The world has gone mad. until fairly recently to make your car headlights come on you would flick a switch. This simple act would connect the 12 volts from the battery to your bulb, which by the miracle of electricity would come on and you could see the road ahead. Simple but effective, it served the motorist well for many decades, the world was a happy place. This happy day scenario wasn't good enough though and what with us being in the computerised age some clever sod decided that the level of complexity needed to be elevated by at least 20 levels. Wouldn't it be nice, they said, if instead of using a standard incandescent filament bulb we used a high intensity  discharge bulb like used in strobe lights but flash them so fast that they look like a continuous light source? Hmm, said the bosses, wouldn't that need a 1200 volt source and a complicated little box to make that happen? Oh, yes, said the engineers, but we have a whole load more ideas too. How about we make the lights go up and down with the suspension and also have extra lights that work with the steering so you can see round corners. And while we are at it instead of having two bulbs we could have a really complicated shutter sort of thing to give us high and low beam. We could use that low cost LIN bus, which could then talk to the CAN bus so the whole shagging caboodle can then be controlled by software in the body control module. Fuck it, while we are at it we could add an overly complicated monitoring system too and instead of calling them headlights lets call them AFL - adaptive forward lighting.

All this started when we were trying to test the brakes, long term readers may remember that we had got the brakes all sorted but when we went to test the car wouldn't start. It was quite embarrassing really, we had an audience, it had started no problem first thing in the morning but didn't want to know when we got it to the test track. We loaded it back up took it home, had a look at the plugs - they were very very black and sooty, so much so that they simply wouldn't spark. With a new set in it fired straight up but was running very rich indeed, something was clearly wrong.

I'm still trying to work out exactly how this one came about, it just sort of happened. There was this spare Fiesta lying about making the place look untidy and for some reason Malc decided it would be a jolly jape to turn it in to said M sport style sort of thing, road registered, available for any motoring event, car show or bah mitzvah. It's fairly standard mechanically speaking, it's been fully stripped out, race seats and harnesses put in, side windows are now perspex with sliding panels, great if we decide to turn it in to an ice cream cart. Many a 69 could be served through them, oops sorry, bit of a Gregg Wallace moment there. Anyway, back to the car. The body had to be cut about a fair bit Russ did all of that, in fact he did it twice. The first go didn't really allow enough travel for the wheels so he cut the arches back even further, there is loads now.

Somehow I have deleted the photos I took of the front end all in bits, here the whole caboodle has been reassembled and the lower leg has been painted the correct black.

The flip front that came with my car tricked me in to a false sense of security, I thought it would save a ton of work and allow an easy way to access the engine when needed . Trouble is my car is a Prefect and the front end is for an Anglia, it's also been very badly hacked about so it is no longer rigid and I suspect it wasn't of the finest quality in the first place. To add to my woes the metalwork on my car has been extensively messed with and nothing really lines up any more.

The Renault got a pretty good rinse on the way back but can still hardly be called spotless. .

First trial fit, I got Mrs Dave to take a photo so I could see how it looked while I held it in about the right place.

The lights look fine, the flip front bonnet less so, it's going to take a lot of work to make that right.