...because the radiator mount is in the chassis as I promised myself it would be by the end of the weekend. There was a moment when I thought it would be a good idea to bolt it in - I didn't think it would come loose and it would be useful to pull the engine out forwards - but good sense prevailed. With a chassis that tapers to the front, I'm not going to be able to get the radiator mount out without taking the front engine mount out first and for that I'd have to remove the engine and to do that......... It was a nice idea though.

And with the radiator shell...

To remove the old radiator mount it was just a question of grinding off the rivet heads and punching the rest through the hole. Well, that took 2 of us all morning. There was 16 rivets in all and each one of them didn't want to come out and they weren't rusted in either. I borrowed a very big hammer.

The day before, Cleverchap came round to look at the white metalling on the 7 big ends. (I called them shells in an earlier post but I meant white metal - I knew that; I did, oh yes). During the sucking of teeth, I mentioned about the Morris gearbox and how I was having to convert the motion of the 2 levers on the side of the box into a conventional gate arrangement. Well, Cleverchap was on it straight away, solved the snags in a few sentences and put forward a brilliant scheme which has inspired me to open up a box again and revisit the action.

I'm not sure I was concentrating the last time I tried to work out what was what but, this  time I sellotaped a pencil to the input shaft so I could  see how far the pencil moved for one revolution of the output shaft and thus calculate the sequence of the gears and note the positions of the 2 levers.

Now all I have to do is convert this to a gate change and having been given a good plan to start with, I feel a model coming on. I like to build a model. I made one before I built the Austin,

and one for when I was going to put the gearlever outside the body - until I realised that it would get in a muddle with the spare wheel:

Cleverchap has suggested that I could use one lever on one side of the box for the shifter and the other on the other side of the box for the selector. And don't use cables - remember the Maxi, he intoned. Oh, alright then. The gate will be centrally located for trouser safety (though the handbrake may still catch the unwary. No it won't, there's not going to be a driver's door).