Update and August Meet

Well, that's a month gone by. And to be honest it was a month of not driving. This was mainly due to allowing my partially severed finger to heal!

The next thing I knew it was the third Sunday of the Month and time for our North East Area Group Meet. This time I had selected a route that covered most of the Historic Lead Mining Areas of the North East. The route is shown below, click on the image for more details:

Having been promised a decent forecast by the Met office, on Sunday the weather turned out to be poor. As a result only myself and John with his sumo turned out. We then proceeded to get wet for a few hours! In hindsight visiting the highest market town in England (Alston) when the weather was bad was probably not a good idea. However, I did discover that you could open the boot, sit inside and eat your sandwiches in relatively dry comfort!

Here is the only photo of the day taken in Alston, we only stopped 'cos I was desperate for the toilet!

Have a close look at the Estate Agents sign..... somewhat appropriate.... even if it was a fluke. The route was definitely a good one, but was spoilt by the weather.

My finger troubles have also kept me out of the garage. I still have some more work to do on fine tuning the suspension. I know GD will do it for free, but at the moment I still want to try and get to grips with it myself, thereby getting a better understanding of "cause and effect" and ultimately (hopefully) reaching a better understanding of how my car handles.

At the moment I'm thinking of adding an anti-roll bar to the front. I omitted this in the build as the consensus was that it would not be needed for mainly road driving. However the more I get used to the car the more I seem to chuck it around - my only way of controlling body roll at the moment is by increasing the effect of the dampers, but this in itself has some drawbacks to overall ride quality. The levels of grip available on tight corners have been resulting in some contact between the tyres and front arches. I also think that the front springs have settled a bit more and need to be adjusted.

Hopefully I can fit in some tinkering time in the garage in the not too distant future.

Watch this space.........