Exhausted, Frustrated and Bereft

The exhaust went on my friend’s 500 Sporting this week, so I spent some time yesterday fitting a replacement with him.  A pretty straight forward task which didn’t take long.  While the weather was good we took a look at his Barchetta, which has been flattening the battery when left standing.  I suspected the diodes in the alternator were allowing reverse flow, as the charge rate isn’t brilliant either but after disconnecting the alternator there was still a drain.  The previous owner has wired the stereo to be permanently live and disconnecting this reduces the current drain significantly but the jury is still out on whether this is the cause.

I’ve been patiently working at removing the paint from the frame of Pandora’s engine cover. For large areas of panel I favour the polycarbide preparation disks that fit on an angle grinder.  They strip paint in seconds with no damage to the metalwork.  Unfortunately they get ripped to pieces by edges, corners, bolt holes and the like, so no good for the job in hand.  So I thought I’d turn to a faithful old helper… Nitromors.

This stuff used to be the de-facto paint stripper by which all others were measured and would fetch paint off a body panel in minutes.  It’s active ingredients being volatile organic compounds, it has recently fallen foul of the EU’s ban on anything that actually works.  Replacing the VOC’s with New Improved Enviro-Bollocks has resulted in a product that does sweet F.A.!  It’s like losing an old friend.