The panda is lying motionless over in Ben's garage. It is mid-way through a big operation...its status is stable. After tootling over to see a nice mechanic called John (a friend of Ben's) - we came back with instructions to strip the engine right down and take the cylinder head back to John for skimming. He'd had a look around and decided it needed skimming. Having been told the job was "a piece of piss, 15 minutes tops" we settled in for what turned out to be a 4 hour marathon engine strip!

We took a while to get going, consulting the Porter manual, then the Haynes manual, staring at the engine again, then back to the manuals. But after giving the floor and ourselves a good coating of coolant we got going.

Bits were coming off here and there, there were ratchets going, spanners being whizzed around and allsorts.

It was hard work undoing some seriously rusted nuts, with the exhaust manifold and cylinder head being the hardest bits to crack. But with 3 of us there (me, Ben and his brother Ross) we persevered and cracked it in the end.




So the net affect of all this is that our little panda now has a half empty engine bay. The cylinders as you can see here, are all present and correct. So we pushed the Panda into its new home (Ben's garage) and carried on with some other tasks - I did another 25 letters asking for sponsorship, whilst Ben began the secret project which we hope to show you soon.


Meanwhile today - the cylinder head, now separate from the rest of the car made it over to the garage for skimming.

We have the pleasure of putting it back together again soon, before we move onto other areas, namely gearbox and fuel tank.