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The Friday Flick

I’d love a cortina like this

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Ok, I’m a little late with the ‘Merry Christmas’. I hope you have had a good one. Today is the first day since Christmas where we’ve not been over to someones house for drinks or they’ve been over here.

Yesterday I had a bit of time to sort my windscreen washer motor out. It had seized good and proper. I managed to get it smoking after I took it out, cleaned it up and refitted it hoping for the best. Luckily our local factors had a box full of them, so I bought one, along with a set of battery clamps, as the leads are currently screwed into the battery terminals and they keep working loose. Twenty minutes later I had the washer motor fitted and I was happy. All I need to do now is fit a new wiper blade to the passenger side and a dual speed wiper motor and it’ll be like driving a modern car. Ok, no it won’t but it’ll be a step closer.

Today I went for a spin over to my mates in the pouring wind and rain, just because I needed to have a blast. I managed to get a bit of sideways action around the roundabouts. I need an LSD because I had about four instances of just sitting there spinning the wheels when I was trying to accellerate away from a junction!!

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The Friday Flick - Anglias at Essex Arena

This is an animated flick from www.ukdirt.co.uk which is an online racing league. If you don’t know what it is (I didn’t) pop over there and have a look and read up on the rules.

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How cold?

Don’t you just love cold winters mornings? I do. It’s great walking to school with my daughter when the ground is slightly frosty and the air is fresh. Now, imagine driving in a van with no heater on those mornings! Not so good. I have to get my scarf, gloves, hat, fleece and big coat on before I strap myself in. One other thing to do is make sure the ice scraper is on the passenger seat as I’ll be using it. A lot. Every 15 seconds. It takes about 20 mins for the cabin to warm up sufficiently (about 2 degrees) for the windscreen to stop misting up.
You’d expect the exhaust to heat up the cabin, but it doesn’t. It keeps the passengers feet warm, but that’s about it. I may re-route it under the drivers side to help out.

And don’t expect to drive on the motorway when it’s cold and wet. The spray kicked up by the wagons makes sure you can only drive at about 40 mph. I’ll be getting a multispeed wiper motor as soon as I can. And I need to fix the windscreen washers. I may have only knocked a wire off while rummaging around under there but it is restricting the use of the van.

Old cars. Don’t you just love em.

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The Friday Flick - 1981 Capri Ad

“It goes like s**t” says the advert. Or do they mean lightning? You decide….

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Yay! The hamster is back!!

Top Gear is to return to BBC2 on the 28th January with a complete team. Yes, Richard Hammond will be there too. That’s only a month and a half away.

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I’m still tuning…

…the van. I’ve managed to get what I think to be a pretty good map. It is a hell of a lot torquier than previously, so I reckon I’ve found some of the lost horses. It does feel about as quick as my Celica. Yesterday I was rushing back from Manchester to go to my daughters nativity play, when the motorway was closed due to an accident. I ended up going round the back roads to avoid the blockage. When I was coming up the slip road, a Saab was up my bumper on the roundabout. He moved to the outside lane to past me on the slip road, but I put my foot down and he wasn’t able to pass me. Either that or he wasn’t trying. But hey, I felt good!

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The Friday Flick - The Spa Historic Rally

Lots of old metal flying around in this short film.

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Wideband Tuning

I’ve spent the last week messing around with the megasquirt maps and wideband sensor trying to squeeze as much power out of the car as possible. Tuning with wideband is different to narrowband. The narrowband sensor can only return three conditions - Rich, lean and stoich. When tuning with megalogviewer, you can only tune it to stoich. That means you can’t automatically set it up to say ‘run at 12.5:1 air fuel mixture above 4000 rpm.’ With wideband you can. You set up a target AFT table and do some logging. Megalog viewer then analyses the voltage from the wideband, as that is an accurate reading of the mixture.

I reckon the van will need taking to a rolling road to be tuned properly, but in the meantime I have found some extra horses.

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The Friday Flick - Nescafe

Most of you will remember this advert from a couple of years ago. It’s the Nescafe advert with the Mk3 Cortina and afro

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