Yesterday Jasmine died at a traffic stop. Everytime we put it into Drive the engine would stall - but Reverse worked just fine. Conclusion?  The transmission is messed up internally and I'll need to find a local expert to fix it. That's not going to be easy or cheap I suspect.

In the meantime, I have a wagon with a crummy engine and great transmission and a convertible with a great engine and crummy transmission. Which one will win?

After a little bit of thought I'm going to sacrifice the convertible and swap its engine into the wagon. Tara will get a fun car to drive and the convertible will be off the road until.. well, further notice.

Reason being, I want to drive around the pedal cars to local events like Summit, HAMB & Grits and get the work out. I got the first one, a fire truck pedal car (shown here) yesterday.

Uh-oh, strange rattles from the engine today - you can't hear them when driving, but I walked past the car when idling and sounds like the water pump or something is on the way out. No time to diagnose today though..

Jasmine has returned after 5 weeks in the shop. An old woman ran a stop sign and did a number on the front end of the car and although her insurance company picked up the tab, it still took forever to get fixed.

No-one makes parts for this car, so everything had to be found and bought from individuals or junk yards.

Took her out at lunch time to run to the bank, nice.

Finally, after what must be over a month now, my parts arrived at the bodyshop for Jasmine to be fixed up and hopefully look like this again..

I visited Daniel at the shop on Friday and also dropped off my radiator for the 55 since he said he can weld aluminum.

I need to switch all the fittings side-to-side because I'm re-using my upright radiator from the '37 on its side.

See how the fittings are on the wrong side now?

I've been fighting Nationwide insurance this week after a phone call from Enterprise car rental telling me that my time was up and the car had to be returned. Obviously that's not cool since I have nothing else to drive..so far I've been able to get a few more days, but their patience is running out.