Upper Middle Petrol Head:

This stunning EH has all the fruit and more:  awesome duco, sparkling chrome, nifty bonnet louvres, a floor-change 'box, fabulous wheels, and disc brakes all round, as well as all the niceties that accrue from being a top of the line Premier .  Its owner has  contacted me since this was first published and says that its powered by a supercharged 3.8.  It's probably fair to say that it is immaculate and exactly the style of car that special interest registration was intended for, although the owner says he’d describe it as “a neat and tidy cruiser.”  So is it immaculate?   What, exactly, does immaculate  mean?     According to everyone's best friends at Google, the term immaculate is described as "perfectly clean, neat or tidy."  That makes sense, doesn't it? Not if you're administering the special interest provisions of Section 85 of the Vehicle and Traffic (Driver Licensing and Vehicle Registration) Regulations 2021, it seems.  Th...

Fortunately, the top rail of the grille is hidden beneath the leading edge of the bonnet. I had initially thought that P3P's grille looked okay.  However, closer inspection revealed that the entire top was either badly cracked or had broken off, most likely because there's no bonnet prop or catch keeping it from hinging too far forward.  Why this is missing is anyone's guess and where I'm going to find a replacement is quite the conundrum, as a thorough search of the interweb has failed to locate one anywhere.  So, if you do happen to have a spare, ... .   Removed from car.  Note the damage to the area above the driver's side inner headlight and to the top rail. We digress.  Further searches of eBay and similar sites did reveal several replacement grilles,  ranging in price from around $AU200 through to a rather less reasonable $350 or so, all with exorbitant postage and handling charges that in some cases went close to doubling their pr...

I get that fixing things with rubber bands and string isn't exactly rocket science, which is just as well seeing that my aeronautical skills top out at paper plane construction!  That said, anyone with some basic handyperson and lateral thinking abilities should be able to tackle lots of the small jobs that make up a large chunk of any classic car restoration, gaining satisfaction and saving money, too. Case in point:  The inner driver's side Carello headlight of P3P had been fitted upside down and was never going to do much for the beam pattern or the car's chances of passing a roadworthiness check.  The locator lugs on the back were asymmetrically spaced, meaning that the light couldn't simply be realigned 180° into the headlight bucket and that the only option appeared to be to buy a new one.   Upside-down, Miss Jane! Several years ago, I had tried to swap the pristine reflector from a cracked Cibie Super Oscar into one that had a badly corroded reflector and...

My laptop has had one of its hissy-fits again, having decided to randomly assign the order of all the photographs I took at CMI's 2021 Hobart Domain hill climb with no regard to chronology or the manner in which I'd like to present them.  Therefore, many of the images featured here are out of order, unless I've corralled them with some semblance of logic in mind, trying to show a participant's line through a corner or something like that.  Please enjoy!   Thanks go to CMI's organisers, officials and volunteers for another excellent hill climb, as well as the drivers and their crews for putting on such a great show!  The City of Hobart and its citizens also deserve our appreciation, as without the cooperation of both it wouldn't be possible to stage such an event. For the day's results, please go to:  https://cmitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CMI_Domain_HC_Results_Oct2021.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0a-tDegNFixCcGAR-qtU0rspZm8LaKCdOfvA8cyTscYTvT1Lu-kmBGbIc  .  O...