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Been having a busy day with the wire brush in the grinder. Due to the rheumatism in my hands I can only use it in short bursts. Plus with the heat today there was smoke coming out of it at the end! The annoying thing is it only takes seconds and a bucket of water to remove the concrete when wet, yet Ive hours ahead of me. Been speaking to Titch and he reckons itll be no problem to reproduce some decals, and ive found a source of Belle Orange paint. I thought i'd try emailing Belle to see if they could give me any information about its age etc, but typical of a lot of big companies they didn't even bother responding after nearly a fortnight!

Morning all, time for a long over due RJ update, and unlike my last post this one has a happy ending Monday morning Nigel and I had a visit from Neil, it was good to catch up again mate, it's been a while.. Not only has Neil got a huge amount of Wheel Horse history stashed away in he's head, but he also came with gifts... 2 engines Here's the top half of Neil.. The bottom half of Neil was busy controling the rev's of a very nice looking engine that ran as good as it looks.. The blue engine has carb and spark issues as we found out, so that's a job for another day. So with a quick pulley swap the new engine went in the RJ. The shade of engine red is so close to the rest of the RJ we saw no point in repainting it match 100%.. It's looks good as it is. One slight problem with the new engine is the exhaust port had two studs rather than the port itself having internal threads so swapping the exaust over wouldn't be a bolt on swap. Not a problem, take a flat bit of thick-ish steel and drill three holes in the right places... A quick test fit. Trim a bit of the RJ's exhaust down to size them grind the thread of it so it fit's in the flange leaving plenty of space to weld it up from the inside. (No idea why this photo won't upload the right way up!) Welded up, cleaned up and trimmed to shape. And a coat of the black stuff to make it look good. Exhaust on. You can remove an RJ engine without taking the hood off, but you need to remove the spark plug. Then once the engine is back in the spark plug has to go back in using a very special tool that won't scratch the paint on the hood Knowing the engine is a good, the time had come to fire the little fella up and go for a drive.. Knowing the gear shift would need a bit of adjusting to get it to shift right and even though it should of been in netural but possibly wasn't the rear wheels where jacked up before starting.. A running issue was soon soted by putting some petrol in the tank, so I climbed aboard and Dennis lowered the jack, and off I trundled After so long it was nice to finally drive the RJ, but as you will hear in the video (coming soon to a YouTube page near you) the gear selector needs some adjustment so it get's all gears and the selctor bar does not rub against the reverse disc. Also the engine governor need a tweak to stop the engine from trying to over rev.. So not much to do and the RJ will soon done Told you this update would have a happy ending

Looking good. You could bolt the alternator brackets on.