After the drama of getting the car home, it was stuffed into my garage and I went inside to consume calories and to recover from the horror of the M6.

This morning I’ve had to finish off my news writing efforts for Classic Car Weekly, which has been frustrating as I was keen to have a play with my new motor. Eventually, while waiting for people to get back to me, a window of opportunity arose.

The car wasn’t too keen to fire up but did eventually, settling to a lovely even tickover. I thought I’d see if it’d behave on a test drive. It did until it got up to operating temperature. Then it was misfiring again. A duff distributor cap was the first point of call. I knew the previous owner had replaced the rotor arm in the past 40,000 miles, but there was no mention of a dizzy cap. Sure enough, once I finally got the thing off (access is terrible!) it looked like this.

Icky dizzy, let’s get busy

I tried to clean it up, but it was like trying to improve the global environment by buying one canvas shopping bag. It didn’t achieve much. So, a new distributor cap and rotor arm have been ordered for a rather eye-watering £86 delivered. I can see me getting rather fed up with Merc ownership if it results in costs like that!

For now, it’ll have to await the arrival of a new cap. I turned my attention to other major issues. Like the headlamp wipers. The blades were knackered.

Knackered headlamp wiper blade. This was a priority job.

When I owned a Saab 9000 a while back, I made new wiper blades using cut-down scrap 2CV windscreen wiper blades. I reckoned I could do this again. I was right.

Wiper blades. This CCW was sent to us packaging a kettle. I don’t usually treat such glorious pages so badly!

Stripping the larger blades, I cut the rubber down to fit the headlamp blades. It took less than five minutes.

A small and rather unnecessary job, but it made me happy.