wait eh.

operation clean carbs

Still not got my act together and bought a welder yet so my idle hands, in tandem with my idle brain, decided it would be a good time to remove the carburettors. I never managed to get the car to idle perfectly now matter how much i tweaked and twiddled the adjusting screws, couldn't get them balanced properly either, so off they jolly well came.

A couple of the securing bolts looked a little bit tricky to get to...

and not so much better even with the air filters removed.

they needed a good clean any way.

lots of swearing and grazed knuckles later they on the operating table.
I bought repair kits for them a while ago but now realised that i also needed some extra bit and bobs, hopefully my trusty parts mule will have them over here for me in January.

and here beginneth....

the problems?
Time to change to winter tyres, well not usually quite this early for me but Silje will be in London next week, and by the time she gets back it will be november and by then you have to have your winter tyres on. So a jolly pain in the backside evening was spent changing them over. The first one came off and then me being me I decided to dismantle a few bits and pieces to see and clean 9 years worth of dirt. Hmmm OCD.

Anyhow, first wheel changed, car taken apart and put together again time for wheel nr. 2....
only to find this...
grease on the inside of the wheel, pretty classis sign, on a front wheel drive car anyway, of

this....
arrrrrrrg, a split CV joint gaiter letting all the grease spew out and more seriously the dirt and grit get in.

a job i could probably quite easily manage myself but no time this week, on my own with the kids next week and the longer it's left the more chance of the joint being ruined by dirt so i've booked it in to get it changed next week. Just hope it isn't too late for the joint.

grrrrrrrr