It's possible with people

You know, when I take peoples computers apart, I never really give two thoughts about it. When I saw Emiah (my Escort) up on the ramps without her engine, though, it gave me a shock.


On the floor, the new, second hand, engine to go inside her.


Those are the feet of Ash, the bloke in Colchester who, along with a few other people, changed the engine out.

Somehow, when you see parts of your car resting against walls and sitting outside on the floor, your heart sort of ... sinks, because you KNOW that somehow, once all this is bolted back together ... there are going to be screws left over.


It then came the turn of Kat Maul and THE Loopy Lemur to take Emiah to the Blue Lemur works and do both her outer sills, (repairing the inner sills as missing bits of metal were found to be ... um ... missing) the cat, one of the hub carriers, the body work and, um, all sorts of other stuff. I lost track and all I could do was make the tea.

This is Kat Maul doing what she loves best ... hitting things with hammers. In this case, a piece of metal to connect the right hand wing with somewhere on the main body.


As Escorts are famous rust buckets, some of the metal work had to be taken back to ... um .. air ... and then filled. Trust me, after it was sanded down and spray painted, it looks cool! Well, cool enough to get us through an MOT and a lot cooler than the jaggedy rust colour that it was before.

Plus the big gap on the right had to be filled after some stupid bint in a Binny (BMW mini, not an Austin mini) pulled off being parked on double yellow lines and decided to take a good chunk of the rust away.


So, all in all, a massive amount of work has been done on the Escort, in cold, winter conditions, to get her through the MOT and hopefully more reliable. There is yet more work scheduled to be done in the summer, like replacing the wheel arches with new panels and re-doing some of the paint work and stuff.

With luck, Emiah will be kept out of the great scrap heap in the sky, for some years to come. It's a shame that my defibrillator won't work on her. Ah well.

It is at times like this that friends really are worth their weight in gold. There was no way I could afford to get myself in debt for another car. The house has just leached everything from me since we moved in. When people thank me for nipping round and sorting their computers out, it is one thing. When people get mucky, messy and work bloody hard in the wind, rain and all the rest of it ... the words, "thank you," just don't seem enough; but they're all I've got. So ... Kat, Lemur ... Thank You.

Party at Kat's place ... when the credit card trips over :-)

And if we needed an extra hoof, we asked the neighbouring Lamas. I ain't kidding; these guys know how to weld.