Seven - The magic number

 I've bought a fair few tools and bits and pieces for this project. So far, I have pretty much only been working on the donor car, so have used hammers, breaker bars, my socket set, spanners, pliers.... and so on. All useful and expected. The one thing I didn't buy up front but very quickly decided to invest in was this. Seriously - if you are breaking a donor car, just buy one. It will save you HOURS, possibly even days of sweat and tears, skinned knuckles, swearing, aching muscles, and ruined tools (oh, and get an inexpensive set of impact sockets as well - regular sockets can explode with the amount of force it generates. If you are breaking an MX5 - get a set that goes up to 32mm. You'll realise why when you come to the rear hub nuts). It's a 1/2 inch impact wrench and it's a beast for removing rusted up, over torqued, stuck nuts and bolts. Garages have even more extreme pneumatic versions but the 18V battery versions are perfect for the home hobbyist. All my 18...

 So - after the excitement of the donor arriving at the weekend, the really exciting bit finally happened and the kit arrived today!  While we had a few problems with the courier for the donor, the courier for the kit was flawless. He picked up in Essex at 8 am and dropped with me in Stirling at 3.10 pm! As I was in the middle of my working day I literally helped unload into the garage then went back to work and left it like this: I then had to do the obligatory thumbs up shot for MK which looked like this: I was a bit worried that it was going to be far too tight in the garage but all those boxes in the background are mostly full of body panels which have been relegated to the shed for a while. Once I had it unpacked, everything moved around and sorted out, it looked like this: Much better! And I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have already sat in the drivers seat and made brrrm brrrm noises. I'm pretty excited - all the kit looks nice - a few of the bits and pieces ar...

 Big week! First - after a few false starts and a bit of an issue with the courier, the donor arrived. True to his word, the person I bought it off has done a lot of the stripping of it and its down to the important bits I guess! As I write this it looks like this: Except a lot wetter (it's chucked it down all day). That doesn't really matter - I managed to pull out the steering column before i finished, as well as the propshaft which are two of the critical bits I need to get off to MK to be modified. The rest is going for scrap anyway once I have the big greasy bits that I need. So, the order of work next is: Try to get the rear hubs off. I've splashed out on a nut gun to go with the rest of my Ryobi stuff - everyone tells me it will make stripping the rest of the car a piece of cake. I hope so - those nuts had two of us hanging off a big piece of scaffolding and did NOT want to move. As soon as i get the hub nuts off, I can quite quickly get a load of other things out: r...

I've spoken to MK and Neil is doing his best to get my kit shipped up in a covid friendly way. The normal way to acquire your kit is hire a van, drive to Essex and pick it up. That's actually a really nice idea because you get to see the workshop, meet the team, geek at whatever cars are in there and so on! Unfortunately there are two reasons why I'm not keen on that at this point  COVID. While it's fine to have it shipped, me driving pretty much the full length of the country in two directions would be classed very much under the "unnecessary journeys" category, putting myself, my family and anyone else I came into contact with at risk. It's a really long way. It's probably a two day trip. I'd still do it if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic, but it would probably necessitate time off, a fair amount of cost hiring a van and fuelling it, and I haven't driven much further than about 20 miles in nearly a year - I am out of practice! (In ...

 So - all of a sudden things are starting to move. My donor arrives next Monday!!! On one of the forums I frequent, there was another prospective builder who had decided to put things off a year so was looking to get rid of his donor. Its the right spec (Mk2), right mileage (80k - which is fine for this sort of a thing), it has the LSD, and he's already done a load of the work to strip it. I jumped on it pretty quickly! Now onto MK to see when they can get me the rest of the kit, and I can finally start building (it feels like it's been decades since I ordered when its really only about 15 weeks!) I have also had my main gauge delivered which is a super clean looking rev counter with an OLED display that will show Speed, trip, temperature, fuel level and a couple other things. So - now to start getting properly excited. First jobs will be: Pull the engine, gearbox, diff and all the other miscellaneous bits and pieces I need from the donor. Ship the bits that need to go to MK do...