Upper Middle Petrol Head:

The Alfa Male attends to the practicalities while I faff about taking photos. I'm not generally given to impulse buying.  No last-minute check-out queue choccies or copies of celebrity gossip rags for me!  But send me an auction link, like my mate Nick did a few weeks back, and it seems I'll buy nearly any old thing, sight unseen. A rusty late 70s' Fiat 128 3P coupe?  Why not?!  The photos on the Tullochs' Auctions webpage looked OK, the car seemed straight and one pic even hinted that it might actually run.  And with classic car prices clearly on the up, it looked to be worth the gamble.  My "winning" bid fell short of the reserve and the car was passed in.  Noting that there only seemed to be two other bidders and their lacklustre interest in the car (I had made two of the total four bids), I flicked Tullochs' a cheeky email with a counter offer, still below the reserve, and left it at that. The following Friday, I received a call from the auction house

This isn't the YouTube debut that I was hoping for, but - as the popular and axiomatic A-F saying goes - it is what it is!  And what  https://youtu.be/TgoYyGUR_rM   is, to be precise, is a video demonstrating P3P's blown head gasket and not the custom extractors that I was hoping to write about. The extractors - built by Kevin at Kingborough Exhaust - look like this, by the way: And now that I can't drive my car, let alone appreciate Kevin's first-rate handiwork, I look like this: U M P H (upperemiddlepetrolhead.blogspot.com.au.) iPhone images and video.

  After ten long months in hibernation, awaiting a new head gasket, Project 3P has reached the point of reasonable usability.  It's not pretty.  Nor is it particularly nippy.  And I wouldn't bet on it being all that reliable, either!  However, it does start, stop and steer properly, all its legal requirements have been met - tyres, restraints, wipers, lights, indicators, horn, whatever ... - and it's registered.  Usable is quite a milestone!    The ignition points have made way for a Pertronix  Flame Thrower  set-up with a new coil and leads,  and it's also running a set of "tri-y" extractors and a new tail pipe ( https://uppermiddlepetrolhead.blogspot.com/2022/08/project-3p-part-18-custom-built.html ) .  All the radiator and heater hoses have been replaced, as was the heater core (Motor Cool Radiator Repairs, Brownells Lane, Moonah / (03) 6278 2736).  The  head was machined at Just Heads (74 Springfeild Avenue, West Moonah /   (03) 6272 5550) , a mate and I t