Today the time came to drop the VP back off with its owner and collect the Trabant.
I've very much enjoyed my time with the VP and on the strength of that I could absolutely see me owning one in the future.
The reason the Trabant was away was to have this crispy bit of sill looked at.
As is always the case what you can see is only the tip of the iceberg, and this was no exception as we fully expected. Some photos were provided while the work was underway.
Some grot was also spotted on the front cross member as well - including going behind the subframe mounting reinforcement plates. This definitely isn't ideal given that basically the whole front of the car is hanging off these two points.
Let the chopping commence.
This also revealed a historic repair on the wheel tub - which most likely explains why this corner seemed so much worse than the rest of the car.
Some nice replacement panels were fabricated.
Then was zapped in.
Attention was then moved to the cross member. This was done in two halves to deal with each subframe mounting point.
Then same on the other side.
Followed by some underbody sealant.
Just a shame that nobody besides me and the MOT tester will ever see it!
There are a few other areas which will want further attention in the future, but all well clear of prescribed areas and nothing that I'm imminently concerned about. However I knew this was seriously important structurally (especially given that basically the whole front of the car hangs off those two big mounting points to the cross member) so needed sorting sooner than later.
While I have very much enjoyed my time with the VP, I am very happy to have this little buzz box back.
I do need to do a bit of clean up where the VP was parked prior to dealing with the oil leak issues...
Finally did get the car transferred over to the historic tax class yesterday and logged as MOT exempt (despite that, it's still going in for a test next week) as I ran into issues last time I attempted to do that. The MOT exemption I'm not particularly worried about other than it making the logistics of getting it back a bit simpler, but I'll definitely take the £18 or whatever it is a month saving on road tax costs.
With around 100 miles covered since I last tweaked the carb, looking at the plugs I think I'm maybe a little too far on the rich side now.
Which is good - I was aiming to go a bit too far that way then back off a notch on the slide setting in the carb to find what's probably the safest setting for the engine. With two strokes being what they are I'd always rather err on the side of rich than lean. A fouled plug is far easier to deal with than a melted piston.
Shortly after the engine swap was done I found this crack on the front exhaust section.
This was looked at while the car was being worked on, but was deemed too far gone to do anything with - pretty much as I expected given that the pipe was paper thin around that join. I did speak to a couple of places locally about having a system made up in stainless but they really weren't interested. Did consider just buying the middle section that's gone as the rest of the system does still have at least a bit of life left in it yet - but instead just pushed the button on a new 38mm system. Which should help get the most out of the better carb and overbore on the engine itself. I also don't like messing with exhaust systems at the best of times so don't want to be replacing one pipe now and having another bit go six months or a year down the line - hopefully this will be something that won't need to be touched for a good few years once it's all on there. Given we've got a fair few uprated parts on this car, it just seems a bit silly not to add the last bit to get the most out of everything. 38mm doesn't *sound* like a big exhaust bore - but the stock one is 35mm...This is a really small engine! Should make a noticeable difference at the top end I expect - apparently the baffling arrangement in the heat exchanger/expansion box up front is quite different to the stock one as well so flows considerably better.
Really happy to have the car back. This is always one of those areas where there's going to be a huge amount of placebo effect, but it seems to *feel* more solid and planted on the road. I guess this could have made a noticeable difference though given that we found that the rot had got into areas next to the subframe mounts off which the whole engine and front suspension setup is hanging - wouldn't take much movement there to be perceptible from the driver's seat. I'm pretty sure though it's entirely in my head and just knowing that there's not a big hole in structural areas any more is making my brain think the car feels more solid.
