Wow, what a weekend. Hold on, because I just noticed this is by and large my longest blog-post to so far (or, I managed to keep my typing under control so far). Sorry, and congratulations to you in advance if you make it to the end.
It started all on friday evening. For the past few weeks, we have been
working on the dashboard from Demelza's Mini. It was a standard burr
walnut MPi deal. Pretty nice, most would say. Not this one, though...
As you may or may not know, MPi dashes have a lining around them, which
is supposed to look nice and is made of somekind of spongy fabric,
which is great for retaining water which has found its way inside (hey,
it's a Mini, it will
start to leak at some point in time). Due to this stuff and an
inevitable leak, the dash had developed a pretty nasty case of water
staining; the water had made its way in between the gloss finish and
the wood, leaving horrible yellowy staines (see the pictures on this site to see what I mean, or have a look at the bottom edge of any MPi dash; most have it, to some extent).
As you can see from the pictures, Demelza's dash was pretty bad. In
addition to this, some idiot had drilled holes in the dash at some
point in the past, presumaby to screw on whatever bracket for whatever
personal gadget. In short, the once so magnificent wallnut dash was in
a pretty sorry state.
So, the idea was born to actually sand it down, fill up the holes with
filler, and have it spray painted in the colour of the car. A few weeks
ago we removed the dash from the car and replaced the clocks by an old
set from a 80's Mini (didn't work well, but it worked a little), and
Demelza sanded the dash in her spare time. Last week we took it to the
spray painter (who had to repaint it three times before he got it
right, wood is quite something different than sheet metal) and this
friday, it was finished! We spent friday evening assembling all parts
back onto the dash, and saturday morning fitting it to the car. For
pictures of the whole process, have a look at the relevant section of this site. Here's for a view of the end result.
[Picture temporarily unavailable]
Pretty sexy, isn't it?
After fitting the dash, we went on to a problem on my white Cooper; the
left windscreen whiper had quite suddenly stopped making it all the way
to the left of the wind screen. I guessed (hoped is more the word,
really) that something had shifted, and it was a simple matter of
taking of the wiper and putting it back on at a different angle. A test
wipe quickly shattered that hope; the wipers both stayed where they
were, while the wipermotor was desperately trying to move them, by the
sound of things. This screwed the plans for the weekend up quite a bit,
as I was to accompany Demelza and Jane (her white shepherd dog) to an
agility competition on sunday. We decided to continue the work on
sunday morning, and it turned out the whiper cable had broken right at
the joint inside the motor mechanism. My dad is getting a new cable
tomorrow, so hopefully it can then be fixed. And I still had time to go
and have a look at the agility contest in Wormerveer. The team didn't
do too bad, with 16th place overall out of 20. Not bad for a team of
all beginners.
Back to saturday, however, because I haven't covered an important part
of that yet; the evening. We went to the DoDa-rit, a rally for Mini's
organised by the Mini Club Brabant and the Mini Seven Club Nederland.
First stop was Waalwijk to visit Marloes and Marco. Bertina and Freddie
were already there, and after some chatting and admiring Demelza's new
dash we went off to Drimmelen with three Mini's. It was a great rally,
but time was a bit tight, so we had to cut it short to arrive within
time (we needed 24 of the allowed 30 minutes slack, which got us 24
penalty points in addition to the inevitable ones we would have picked
up during the rally itself). We didn't do too bad, we reckoned, but we
didn't finish the entire drive, so we guessed we'd be somewhere midway
in the endresult. Using an answer sheet, I found we had a penalty score
of 174 in total (if I did all the math correctly).
Well, turned out we weren't the only ones who didn't have enough time
and had to cut it short. Eight teams out of 76 (is that a record for
the club?) were disqualified for arriving outside the time, 68th place
started with penalty scores somewhere in the upper regions of 700. So
174 didn't look too shabby, all of a sudden. 40 arrived, with still 408
points left. 20, wow, upper quarter. Tenth place managed to get there
with 267 points. I probably didn't do the math correctly and they
forgot to qualify us. Well, to cut a long story short, it turned out
that our 174 penalty points overall (yes, I did do the math correctly
after all) were still good for first place! My second win, and
Demelza's first. Happy, happy, joy, joy! For the entire end result, have a look at the site of the Mini Seven Club Nederland.
Wow, what a weekend.