Lancia Motor Club

As well as the Aprilia, I have a long term restoration project - a Flavia Sport. I must admit I only manage to get round to her occasionally. However, a new year word of warning! Having had the petrol tank cleaned out and repaired, it was returned to me wrapped in several layers of bubble wrap. Over Christmas I reorganised the workshop (an old barn), only to find that although I share the barn with several mice, against which there is an ongoing war including multi-pronged attack with traps and fudge bar, and the odd cat, one well and truly got the better of me: attached you will find some interesting pictures of the latest des res for mice! Excuse the quality of the pictures - probably due to my frustration at the absolute cheek of it!

Have you been to the High Court of the Pied Piper, take out a house mouse restriction order preventing them coming within a 100 metres radius of said Flavia.....I would!


;)


P

Dilambda Mouse.

When trying to get the Dilambda to fire up as a last resort we removed the cylinder head and found the remains of a mouse nest in one of the bores. It must have climbed in through the manifold found an open valve and dropped inside. Removing it didn't cure the problem, that was because I didn't understand the way in which the cylinders were numbered even though the numbers were stamped on the block!  ::)

Robin.

A cautionary tale on the pursuit of legal process by cat.

My garage came with a cat flap in the door and I was perfectly happy to have the cats about to deter rodent squatters. However one winter I had taken the rusty rear side windows out of my Beta Coupe intending to replace them with some nice stainless steel ones I had acquired. In the mean time I covered the car with a large blanket to keep it safe. Little did I know that my cat had spent the winter creeping up under the blanket, in through the absent windows and sleeping on the nice tangerine coloured velour seats. I could have forgiven that but he also spent the winter stropping his claws on the seat backs. All of them!

That cat is now dead, though I hasten to say not at my hands, but it was a close run thing.

Frank

Don't underestimate the threat of rodent infestation...
Until recently a good pal of mine had a very nice late model AMG Merc coupe, one of those V12 jobbies. He parked it up for a few months and then discovered it wouldn't start and all manner of fault codes were displayed on the dash.
He's technically savvy and this sort of thing wouldn't normally phase him but when he investigated he discovered key parts of the loom had been eaten away by mice. As you probably know these big Mercs depreciate at a frightening rate and the cost of replacing such a complex loom made the car uneconomical to repair and it had to be scrapped.
 Of course if the car had points, plugs, a carb and a coil... ;D ;D ;D

You have to be careful how you store car seats and other nice soft fabrics belong to tour precious car, I took the seats out of my flavia ,stripped them from the frames , cleaned the vinyl ,put them into plastic and put them on the shelf stored flat. When I came back a couple of years later looking around the shelf there was bits of sponge crumbs around the place  :o, I took the seats out to find a very nice comfortable little home dug into the middle of the seat base.  ???. LITTLE B------S. >:(