Well I got a new one from Burlen at a sensible price. Now it all gets worse....
I decided to come in on Sunday afternoon after a successful morning at the Malvern Autojumble, to finish the carb repair. All went well and it was set up beautifully. I had had the car up on the lift for oil leak tracing and when I had finished the carb repair, I pulled the lift from under the car. It seemed to get stuck, so I looked underneath to find that the speedo cable had been ripped out. That was the point at which I should have gone home.
Having a scrap vehicle, I thought I would take the cable off that. After lying in a pool of coolant and getting black as the Ace of Spades, I got the old one off. This done, I noticd that a fence panel had blown over and a nail sticking out had scribed a deep line down the side of my Granada which had just had £300 of repirs to the area in the last few months. Going back into the workshop, I laid the cable out on the floor near the car and then trod on the plastic end. This improved my mood by some amount, especially when I then found that it wouldn't have fitted anyway as the scrapper was a
1.3! So then I decided to take the damaged one off the 1.6. . . .Up on the lift and take off the cover plate. Well four of the bolts were hidden by the centre boom of the lift, so I had to use ramps at the front and axle stands at the back. I lowered the lift carefully onto them and pushed it to test the stability was OK. To open the bonnet I had to get in through the passenger door and lean over to pull the latch. . . . .
The car went sideways off the axle stands (because the weight was still being borne partly by the lift), and crashed into the lift's central support damaging the bodywork. It was at this point I finally saw sense and went home. :-)