Bloody Monaro

I’m lucky to have relatives who are willing to help me track down parts for the never-ending, ongoing saga of the Monaro build. Let me explain just how time consuming the whole process can be by describing the fitment of a very minor, essential part.

I had an auto sparky work on the car recently and he found one of the tail lights wasn’t working properly, (amongst a thousand other weird things the wiring was doing but we’re not interested in that here).

A clip on the globe holder had rusted away leaving a poor connection when the brakes were applied. Simple enough problem. OK, I’ll just get a new one. No way. No bastard makes them or sells old ones that I could find. (I’ll probably be bombarded with places that stock them now).

Since we were going to Kingaroy for a party (nice one Leanne), we recruited our reliable parts procurer (Errol) to find us a few spare parts from the wrecks we’ve taken parts off recently. He kindly strips a set of wiring and globe holders for the rear lights out of a HK he’s got. Luckily he avoided the snakes and spiders while he worked on the car in the dark or I’d never hear the end of it. All for a lousy tiny part I couldn’t do without. Much appreciated.

I bore my trophy home, confident I had the right part until I compared it to the globe holder I needed to replace. Different. Bloody son of bitch. Unwilling to be thwarted I ripped the holder apart and tried to work out how to make an offset pin globe work in a parallel pin holder. OK it’s not rocket science but I tend to break shit about now so I went at it nice and slow. I filed down the ledge that captures the pin very carefully. Goody it fits. Then I had to pull the entire rear light assemble out of the Monaro to work out how the bastard went back in. (Can’t see shit behind the panel in the boot.) The joy of one man testing the lights won’t be discussed. Finding most of the nuts missing from the light assembly wasn’t surprising. I couldn’t bring myself to jam the assembly back in using a handful of silicone like the person who owned the crap heap before me so I spent another half an hour finding replacements nuts and fitting them.

All up a simple globe replacement took two weeks to finish, hours of discussions and caused the maximum amount of inconvenience to people who probably had better things to do.

No wonder working on cars has been proven to make otherwise normal people insane.

(Like it? See - Wanna buy a Monaro? - Cheap)