Paint? Pained?

Time to spin another yarn round this old man, gather round for this one is where life gets very interesting. Pictures shall be added at a later date, when I get around to it...

The last time the saga of Robert was left, the exhaust manifold gasket had been repaired. All was good in the world of Robert, he ran pretty well and was a joy to drive.

Like all good things though, this one ended spectacularly. Driving home from University one day, Robert developed a mild cough. A splutter. And then a full blown asthmatic grinding, wheezing rattle that shook his very bones and felt for the world like the engine was trying to throw itself out of the car.

Nursing it very gently back home, it was taken into the secret lab where it would be rapidly stripped of all non essential components, as well as some rather critical ones, to discover the issue.

It could be heard, easily, that all was not well. It was running on perhaps 2 and a half cylinders. It was blowing smoke. There was a nasty acid smell. The old man had definitely had some kind of seziure. Getting the head off was the most major surgery I had ever done on a car up to this point, and the idea of what lay beneath was terrifying, and enticing at the same time.

Cracking the head revealed... A blown head gasket. Nothing too horrible to fix, thankfully. A replacement was ordered, the head was faced by a place that, genuinely, gives the best head jobs in town. Replacement parts for various bits were ordered and shipped quickly, and very soon the repair was ready to commence.

Everything went back together by the book. Amazingly, there were no major problems. No, wait, I lie. After everything was back together, there was a monumental coolant leak from the front of the engine. A rubber o-ring had perished, and lucky me, it was a special one that required an original replacement part. The nearest ford dealer was twelve kilometers away. There was no car to drive there.

I didn't care.

I got on my bike and rode there, fast as the wind, to retrieve the missing part of Robert's heart.

And once he was on the road again, he was as happy as the day he rolled off the showroom floor.