Nice day today as 6 of us met up at Foxton Locks for a picnic. Lovely drive, didn't touch a single A Road, all country lanes. It was a comfortable 1:05 hr each way (40 miles) and great weather.
I think I had been through the locks in a boat but had never wandered round.
Unfortunately while I was driving there I had breakdown number 3 (First was when the water hose blew off the pipe and the second was when I holed the sump. Still not bad for 7 years of driving). I was just coming out of Oakham when I found I couldn't change gear easily. It got worse until suddenly the clutch pedal just dropped to the floor. As luck would have it I was passing a housing estate and just inside was a row of garages with plenty of tarmac in front, So I stopped there to check. I has assumed the clutch cable had snapped, a regular occurrence on these cars. But I was wrong. Some of you might remember I modified the clutch cable/pedal a few months after I bought the car. The diagram shows what I did.
The original fit is the top diagram and you can see the clutch cable is bent so has a lot of strain put on it, So I used a couple of pieces of stainless steel to make a joint that allowed the cable to be perfectly aligned.
After 7 years of constant flexing the stainless steel had given up and parted in the middle. Luckily the fix was fairly easy, I just removed all the bits and bolted the cable directly to the pedal as it used to be when I bought the car. Total time was 30 mins. I had been running 20 mins ahead of schedule so was actually only 10 mins late at the locks.
So I can keep my 100% record of never calling the rescue services to get me home, and I didn't have to use the spare clutch cable I always keep in the boot. :-)
I will rebuild it tomorrow but use thicker steel, even though the normal steel lasted 7 years.
