The road to Hell

... is paved, they say, with good intentions, and so it proved for me over the weekend.

It started well: it looked like some bits for attaching the clutch switch weren't going to turn up on time, but I was rudely awakened on Saturday by a knock at the door, which turned out to be the postman with the clutch switch. Glad I got up to answer it then.

Plumbing it in was relatively painless, surprisingly - I cut the braided clutch hose, following Peter's advice to use side-cutters, and then switching to a hacksaw when they proved ineffective (the hacksaw worked much better, though I recommend wrapping the hose in tape first to prevent fraying), and attached new end pieces to the cut ends, which, as they have not leaked so far, seem to be good. I cable-tied the switch into place (more on this later), and set about bleeding the clutch.

This went surprisingly badly: despite the reservoir having plenty of fluid in, nothing was coming through. In the end I gave up for the day.

On Sunday, Will came over and had a poke around the car for me. He pointed out that the gearbox switch was clearly going to fail IVA, because it caused the wires to rub against a panel, so after some deliberation we decided to chop the switch down with a hacksaw. Despite very limited access, we were mostly successful, although some work still remains to be done to insulate the wires which now occasionally touch and randomly light the reverse light.

He also pointed out that I could do a better job of mounting the clutch switch. This was clearly true, so with the best intentions, we made up a bracket to mount it onto, and tried to attach it. At this point I snapped off a bolt in the block and after much cursing, was unable to remove it.

Will left me to it at this point, but undeterred, I made up a new bracket which conveniently covered up the mess I'd made with the previous attempt, and got the clutch switch mounted in a much more satisfactory way.

Clutch switch bracket (attempt no. 2). Note cross-threaded banjo bolt.

Whilst tidying up, I noticed that the clutch hose was now a little twisted. Once again with good intentions, I detached it from the master cylinder, rotated the end by 180 to remove the kink, and reattached it... at which point I cross-threaded the bolt and damaged the thread in the master cylinder.

This evening, then, was spent removing the master cylinder to get decent access to it, running a tap down it, and reattaching it. Fortunately the repair process was painless and after a couple of hours, I had everything back in place, with the clutch properly bled, and the switch functioning properly.

Now that I no longer need access to this part of the car, I permanently fixed on the drivers-side front wing, and then the exhaust. It's looking very nearly ready for an MOT...

Nearly ready for MOT?

Edit: props to Emily for her brainwave when it came to fitting the exhaust. (Using a jack to raise the manifold up slightly made it a lot easier to get it on).