So an eventful 'Freedom Week', typified by the relaxation and removal of various legal obligations, and such hot weather that it was hard to concentrate on anything anyway. Work on the Aston Martin book proceeded slowly, and I went to visit a serial Aston Collector to interview him and photograph his cars. His collection was mostly modernish cars - a V12 Vantage S from 2017, a 2005 Vanquish S, 1998 V600 along with a Cygnet and a 1982 Tickford Metro! Eclectic or what?
Here are his V600 and Cygnet together - an intersting contrast!
Otherwise its been a spot of writing on the book - sorting out some details in my nearly complete chapters and writing up my recent visits.
As a future event I've booked the better half and me into the Brooklands meet on August 7th which is celebrating 'Brooklands Relived' with displays and demonstrations of the cars and bikes that competed at Brooklands - so it should be good.
The Lotus is progressing as well. I've spent some time labelling the engine bay loom, and today spent a couple of hours working out how it all fits in under the bonnet. It sounds as it if should be simple but it isn't. An example - the wiper motor is connected using a simple and unique five pin plug, which was on the new loom and slotted straight in.
But it wasn't where I expected it to be, which was close to the bundle of wires which enter the engine bay. Hunting around for it, I discovered it at the other end of the loom, on a long spur coming out of the loom between the front lights. It was then I twigged that the wiper motor must be on the other side of the bay for left hand drive cars and Lotus didn't want two different looms so in this case the wires can reach either side of the engine bay. Simple when you realise, but a bit confusing! Once fitted the rest of the loom could be laid out roughly in place, and then I fitted the connectors to the horn relay - again these were the only wires with screw on connectors and again helped to settle the loom in the correct routing.
One thing I've learned is to untangle the wires before fitting anything - well worth making sure that the connectors have a straight run to their terminals as it saves having to disconnect things to untangle them later.
Another job was to remove the existing non standard and slightly odd fuse box. I'll replace it with a modern simple multi blade fuse unit, but will have to do a spot of glass fibre work to fill in the large hole that the unit left. Here's the old fuse box before I removed it, leaving the ruddy great hole visible in the picture of the wipe motor above!
Its amazing how much extra work a relatively simple job can result in - but if you don't have a sense of humour don't buy a Lotus! So to finish off heres a couple of pictures of the DB9 out and about to cheer everyone up.
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