Being a house-proud sort I gave the car a good clean and as the black PVC seats were a bit shabby I looked around my "Car Care" shelf in the garage and lighted upon some CarPlan "Original Black".
It's a spray which brightens up the trim.
Looks lovely
I went to get into the car and slid straight off, onto the floor. Wow! It was slippery!
Hmm. It seems the spray has a silicone-based finish. How to resolve it?
I tried white spirit, Swarfega and Fairy Liquid. No good.
After asking on a forum I follow, someone suggested a silicone remover (why didn't I think of that?) so I got some from the local Build Centre and rubbed it on, left it for 2 hours and wiped it off.
Result! Back to a grippy seat and backrest.
Ian will be well pleased. We went for a trickle around a friend's fellside farm during the week and the slippery seat was a major problem, not least because Ian slid downhill onto me most of the time.
However the good news was that the new, stiffer, spring on Ian's side had really firmed-up the car. I had put 2 clicks on the Spax shocker, but that seemed too firm so I wound that off. A cable-tie around the shocker push rod showed that the car had bottomed a few times, but it didn't seem to be a problem like it was before.
The farm isn't really much of a test as, whilst it has 750 acres of mainly steep fell, it has a huge number of rocks in amongst the grass and bracken so setting a test hill is tricky. Another problem was that there was so much grip with the grass being dry and unused that we couldn't find a hill to defeat us.
This bit of video of the approach to the test area is one of those disappointing films that doesn't look as steep as it was. The bit where I'm driving through the gate is so steep you can hardly walk up to the gate.
We tried an area lower down and found a couple of spots we could use, but not enough to form any proper opinions. People do say it's only worth trying things out actually on an event, as that is the only place you will find the sort of conditions that matter. The funny thing was when we went searching for some good land along a pasture area and the sheep (mainly Herdwick) thought we had brought lunch.
Later in the video a pheasant joins in the chase.
We also identified that whilst the fiddle brakes do work, I am not pulling them hard enough to lock the wheel for a quick spin on the spot. I think this is due to the knob on the lever only being big enough to hook one finger on properly. So I've extended the knob by about 1/2" (no bloody metric here) to see if two fingers does the trick. As long as I pull hard enough.
This pic shows the original on the right and the modified one on the left...
I have done them both of course....
Using my new bead breaker I've had the tyres off the rims and stripped the paint and rust back. I've spray painted the rims and done the centres in gold to try and make the car look a bit more "classy"
So this Sunday we try all this out.
We missed the early March one as Ian was in Germany and the late March one was snowed off.
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