In between a pub lunch, a visit to the Drum and singing Christmas carols at St Deny Church, Tidy, Bex, Katie, Kevin, Al, Natalie and I made some progress on Big Car yesterday. We’ve reattached Big Car’s bonnet and bumper – she looks like a Land Rover from the front now! We took some excellent photos of us all reveling in our achievement – I’ll stick a goodun on this post and the rest on Flickr as soon as Tidy and Bex email them to me. With a bit of luck, we’ll be able to move Big Car to Shaun’s new house this week – once that’s happened it’ll be heaps easier to make more substantial progress. Take care all, Bob.
Edit: The photos can now be seen in this post.

Okay, so I chatted with Shaun today and he expects that we’ll be go to go with Big Car’s big move during next week – yay! If all goes to plan, some or all of Tidy, Katie, Al, Shaun and I are going to head down to Big Car’s garages on Sunday to begin preparations. We’ve got a bonnet and bumper to reattach for starters. We can also attach the walls to the roof so that less effort is required on the day of the move. Fingers crossed, we’ll have an update for you on Sunday. Take care all, Bob.

Actually it’s fairly miniscule in the grand scheme of things. I was just pleasantly surprised to find that if you happened to pop in Big Car to Google, that you’ll find your beloved Big Car Website around about number 7. And if you restrict it to just the .co.uk version and the results are even more orgasmic.

Quite why people might be using the search terms “Big Car”, I’m not entirely sure. I guess when we get #1 for “land rover” will be the time to get really excited.

(If at all. Sorry, I’m a geek. But I think it’s something that Simon would have got a big kick out of!)

Hey everyone, Just to let you all know that things are a little quiet at the moment because of Shaun (our resident mechanic) moving house and being rather poorly with some horrible flu-ey virus-ey thing. Hopefully soon he’ll be all sorted and we can get back on it.

Rest assured that progress, albeit slow, is still being made in amongst the yuletime madness.

BGA

Christmas is rapidly approaching and whilst we’re all frantically making some eggnog and hanging up mistletoe, we musn’t forget about our Big Car, lying cold and alone in her garage. We all like to receive a few gifts at Christmas, and Big Car should be no exception.

Therefore, we’re considering a visit to the next tender, the same place that Big Car was originally purchased from to see if we can scavenge a few bits and bobs for Big Car. We definitely need some new seats, but we might be able to pick up can of green paint or perhaps some sort of gun turret.

Unfortunately Southampton City Council have decided that we’re not allowed to keep Big Car’s garages any longer. So as of as soon as possible, we need to find a new home for our Big Car. It looks as though she’s going to go and live with our resident mechanic, Shaun, for the timebeing, as he’s just got a new house with plentiful parking facilities which also means that he could work on her as and when he felt like it. Considering that the current Big Job for Big Car is to rewire the dashboard, he needs all the time he can get.

Obviously this is a ball ache in terms of having to load up all the stuff and actually physically move a broken 2 tonne (ish!) Land Rover through Southampton, one silver lining is that it will ease things on our finances and leave us more money for repairs, rather than the 70 odd pounds a month we’re spending on garages at the moment.

Moving day might be as early as this weekend, but hopefully we’ll have some pictures of her new home soon.

I was up the early this morning to take my folks to the airport, and after rapidly abandoning my plans for a pre-work surf (in the dark, in 40mph winds in an 8m high tide), I managed to install a few tweaks to the site. Most noticeably will be on the comments form, which now does a fancy-schmancy slidey realtime posting thingy. Try it out, it’s very slick. You can also now subscribe to comments, so that you’ll be alerted when people follow up to any comments you make. Have fun!

I popped along to Maplin’s today to get a much needed wireless soldering iron – this’ll let us get on with Big Car’s electrics whilst she is still down at her garages.

We’ve had loads of Big Car Colouring Competition entries which you can see here. But don’t let that stop you submitting a new entry, check out the instructions in this post. Here’s an example of one of the more practical designs (we could do with more of these)…

I popped down to Big Car’s garages this morning to try to work out what seats she has missing.

I’ll have a look on the internet for some bench seats to complete Big Car’s complement. I think she’ll happily seat 11 people some day – a proper party bus!

I’m thinking this for the front seats and this for the back…