What have you done today with your Austin Seven

[Parazine]

Featured the hop dry houses. 

Oast houses.

[Roger]

Hi Jensens,
Here’s another 8 minutes of hedges, if you have not seen too many so far.
https://youtu.be/DsEoKjNgHoQ
As you will see one of the difficulties of these roads is the bright sun and then the sudden darkness, it is quite disconcerting when you cannot see in the shadows where the road goes next, but it helps to keep the speed down.
I always try to video my journeys for safety and for interest when I reach home.
I use  an iPhone speedometer on which I can edit in jobs that I have done so keep a record relative to the journeys traveled.

Roger

[AustinWood]

I use a sat-nav which shows what's coming up.

[Oxford Jack]

Not strictly speaking today, but this week I have mostly been in the Dales.
Due to our companions 1964 Fiat 500 having a hissy fit, its metalastic bush on the hub end of a drive shaft disintegrated, we were obliged to travel about 4-up in the Austin. 
   
The Fiat on Beweley Moor, Cold Stones Quarry, before its tantrum.
The Dales comprises a lot of narrow twisting roads, bounded by rather hard stone walls. These roads are rarely flat for long and often resort to steep gradients, with the aforementioned tight turns and hard rock walls.
We took the road from Pateley Bridge NW along Nidderdale, turning off at Lofthouse to climb Trapping Hill onto Masham Moor. The first part is at 1:4, in two miles it climbs 1,000ft, all of which in 1st gear. On one of the very steep turns I was obliged to request two of the passengers to disembark. The photo is from shortly after this event while waiting for the pedestrians to complete their ascent. You may note the slight incontinence, which was I think excusable in the circs.
   
The weather was glorious and apart from the lunatic behaviour of the brutalist SUV drivers, it was a lovely few days. Grassington was bustling with film crew and props in preparation for a forthcoming  feature film shoot of "All Creatures Great and Small", despite cruising through the town we were not offered a drive on part!
Despite the very noisy ( I think) mains, the engine managed three days of arduous touring, used about ⅓ of a pint of oil, the merest sip of water each day and returned 34 mpg.

[RupertW]

Is there a more frustrating design feature of the 7 than the fabric coupling? Replacing it seems to be the perfect mix of cramped, inaccessible with little clearance, poorly lit and greasy. And then when you finally get things lined up you find that with the new coupling it fouls the handbrake so it all has to come apart again. No prizes for guessing what I've spent most of today doing...
I've just changed it on another car so thought it would be a nice easy job for this morning, but it was not to be. And I've still got another car yet to do the exact same job on. If funds allowed they'd all be running hardy-spicer arrangements by now

[Graham Barker]

Retightened the rear wheels to the axle taper using a new toy to stop the brake drum from rotating. See photo. The tool was one of a batch made by an Auckland engineer who wrote a computer file for the shape which he gave to a local laser cutting shop to make a batch of these from 6mm steel plate. The laser cut is so smooth that no further finishing of the tool is necessary. He sells them at NZ$35 (about £17) each.
With this, I was able to tighten the axle nut by about 1/4 flat more than ever before.

[A G Wood]

Hey Oxford Jack, re the 500D, no intent to teach anyone to suck eggs, but you might find the spline on the outside end of the half shaft has stripped in addition to whatever is wrong with the metalastic bush. We had one through the workshop years ago that had lost drive and having to replace the half shaft made the job a little more...interesting

[Parazine]

Not exactly today but in early June, the annual Bristol Club tour of North Devon managed to happen, having been cancelled last year for obvious reasons.

Here we are, crossing the ford at Malmesmead in the Brendon valley in the Chummy.

   

Forty years ago, I used to plough through this ford (we all did) at full speed with a huge bow wave and wet mats in my RM saloon. Great fun but age has left me with a respect for a Magneto below the waterline and a vulnerable air intake, so speeds are now much slower.

A pleasant week, mostly sunny, sometimes hot. Good company, stunning scenery, cars didn't play up, what more could you want?

[Duncan Grimmond]

Retightened the rear wheels to the axle taper using a new toy to stop the brake drum from rotating. See photo. The tool was one of a batch made by an Auckland engineer who wrote a computer file for the shape which he gave to a local laser cutting shop to make a batch of these from 6mm steel plate. The laser cut is so smooth that no further finishing of the tool is necessary. He sells them at NZ$35 (about £17) each.
With this, I was able to tighten the axle nut by about 1/4 flat more than ever before.

Not wishing to criticise but I'd think twice about carrying out that super tightening operation using only a scissor-jack. I 'm hoping you took the axle stand out of the way for a better photo...

[Oxford Jack]

   
Noted, thank you trainee-old-geezer, fortunately not my job to do, however I know the owner has decided to strip the offside axle from diff to brake drum in case there is more to do. Having rebuilt the car a few years ago (with the exception of the bush) it has all new components including beefier drive shafts and is clean and not at all corroded, which makes stripping and rebuilding a mostly pleasant task.
Another rattle we pursued on the first morning after arrival, occurred as we parked having crossed this traditionally cobbled farm yard. It sounded like something loose around the cooling fan. I could just reach it with a finger tip in the fan casing but could not extract it, it felt like a socket. When the casing was stripped we found a 17mm socket! It can only have come from when the fan spindle nut was tightened two years previously by a garage and must have stayed on the fan nut until then!
Here you will see the perplexed owner, riffing on the competence of garage mechanics! Fortunately it was a lovely day for spannering, with refreshments on hand and WC and hand washing facilities