Fitting the CB

* With thanks to my wonderful boyfriend, Tom, for doing most of the work here while I made dinner! *

Just we did like in Scarlett, we decided to fit a CB radio into Poppy. It was fairly easy with Scarlett so we thought it'd be just the same this time 'round. How wrong we were...

Unlike in the Mk2, the MK1 radio mount is fiddly and in an extra hole in the boot so, while swapping the aerials round wasn't too bad (just watch your paintwork!), screwing the aerial cable on to the base of the aerial was a bloody nightmare. In the end, my little fingers came in handy in doing this bit but it still took us a good 15 minutes!

That done, we attempted to remove the radio/clock cubby and radio to have a look behind and swap in the CB etc. Sounds simple, right? Yeah...or not. Firstly, whoever had the car previously and fitted the remote locking had glued the clock cubby back in and that was, frankly, just a state. Secondly, as photos to be uploaded soon will show, we got the clock out and...wow. Well, I've never seen wires THAT messy. Tom was pretty worried about the safety, too. There was a ridiculously long, curled up, cable in the space too - I'd found a disconnected end of a cable in the boot that didn't seem to go anywhere after my MOT anyhow and we'd not been able to work out what it did. It did, it seems, nothing as it connected to the metre of cabling behind the radio that ended in yet another unconnected connecter. Er, what? Tom reckons it was once a CD changer but was now a complete waste of good space. Took the wire cutters to it, anyhow, and successfully removed 2 metres of utterly pointless cable. Weight and space saving too!

The black box confused us for a while - transpires that's the immobiliser. For anyone wondering, it seems that disconnecting the immobiliser from its cabling to fiddle around behind the radio is perfectly safe and the car will still start after! Nonetheless, with that in the way, the CB was never going to go in so I left Tom trying to move all that to the back in the spaces while I got on with dinner.

A little later, when I wandered outside to check, it transpired that the radio was pretty much jammed in, too, so we spent 10 minutes or so fiddling around with screwdrivers trying to press down the metal spokes on the side to get that out - eventual success (though putting it back in later was as much of a hassle again!). It also transpired, with all these bits out and the wiring tidied a little (Tom wants to put some real work into that but last night wasn't the time and we didn't have all the equipment we needed), that my CB has the aerial cable coming straight out of the middle. This is fine. Except that my car has a metal brace straight down the middle of the radio slot - that's going to need a bloody big hole drilled in it! CB doesn't quite fill up the hole either, although, admittedly, neither did the clock cubby: I suspect that this was why it had been glued in.

Not to worry - we still need to order a new Mic for mine as we only had one lying around the house. Possibly with a couple of adjustable/angled aerial mounts - both on the MX-5s are off at a slightly jaunty angle! So...lots to do, but we're getting there :-) Having a CB in the car should be a laugh, especially as Tom and I are planning a cross-Europe road trip in September with both cars and a couple of friends. Fun fun!

Powered by Badgers...

So, Poppy is now powered by Badgers. As it happens, Tom doesn't believe in Badgers (whole different story...) so, when I saw Badger stickers at Hippy Motors, I just had to get some for my car!


Apparently, her name is Andrea the Rocket Badger. She's rather loud. My car is not.
I may have also found a cute spider (his name is Boris)...

Fixed!

After last week, when I wrote about Poppy's MOT fail, it became pretty clear that she needed some work on her. Admittedly, this was mostly because the MOT tester told me so...but nonetheless it made me realise that I hadn't been giving her enough love of late. I said before that I have two loves in my life - Tom and Poppy. Of late, only one has had the attention they deserve! That won't change but we will both be spending some more time with my car, I think.

So, she got her coil springs, shock boot and track rod end boots done last week, plus MOT retest, for a total of £345. Not as cheap as I'd hoped but there we go. Needs must. Tom wasn't up for doing the coil springs and I have no idea where to start (we will learn for Bluey's sake but I needed my car back asap!) so bit the bullet and paid a very friendly mechanic in Newbury, Carl Day, to do it all for me. £345 all in could have been a hell of a lot worse. After all, he doesn't make enough to charge VAT, which brought the price down! It was all done at Dallas Autos in Newbury.

So, on Friday evening, I heard that she was all done and MOT'd, and we picked her up on Saturday morning. She's sitting a lot better now and is a much happier car. I was just happy to have her back after 5 days of not driving!




By the by, Tom brought me a "stress ball" style ninja back from InfoSec last week. Frickin' awesome! *sneaks in a ninja-y way*

(I suck at sneaking. Seriously)

It was all going so well...

So, yesterday,  Poppy went in for her MOT. I wasn't massively hopeful as she does have a crack in her windscreen (oh, ok, two!) but I wasn't expecting how badly she was going to fail.

It transpires that she has a cracked rear coil spring, so really needs both of those doing, as well as the boots on both track rod ends and the o/s front upper suspension boot being dead. Not ideal and three fails on the MOT, not including a whole host of corrosion-related advisories (hey, she's 23 yrs old, what can you expect?). So she's going in to be fixed by a nice local mechanic on Friday (MOT runs out tomorrow) before a retest. Poor little lamb!

Poppy's curious structural integrity aside, it's a bit of a blow to the bank balance - £345 in total inc. parts and labour, which is a damn sight better than the £700 quoted by another mechanic, but nonetheless not ideal. Oh well, at least that'll be coil springs and boots done for a few years I suppose :-)