Why can’t life ever be simple? Harald was supposed to go back on the truck and the truck decided to throw a wobbly with its electrics…Ivan came in on a day off to start sorting it but has not been able to get back because HIS car has thrown a major electrical fault (oh, and just to cap it all my area had a complete loss of electricity last night).

So Harald went back in fine style on Gary's breakdown lorry.

Bob and Laddie's blocks and camshafts were collected from London. Gary has been working on Bob's engine all day. The initial clean took out some of the dirty oil deposits of then Gary took the liners out and then cleaned the whole interior of the block.

As always there are heavy rusty deposit in the water jacket and particular attention needs to be paid to the rim where the spectacle gaskets sit and the areas where the liner seats. Failure to do this leads to problems later.

Spectacle gaskets (a pair of which sit under the rim on the liner) are usually metal (either copper [our preference] or aluminium but the gaskets which came off Bob were a papery composite which is very unusual.