to this:
in ten minutes or less. And then all of the engine is accessible. Regrettably, it turned out that what needed to be done was something I couldn't do. There were engine/exhaust smells in the passenger compartment, and I had supposed that there was some leakage round the heads that could be cured by re-tightening them (and I could do the tappet gaps at the same time). But the heads were OK and the gaps didn't need changing. Instead there was an exhaust leak where an almost-new part had failed at a joint. It needs welding or - perish the thought - a new exhaust cross-box.
Oh well.
That can be added to the "jobs to be done on the 2CVs" list. This now includes quite a bit of painting, and a new speedometer cable for the red car.
In fact there has been some work going on around the farmhouse. I've been attacking - one might say bodging - the window frames which are really quite rotten at the bottom in almost every case. I've been using a resin-based woodfiller to make good, together with T or L shaped metal repair strips. I've tried to get these below the finished surface, using a router wherever possible, and then put the filler on the top so the metal doesn't show. Of course what does show is the filler itself, which has a rough surface. Still hopefully when the starting point is this
almost anything will be better, and in fact the end results are not too bad. Or, to be honest, too good. I hope that the window frames will stay together for a year or two - after which new windows might be possible - particularly since I have replaced ten or more cracked panes of glass in the ones I have repaired. I even discovered that the ones with a suspiciously regular crack - a straight line across the middle of a pane - had been deliberately cut that way in order to give a "crease" in the glass, as the frames had warped so much that a flat sheet wouldn't fit easily. But by building the rebates up a little with the filler I was just about able to manage.
