Forest of Cars

 Weekend trip was to Forest Row for a german and classics car meet. A few of us met up at Denbies and had an enjoyable little run to Tulleys Farm for breakfast:

Note the Ferrari GTC4 Lusso again - owned by a guy called Ace who has 7 or 8 other cars (including his yellow Boxster) and is about 35 years old - he says he works in 'exports and imports'. Yeah right - a definite drug dealer 😀

Also note the Peugeot RCZ next to it - the owner has recently sold his Boxster for this and loves it. It is quite good looking, I must say, but a FWD 1.6L turbo now mapped up to 190 bhp isn't great and the guy has had one before which died when it's head gasket went (typical Peugeot), so why buy another one? I know I wouldn't after that...

The meet itself was OK, with Peugeot owner getting very upset when they wouldn't let him in but did let in the Ferrari - there wasn't a lot of sympathy.

Some nice cars - I always fancied one of these big old 90s Merc coupes:

A 1980s VW Polo, similar to my 1st car (although mine never looked as good as this one):

Star of the show was this eccentric nutter in his VW camper, covered in solar panels and every space covered in gadgets, lights, screens, switches, plant pots - brilliant:

After the show, I went to Cearth's place to try do my drop links. It all started so well as it took 10 minutes to get the 2 nuts off, which I thought was the hard part. But oh no, no, no, no....

There is a bolt that goes through the hub and it was not coming out - 3 hours (!) of whacking it with a lump hammer, air hammer (my first time using it - fun!), heat (first time using a gas bottle - fun!) and nothing would move the damn thing. Later discussions suggest that the technique should be to cut off the other side of the drop link completely and get access to the bolt head but I didn't know about that and also, I'm not sure I'd want to do that because if that didn't work, the car is then un-driveable.

As it is, we put it back together and I am booked in to a specialist on Friday for them to do it - should be about £150. The only positive (apart from using new tools) was that it did feel like my old drop link was knackered (moved in a weird way compared to the new one), so I'm doing the right thing getting them changed.