It’s time to get the car ready for the next outing, so I spent a good while cleaning all the gravel out, of which there’s a goodly amount. Mind you, nothing like the amount that was in the car when I stuck in the gravel trap at Redgate a couple of years ago.
This is where making all the various undertrays removal saves such a lot of time as it didn’t really take too much time cleaning all this out.
After that I started doing something that I’ve been meaning to do for some time. After I burnt out the car I was left with an old engine that was externally knackered, on account of the fact that it’d been pummelled by a prop shaft, but had a good chance of having various decent internals. In particular the gearbox always worked well. As it seems as if the current one is starting to jump out of gear more and more it seemed like a decent idea to liberate what could be grabbed from the old engine.
So, I started stripping it down until I got to the point where the block was separated. (The blade engine’s block is in two halves which you need to separate to get access to the gearbox. Later model blades have a “cassette” gearbox which is must easier to remove, apparently.)
Once I got there it does look pretty decent, although I haven’t had time to inspect the dogs ultra carefully, which is where these gearboxes always fall down. If something still appears wrong with the engine once I’ve done the Anglesey meeting I’ll take the engine up to Andy and also give him this gearbox to see what he can do with it. I did wonder that if the engine worked all right whether I could make one decent blade engine out of the various bits that I’ve got. I shall talk to Andy about that at some point.