What have you been up to today

[Robert Leigh]

My short time in the garage today was taken up with re-spoking one of the wheels on the RP and then exchanging it for the spare wheel, which was running much truer.

I had been out in the car a few weeks ago for a meal with friends, and there were four of us in the old girl, slogging uphill to a little hamlet in the Cévennes called St-Paul la Coste. We got there and back no trouble but the following day I used the car to pop to the post office and I could hear a metallic tinkling noise coming from the back of the car. At first I thought it was the luggage rack squeaking but after I got home I discovered that there were three broken spokes on the rear offside wheel, all the short inner ones.

After waiting for a spares delivery I re-laced the wheel but struggled to get it to run completely true. I decided to swap wheels rather than risk breaking even more spokes trying to true it. This is the second time I've had trouble with this particular wheel so perhaps bolting it on the back carrier might be a good idea. Time to start saving beer tokens for a set of rims/spokes...

I also had strange noises from the rear offside of the Chummy at Beaulieu Rally during the driving tests. When I got home I found seven broken inner spokes on that wheel: three sounds almost insignificant to me!