Lemons

 Sometimes life / universe throws lemons at you.  So what do you do?

Stand up straight and accept a lemon or two to the head / leg / knee-cap and move on with life, or, curl up into a ball get lemon juice squashed all over you?

No, I have no idea what or why I'm talking about lemons either.

What I wanted to post was that I had a mechanical failure occur in my (very expensive) custom car.  It did not "look" like a lot of damage, but as with most things in life, looks can be deceiving....  The infamous quote of, "it could have been worse" is not helpful and for an analytical brain that goes off pondering all of the potential outcomes of actions, this is really not helpful at all.

Here's a photo of the aforementioned car on a recovery truck (that I REALLY want to purchase!), as you can see it is awesome on so many levels, not only can you load one vehicle onto it, you can load another one underneath...... OR, you can hoist one vehicle up in the air and do inspection / maintenance work underneath the car - all from the back of the truck.  Okay, so it might be a little bit excessive spending 250k on a truck like this, but it was a nice thought.  It distracted me from the reality of acceptance.

Acceptance of?  well, acceptance of accepting that in a 4-5 second period of time, a combination of seemingly un-connected but ultimately related actions occurred culminating in an event that is now going to cost me about £20,000+ to rectify.  yep.  I hear you say, "but it looks okay in the photo?".  I deliberately didn't take a photo of the other side!  

How / Why so much? Well....imagine if you will, that entire rear quarter panel from the door backwards is no longer straight....doesn't sound like much of an issue.  Except it is.  It bends inwards towards the boot.  Which in itself is crunched and caved in.  Therefore it'll need stripping back to bare metal.  The metal will need heating / hammering / shaping with expert precision to not affect the roof / rear window alignment and then the rear wing / light cluster area will need rebuilding and the rear bumper section will need re-making.  Then once all of that is done.... a very skilled and professional painter will have the mammoth task of prepping and then painting and blending the paint of the rear quarter panel, the boot and all associated areas so that the car won't look like it is two different colours.  You can see how that now add up to quite a lot of money.

But, hang on... didn't I say, "mechanical failure" earlier? There is no mention of that above only cosmetic repairs.....yep.  The Borg Warner 65 automatic gearbox has now got to come out.  I did ponder getting it examined and potentially fixed, but I've decided that I don't trust it anymore.  It's going "in the bin"

I do have an old LT77 Rover P6 gearbox in the back of the garage, time to get it out and get it reconditioned and upgraded to a 5-speed.  I'll have to purchase the new S380 gearbox section, then that'll have to be fitted by the experts.  But, that then means that I'll need a new prop-shaft to be custom made and whilst we're doing that I might as well get the 3.09 diff. fitted as well.... seeing as the manual gearbox will also require new foot pedals (as it'll now have a clutch), I may as well replace the brake master cylinder with a beefier version along with upgraded brake discs and callipers.... ah, now it starts to make sense how the cost for parts & time / effort will push this into the £20k+ range.

.Sigh. 

Obviously, my missus has said to just put the car:

Torch it, burn it, kill it with fire, etc..etc...

But, I'm going to give it one more chance....The work cannot start until Feb 2022, so that gives me enough time to go tea-total and not eat any take-aways for 6months (might do my health some good) so that I can save up the extra pennies required to get the car back on the road.

What this ultimately means is...... now I'm going going to be doing CAR stuff, I can get back to doing GEEKY technology based things and with a clear head and lots of LEMON(ade) juice to hand, I can finally get my ar$e into gear and start making the robots that I've been promising myself that I'll build.

(yeah, it does look a little creepy!  Where's the kill switch?!)

Clouds and silver linings and all that.