Its all been pretty hectic around these parts recently. Had to move house twice. Lots of bill paying, housing deposits, uni, busy summer, cutting my leg up with a grinder, that sort of thing.
Here is a long overdue update of the happenings around Derrick the Volvo.
So where I left off. We moved across the bridge to lydney in early summer. Was a really nice place. There I did a fair bit of work on him. I had got the dimensions for a brake disc conversion off Adam, so began work on that. Speedy turned up to do some work on his sigma. Meanwhile I started work on the brackets, only to have the grinder catch, fall out of my hands and chew my leg up! That put the brake conversion out of play for a while!
So with me hauled up and off work, I got bored sitting around so got some plexiglass I acquired from uni cut up and made ploycarb rear windows. I also fitted spacers to the fronts which meant I needed to trim the front end a bit.
So a few months went by, and I managed to make up some brackets to fit the rear brakes on. All was set and ready, until our landlords at the time decided to get a divorce (we'd only been in the new place a few months). so everything was put to one side while we found a new place and started putting money together to fund another move. After faffing around, shouting at estate agents and moving we found a nice place with a double garage.
All packed up and ready to move
New garage
So it all worked out ok in the end, it was just the stress of having to do it that was the batsard. Anyway, we're here now, and RRG 2013 was on the cards.
So after some tyre bombing
we all headed to RRG. Awesome fun.
Then it was all work work work and I haven't driven him for a good while since. Runs really well though, did some measurements I've been meaning to do for ages after an off being enthusiastic (rear axle is a good 1" shifted to one side). A flat tyre (I have no luck with those) means I can't use him for a while anyway. I don't have the spare cash at the moment to do everything I want to so he'll have to wait for a while before things start happening again. Managed to get the spare wings home though so doing work on those ready for moulding as and when I can, same goes for the door cards.
I need to sort out the fuel cell as its leaking badly from the top. I have a replacement ali one which I need to get some weld on fittings for and get them all on. Once that's done, I need to get some new gauges, sort the 5 link out (first getting the axle off Liam which I STILL haven't managed to get off him), and tidy a few bits up too.
In the mean time, I found a MK4 astra splitter at a scrapyard which I fitted and it seems to work well with the car.
and I've also aquired a garage fridge.
In the middle of all that I managed to help get smchris's valver going again, as the cam belt snapped and bent some exhaust valves.
So there's a long list of things to be done, and stuff that I really want to get cracking on, only got one year of uni left so I'll be concentrating on that for the most part, with the 340 and Fiat taking a back seat for a bit until I have some time free. Onwards and upwards.