The wind blows hot & cold...

Whilst driving the Mustang to town on Saturday I noticed a strangely familiar odour, not noticed since the passing of the Morris Minor.

"What's that smell?" asked my wife.
"Um, that's anti-freeze".

Yup, most of the coolant was pouring from a small hole in the bulkhead. It looks like Mr Ford thought about this - and duly designed a drain hole for coolant leaking from the heater core to exit into the engine bay rather than onto the carpets. Now, personally, I would have preferred them to have a) Designed a stronger heater core and b) Made it easier to get to.

Let me explain how Ford build Fox Mustangs. They sweep out a big room and place a V8 engine in the middle and place a heater matrix beside it.

Then they build the rest of the car around them both...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The delivery extension for this subscription could not be loaded" when using SSRS

Image
OK, so we upgraded our server farm and put on the latest "stuff" (SSRS, SQL Server etc.) and the engineers gave me two servers to play with - SQL01 & SQL02. The idea being that we used high availability to help keep the factory running. We employed a contractor to load up and configure everything. At this point I wasn't involved. My involvement was to move all the reports and subscriptions from the old servers to the new ones once the servers had been configured. All went swimmingly, until I actually started to fire off the subscriptions to test them. Randomly (like 5 out of 10) I got the error in the title. I would edit the failing subscription and/or change the schedule time and it would work. I finally got around to moving 81 subscriptions for the same report (all slightly different parameters going to about 6 different engineers). I press the "go" button and every single one failed. Let's cut out the long story about how I went through about...
Read more

Oooh, look, an Eagle...

Image
The Scottish Holiday . After the trauma of the Astra-breakdown episode and the gutless hirecar, we'd recovered sufficiently to begin to enjoy the rest of our holiday with our friends at the Castle... Chapter Seven: One of the things my wife really wanted to see was a seal, or seals if she was really lucky. So we decided to take a day out and around the Mull Of Kintyre. We stopped at "St Columba's Footprints" and carefully studied the jumbled collection of rocks and seaweed. "No seals there dear, let's carry on" "Oh, alright then, never mind. But that's where we were told they are most likely to be." We drove on and took a gated road signposted " To The Lighthouse ". This took us right up into the hills. As we were driving slowly along admiring the view, my wife whispered quietly... " Ooh, look an Eagle! " "Stop that, that's not funny." "No, really. Stop the car." ...
Read more

What else could possibly go wrong?

So. I got the new radiator hoses from Vauxhall at a stupid £45 for the two and fitted them the weekend before we were due to go away on our Touring-Trip-Of-Scotland. I used this as an excuse to get out of helping with my sister-in-law's 50th birthday party. "But, I need to make sure the car is OK for next week dear!" "OK, I'll take the smart, and woe betide you if you're late for the party!" The Astra is now in bits and has no water in it. It is 6 minutes to 12 o'clock on a Saturday morning. I know this. For some bizarre reason, I decided to test the tightness of the -ve battery terminal by gently shaking the clamp. It was loose. "Ah, I wonder if this is the cause of it cutting out last week?" I took a 10mm spanner and gently tweaked up the bolt. The lead post (as in led, not leed) offered no resistance and gracefully detached itself in its entirety from the battery, the terminal now firmly bolted to the -ve lead (as in le...
Read more