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Preview of the 2005 John O'Groats to Lands End rally

by
John Cooper

As I mentioned in last month’s welcome, this year my dad and I are planning to take part in the Barnsley Branch of the Morris Minor Owners Club annual John O’Groats to Lands End (JOGLE) rally. This has been a regular event for quite a few years now and this year will take place on 21st-22nd June.

We’ve paid our entry fee and booked overnight accommodation in John O’Groats, so there’s no going back now. Incidentally, not having booked accommodation in Lands End is no reflection in our confidence in completing the distance, just something we haven’t got around to yet. However, on the subject of not making it all the way, I did have a rather amusing thought about whether our breakdown and recovery cover was one of those that promised to deliver you to your destination and how this would look if we broke down just outside John O’Groats!

Alas, they won’t take us on to our destination, so there’s no alternative but to drive it all ourselves.

The rules of the event are quite simple, and are essentially that the journey should be completed in 24 hours, that each car must have at least 2 drivers and that you shouldn’t break the law. Sounded quite simple when dad first suggested it.

We’re now approaching T-7 weeks and all of a sudden, it’s starting to seem quite close and as is always the case, things seem to start going wrong. Recently the car has started intermittently losing power, which only seemed to be cured by pulling out the choke (which incidentally refuses to stay out on its own).

The consensus was that it was probably a problem with the carb and an initial investigation showed that the gaskets were either missing or in poor condition. So, a full service kit was bought and the carb was completely stripped down, cleaned and rebuilt by dad and my brother.

Since the rebuild, the car seemed and sounded to be running well and this seemed to be borne out today in our annual run to Andrew Greenwood’s Thoresby show, so this particular problem appeared to have been cured.

However, it wasn’t all plain sailing. The show ended rather abruptly as the heavens opened and along with most of the other people we packed up and left. We’d only gone maybe a mile and as we tried to pull out onto a roundabout, the accelerator suddenly dropped to the floor. We managed to coast round to our exit (the first fortunately) and to a safe-ish distance from the roundabout before we pulled to the side. The engine was just ticking over despite the pedal literally being down to the floor.

The problem was quite quickly identified as being a missing grommet against which the accelerator cable outer sleeve should have rested. This meant the cable slipped through its clip and all tension was lost. This was quite easily resolved with a cable-tie and the offending grommet recovered from the middle of the roundabout as ‘exhibit A’. The car and cable-tie performed perfectly well on the way home, but it’s one more problem to be fixed over the next 7 weeks.

The other piece of preparation for JOGLE to mention is that we’ve had repair panels welded in and a replacement wing attached. As you can see from the photos, a respray is going to be in order.

Given that it’s going to need a respray, we’ve decided that we may as well wait until after JOGLE and try to sell sponsorship space on the car to raise money for our chosen charity the Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice.

There’s little point in me trying to tell you about the charity, but I urge you to read about it on their website, www.bluebellwood.org.

If there are any corporate sponsors out there who would like to see their company’s name emblazoned across our Morris Minor for this prestigious event then I would love to hear from you. The most important thing to remember is that you would be supporting a very worthwhile cause.

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