... to see how my New Year's resolutions play out. These determinations are no more than agreeable undertakings that I have no obligation to uphold - which is just as well because I will have forgotten them by Twelfth Night.

For the New Year's Day gathering at Hawkedon in Suffolk, my car of the month was this Lancia. There were several other beauties present, but the understatement of this model tipped the balance. The Italians always got their body styling weighed off in the Olden Days.

Unfortunate news from Mr Larken - you may remember his experiment to up the compression ratio on his 6/80 engine which saw these additional blocks screwed to the piston crowns.

Regrettably, one of the blocks let go. It may have been the unavailability at the time of aluminium machine screws of a suitable grade.

Whatever it was, it certainly made a mess of things. Mr Larken reports that the performance enhancement was in any case minimal, so the other five plates will be removed.

In other performance news, this is the new setup on Leon's A7 Special - a pair of Amals. Next stop, Mikuni's?

On the subject of air intake, a chum related a story of having to rebuild an Aston Martin engine three times because grit kept working its way into the mains and big ends. It wasn't until someone realised that the intake manifolds had been sandblasted that the penny dropped. The media had been lodged in crevices in the castings and, dislodged when the engine was running, quickly made its way into the bearings.

With this in mind, I dismantled the MS air cleaner by filing off the top of the crimp which holds the end cap on.

And I'm glad I did.

Welding it back together again was a bit tricky, but with patience and care, it was a successful operation.

Staying with air, I tacked the windscreen demisting vents onto the scuttle...

... and rivetted together the cabin air box after turning up in PVC the outlets for the vents.

Here's the beginnings of the magneto charger. It's taken a bit of time because I had to find a scrap source for the base plate before getting Chumley to clean it all up and turn up the cores.

There's plenty on the web about how people have made these re-magtnetisers, but all the descriptions assume a level of electrickery knowhow that I don't possess. Awkward came up with a couple of coils of wire and a plan to test the theory. As I said, it'll be interesting.