In celebration of it being “National Alloy Wheel and Brake Shoe Day” in Croatia yesterday, I thought it only fitting to get my arse in gear, get out to the garage and get the wheels finished up and onto the car If you recall, the old tyres on the steel wheels are 165/80/13s and the new ones are 205/60/13s. The difference in the width of the rubber can be seen…
“What a difference a day makes Twenty-four little hours Brought the sun and the flowers Where there used to be rain” Dinah Washington sang that back in 1959 and it came on the radio this afternoon whilst I was out in the garage. Of course, technically speaking, the second line should have gone something like “fourty-five and a quarter little hours” to be totally accurate, but I was willing to…
Highs and lows, eh Today’s certainly a low Re-jigged a load of stuff so I could spend all day out in the garage re-stripping the wheels after my first aborted attempt at painting earlier this week, cleaned them up, masked everything off, sprayed on some black and it’s just … well, shit would be one way of describing it. A less kind way might be to say that it’s very shit …
After a strange few week’s break, I’ve had the urge and the time to get back out into the garage This co-incided with the arrival of a set of “10GG” nuts from SpeedShack which are needed for my new wheels – 5/8″ sleeve nuts to fit an M12x1.5 stud. At £1.95 a nut though, if my retirement fund has a shortfall in a few years, I’m going into business making nuts and washers …
I couldn’t get my verniers inside the rim of the new wheels to measure the hole size, so Steve Law at Speedshack very kindly put a couple of second-hand ones in the post to me so that I could check for sure … they’re 5/8″ it turns out. Excellent service from Speedshack Now comes the question of refurbishing them I’m guessing that media blasting would be the quickest/simplest way of removing the old…
First up, I’ve been talking to Steve Law at Speedshack and apparently I need sleeve nuts, rather than longer studs and new nuts, so we’re just sorting out the right size So that it didn’t become one of those jobs I kept meaning to do, I’ve jacked the back up to remove the spring pads – given that nobody had a good word to say about them (not even “ooh, nice colour”) For completeness,…
It’s funny how one day you can be idly thinking about something in a “maybe one day” kind of way, and then a couple of days later the planets align and a deal drops into your lap I’d been browsing an old copy of Custom Car from the late 70s, devouring the adverts as much as the editorial content if I’m honest, and in amongst the stick-on murals, nudgebars and…
Rather annoyingly, I’ve just realised I never measured the drop from the top of the wheelarch to the floor before I started all this, so I can only really say “a bit lower”. The front springs are quoted as two inches lower than standard, whilst the single leaf rears had almost three inches less unsprung curvature and have currently got one and a half inch blocks on too. Against the tired old…
And so begins the second year of the project If I seem overly chuffed, it’s because I was worried I might get hacked off with it all early on and chuck in the towel after a couple of months – so to get this far is cause for celebration in my book But, you lot don’t want that – no, you lot want updates, pictures, questions, bizarre bodges and clearly signposted…