Maybe I’m coming around and will get the common sense to reclaim the time these old cars are taking. I was talking  with a friend about taking a trip, he on his humongous bike and me in the Europa. Except I don’t trust the Europa and if I did trust it, I don’t trust that it would remain intact if I left it parked and went hiking. Vandals.

A better choice would be an MX5, which is perfection in the two seater genre, reliable, and so common that no one wants to bother it.

Still, in the here and now, I have the Europa and am nudging it back into service. I replumbed part of the cooling system to undo an ill advised modification from a Previous Owner who had block coolant pouring in where freshly cooled fluid from the radiator also was flowing. It made no sense. My solution was to bridge the two extra water pump ports and place a bleeder on one side and plug the other side internally in the hose I plugged the block port.

Not pretty, but I hope it improves things.

Then I tested the clutch pedal and it’s useless. That led me to the discovery of a snapped off abutment that probably is the event that started this latest drama episode. So now I have to create and install a new clutch cable forward abutment.

What this means is the clutch is cable actuated and the cable can’t function correctly as it is. The actual cable is in a sheath. That sheath has a stop inside the cabin where the cable goes on it’s own from there up to the pedal cluster naked. The abutment is a piece of metal that stops the sheath from moving with the cable. The sheath has a ferrule that butts up against this bit of metal. I got a diagram from a friend in the Europa community and modified that replacement idea with my own. The original was essentially a piece of 1/8″ steel plate bent into an L. No reinforcement against flexion so honestly, it was doomed.