After having purchased Forza 3 and the Official MS Wireless Race Wheel, I quickly discovered that adopting a piece of home furniture to clamp this thing to was just not going to suffice. I looked into buying something fit for purpose, but I’ve spent loads on gaming in the last two weeks, and they’re really expensive. This presented a pretty unique opportunity to do try and prove to myself that I’m not a total failure when it comes to woodwork. I set about getting my measurements for a table that I could clamp my race wheel to and rest the pedals on so as to be a self-contained, geek-tastic cockpit type affair. After annoying Charlotte for a few nights drawing squares and triangles and figuring out how high it’d need to be (something that I messed up, incidentally!), today I set about using the bench saw in our workshop to carve up an old table to make this thing.

Without going into boring details, here is revision one of my race wheel stand. Future improvements I could make one day but won’t are:

• tidying the cables
• four little rubber feet for the bottom
• painting
• replacing the bit of the pedestal mount that I split driving a screw in
• some kind of elevated plate for the pedals/a stop for the back edge

Now taking orders. It’s pretty fucking badass.

I’m not taking orders. Charlotte would kill me.

I love the front end of this car. So unnecessarily muscular. The spots on the forecourt were highlighting it and illustrating my point!

This garage is amazing. They have a Ferrari of some sort (I’m not really up on Ferrari models)

I love this unashamed rip of a VW Bus. It looks exactly the same and entirely different all at once!

I know this isn’t exactly a great photo, but I wanted to try something with the processing to bring it back. It’s difficult to describe, but the kind of look I was going for was “American”. Like in skate videos when the colours are contrasty and bright but also quite dull.

My essay writing skills have somewhat dissipated in recent years.

I have quite a well-balanced relationship with my car. It’s quite twisted, and there’s lots of adultery involved. I take, and once a week big oil takes a chunk. I take a bit more, then once a month morethan takes a bit more. I take a bit more, then once a year the government takes some tax so that I can use the glorious and well-maintained roads of this great nation. Then it all goes a bit skewif. I continue taking, and someone in blue coveralls, takes my wallet to a private place and makes sweet, sweet, unrequited love to it all night long (I’ve started mixing metaphors and getting myself excited, so it’s time to take a cold shower).

This is normally the bit that costs a small fortune, but this year, my car has been well-behaved! Since January this year, aside from oil and cleaning materials, my car has only cost me approximately £400! That’s a bargain considering the amount of fun it gives me for just over an hour on weekdays. Older cars rock (especially mine!)

No, not cockney Monday, not Tim of Ash saying “Mandy”; but a day to embrace your manliness. A day to clean the car (or just throw a bucket of water into the street if you don’t have a car), a day to fix the sink (or break it so that it needs fixing). You get the idea, do man stuff.

Today, myself and the awesome Gareth Jones made my car feel better. I’ve said it before, but I greatly admire his ability and confidence to take apart cars and put them back together. What a ledge.

Viva Manday

I love my car, but we need something more sensible so we’re going to pool our resources and get something with more space. I really want a motorbike as well, but it looks like that’s going to have to wait too. There are more pictures on Facebook and PistonHeads if you’re interested. It really is an awesome car, just too impractical for me right now. It makes me really sad to even think about selling it.

Awful Monday today. Just awful. Disturbing phone calls at midnight, back to work after a long weekend, wild variations of configuration on development and test servers, javascript misbehaving, Postfix on OSX not picking up rn in headers; preferring n and missing the early pre-order of the iPhone 3G, Charlotte’s car started driving funny just before I landed on our drive. Get out of the car and I’m greeted by this lovely flat tyre. I wasn’t even going to begin to deal with this in the rain, so it will be ignored until tomorrow night.

I’ve just reminded myself that my car doesn’t have any petrol in. Tomorrow could be fun too.

Last night, however, when I was supposed to be going go-karting with the guys from work was an inconvenient time for my car to break down. Being the impulsive guy I am I big-fat-went go-karting anyway and left my problem until 11pm last night. Irritatingly enough, my problem hadn’t vanished by 11pm; my car was still overheating, idling high and (seemingly) overfueling. Great. So I think “I’ll try to get it home, then use Charlotte’s car”. This didn’t work. I got to between junction 9 and 8 on the M27 by 11:15pm and that’s where I stayed til 12:15pm when the nice AA man arrived to give me a lift home.

This would be all well and good, I don’t mind spending out on my car because it costs me so little normally, but I really wanted to get a tattoo this month and now I can’t! I also need to look for cheap reasons to test why my car would be playing up, and this definitely doesn’t mean taking it to a garage – I always get the distinct impression someone is trying to steal from me when I go to the garage.