Distance Average Speed Max Speed 49 km 15.9 km/h 26.9 km/h The day got off to a bad start! Last night I set my alarm clock to Finland time. Unfortunately, since it is radio controlled, some time during the night it set itself back to UK time so when it went off at 08:00, it was actually 10:00 in Finland! After a rather late breakfast I reviewed my maps with Timo. I say this every time I come, but I
Author: Dad
2022 Trip – Day 1
The moral of today’s story is never to rely on a bus to get you to an airport! After a reasonable night at a Heathrow hotel I gathered outside the front door at 0820 for the once per hour bus to the terminals. With a last check-in time of 0930 and a travel time of about 15 minutes this seemed just fine. However, by 0855 there was still no sign of the bus and the small group gathered to wait
Camera repaired – Again!!
Regular readers will recall that back in early 2020 my Pentax K50 DSLR developed the dreaded “aperture block” fault and that I repaired it by replacing the faulty electromagnet with one purchased on eBay. Readers may also recall that sadly this was a short lived repair and that the problem returned a little over a year later. Investigating the issue online, I came across this extremely useful post. The first half explains how to replace the magnet, which I already
Replacing the front top mounts on the Fiesta
Another year and another MOT for my old Fiesta. As usual, it failed and this time the problem was the front offside top mount which was apparently badly worn. I also got an advisory for the other three together with both front springs. With the weather being cold I decided to buy the parts for both sides of the front suspension but only fit the failed offside for now. Since I would have to remove the springs in order to
Blasted Golf door lock
It is often assumed, by those who don’t engage in car maintenance, that fixing the engine must be the most difficult task. However, in my experience the areas which give the greatest difficulty are either parts of the suspension which – being exposed to the road – become badly rusted or, worse of all, doors! The people who design engines organise for the thing to be held together with a sensible sequence of bolts which can be clearly seen and
Replacing the timing belts on the Golf
I couldn’t put it off any longer. The timing belt on my MkV Gold just had to be replaced. As it happens, this was nothing like as bad as I feared and certainly easier than on my Fiesta. The first task – and the most demanding – was to remove the crankshaft pulley in order to get the timing belt cover off. Of course, as usual this is tightened to a ridiculous torque. Surely there must be a better way
How I made a simple job much more difficult!
This is a tale of woe about a job in the Golf which should have been easy but for a variety of reasons (mostly my stupidity) turned out to be a complete nightmare! It all started with the approach of the MOT. I knew that there was a problem with the near side CV boot which would not get through the test so I bought a new one and set about replacing it. Various on-line videos show this task and
Quiz Test
Bigbury Day 6
Our last day in Bigbury-on-Sea. Due to “additional Covid cleaning measures” we were required to leave early on Saturday so instead we chose to pack up and leave after lunch today. With just the morning available and the weather remaining poor we chose to stay local and just go and have a look round Burgh Island. The tide was out so we didn’t need to use the sea tractor. The weather as we walked along the beach was grim with
Bigbury Day 5
We started the day with another windy walk along the beach, this time heading up-river. As usual, the rocks sea heavy seas had dug large depressions around the rocks. It was interesting to observe how much these differed from one day to the next. As we walked upstream there was more seaweed, presumably because the rocks are better protected from the heavy seas and this allowed some interesting rock pools to exist. We turned over a few rocks and found