Switching to Manual

After some frantic welding/painting/wiring/plumbing etc etc the time had come to introduce Humphrey to the tarmac and at the same time introduce Tipperary to the notion of the T2 Rally. First stop was Bob’s Bunker in Wicklow.

Last thursday, after much work and tea, Humphrey made his way to the tax office for the last of his paperwork. He drew a fine crowd of bewidered onlookers and amused the lady from the tax office who came down to confirm his new paint scheme. Sadly “Cow” is on the system as a registered colour so he is now down as White/Blue. Good enough. Introducing flip choices onto tax discs would cause too much bother.

That night after fuelling and packing the beast we launched for Wicklow 200 yards down the road, splutter–fart–stop. Fuel line kinked and fuel pump upset. Never ones to panic we pushed Humphrey to safer ground and began the fixin’. Job done in 20 minutes, off like stink.

40 miles later approaching Roscrea, brrrrrrrmmm—-poot—-splutterfart—stop. This was going to be awkward. Here we were on the side of a busy road, in the approaching dark with no lights and timber trucks whizzing by inches from our heads as we tried to fix the pump points as our torch got dimmer, and dimmer, and dimmer.

Luckily both Bob and myself have the night vision of cats due to years of doing this kind of thing with various contraptions, but after an hour and a half we were getting tired. No matter what we did the fuel pump would not switch off and kindly spat raw petrol all over the hot exhaust. Nice. Solution? In true Team Suspect Device style we jammed the fuel pump points closed to keep it running, pulled off it’s feed wire, attached the one from the wiper motor beside it and we took off for Wicklow with me simply turning on the wipers/fuelpump every 10 seconds or so. A sleeping bag on the passenger seat to rest my arm and it was quite manageable!

The next day we whacked in a rebuilt pump and got ready to show Humphrey off.