Yesterday was the big day. I put the car through it's MOT, I knew it would fail, but we wanted to know how much work was going to be needed.
There were a few surprises, and not necessarily bad ones either.
I thought the headlamps would fail, but they didn't, they didn't even need adjusting. So immediately I saved £200 on replacement units. Here's a list of the failures:
Exhaust not secured properly
No indicators
No windscreen washer
Brakes not efficient enough
Handbrake not connected
Fuel line not secured properly
No horn
Rear coil springs not correctly located
Hazard warning light switch faulty
Excessive corrosion to rear chassis offside and nearside
Basically, all pretty minor stuff except for the welding, which I anticipate will cost around £400. There is other welding work that isn't an MOT failure but I'll probably get dome at the same time. I honestly thought there would be far more serious problems, and as far as I'm concerned it's the next best thing to a pass. I'm over the moon about it.
Here's a quick picture taken of it on my drive. It's still really mind blowing to think that three months ago this car was in Michigan, and I was considering this whole project. Now it's here, has crossed an ocean and it looks more possible than ever that it really will make it to the Sierra Nevada Desert.
Updates on the MOT in the new year, but it's all pretty straight forward from here on in I hope.
Well, after a much longer wait than anticipated the car has arrived in the UK. It ended up taking about 5 weeks for it to cross, which was a real let down since we were originally told that it would take 2 weeks.
As many of you will know we've had some 'severe weather' conditions in the UK, this of course happened right at the time the car arrived on the cargo ship - and to add to the delayed crossing containers weren't able to be unloaded as there were no lorries able to make it to East Kent to put them onto. So the car remained entombed in it's container for a further week.
When it finally made it's way off the ship and into the storage warehouse I called the company who are keeping it for me to check weather it was OK to arrange for a vehicle transporter to collect it. They told me that the handbrake was stuck on and the two front tyres were flat. This meant I needed to drive 120 miles to sort out the problem before the delivery company would even consider picking it up. Normally this would have disappointed me, but actually I couldn't get down there fast enough, it was my excuse to see the car for the first time in the flesh.
Armed with tools and so forth I went down to see the car on Friday morning. After arriving at the docks and making our way to the warehouse in question we were told to wait at the entrance to be escorted to the vehicle. 5 minutes seemed like 5 hours as my brother and I waited patiently, the torture made worse due to the fact that I could see the tail end of the car poking out from behind a stack of crates. And then we finally saw it, it was an amazing feeling - I knew it was going to be big but it was even bigger than I imagined, it's 5.2 meters long, bumper to bumper. Here's a walk around video my brother managed to get.
I've purchased a number plate to go on the car when it finally gets registered, WGU 18E, as close to the original of WGU 18G as is possible to get which I'm pleased about. We also need: front and rear indicators, a passenger side mirror, replacement headlamps, windscreen washers and the handbrake reconnecting.
It would have been truer to say that the car had half flat tyres and the handbrake wasn't stuck, as I fired up the car and moved it back and forth a few feet with ease. I really had no problem with going down there though, as I said it was just the excuse I needed to go and take a look at the car. The engine sounds awesome, and led me to thinking that the car samples you can hear throughout the White Room and Chill Out may actually have been recorded by Jimmy from the original Ford Timelord.
Next step: car arrives at my house in a few days, and then it's off to get it MOT'd - nerve racking stuff as any UK car owner will confess, depending on how much (or little) there is to do will depend on how much I'm going to need to fork out on repairs to get it road legal.
Then it's all cosmetics, and once they're sorted out we're off to Spain.
All of a sudden the whole project seems to be more real. The car has arrived.
