I didn't bother with the Skyline all week. I hate having ghettoed fingers at work, and the particular type of grease that seems to cover the engine bay of the car is particularly persistent. It's also as I'm mindful of my neighbours, not that the sound of it running might upset them or anything. Mostly its that they might take it as an opportunity to strike up a conversation.

When Friday rolled around I pulled the battery off the charger, hooked up the terminals, topped up fluids and turned the key. It came to life in that symphony of tappets that tells the story of a car that's not been started in a month. Almost immediately there was a crack and the sound of grinding. Uh oh.



I figured the worst, but as it turns out all that had happened was that I had forgotten to put the nuts back on after I removed the engine fan which meant that the fan belt pulley (which also drives the alternator) had come off and had dragged on the water pump housing for a bit. Whoops.

With the hard work done, I went off and had a well deserved Friday afternoon beer.

The next morning I got a sms from Thompson who was attempting to replace his exhaust manifold gasket. He mentioned free beers, and in the spirit of sharing his beers I headed over. As it turns out Nissan had sold him the wrong studs, they looked like the outer studs in the manifold (to hold the turbo on) rather than the head studs. As he worked and I drank, we discussed what we thought of Internet People the first time we met them. The whole thing seemed to boil down to "I thought he was a knob online, then I met him in Real Life and he was an alright bloke, then I got to know him and it turns out he is a knob."

Eventually Thompson managed to get his turbo and exhaust manifold off (in 7 less blog posts than Matty D to boot), but it wasn't all smooth sailing. Half of the head studs were loose, and when they came out so did half the thread. Some had been cross-threaded, or possibly they were the wrong thread pitch. Either way, it wasn't going to be a fun job to fix. I suggested he tap out an oversized thread and use bigger studs, although heli-coils might do the job. I've never used them myself, though, I've seen them used for spark plug threads before on old engines with softened alloy heads. A bigger stud would reduce the chance of them snapping in the future, maybe. I don't know. Whoever reinstalled the head previously did a shitty job of it that's for sure. Forget mechanics, I'd rather blame myself for dodgy work than pay someone to do it. With that and with Thompson in tears at the thought of having to spend the next week or two riding a bus, I went home.

The next day I reattached the water pump pulley, and was going to take the car out of the garage for a few photos. Annoying the clutch pedal went to the floor, but it does that just about every time I don't drive it for more than a couple of weeks. It came good after a few pumps, but there's no fluid being lost anywhere, so its a mystery to me why its doing it. Another problem was that in the process of removing the A/C radiator I had to disconnect a whole bunch of lines. I figured they were all related to the A/C, but stupidly one was the part of the power-steering. So when I started the car it shot ATF across the garage in a comical spasmodic ejection. It made such a mess. As it turns out, I disconnected two lines that form a pointless loop in the power-steering system. Well I say pointless, I presume its supposed to be a simple heat exchanger, but it doesn't look like it'd do much. I probably should have paid a touch more attention when I was ripping things out.

I ended up throwing on a piece of clear PVC pipe I had laying around. It actually looked kinda cool with the oil flowing through it, but I'm pretty sure would fail under any kind of pressure. I'm thinking I'll hook up one of those transmission coolers instead, as I think the old man has one laying around somewhere. It'll serve no purpose at all, but it'll look like it does and radiators do serve a as a handy crumple zone.

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