Pulled in, climb under the back of the car – oil all over the bottom of the shock.  The fitting to the remote canister is not tight, and its leaked all the oil out. hmmm….

We get the car up on its stands, and attempt to tighten the fitting up.  On touching it the circlip comes off and the hose pops off.  Inspection of the fitting shows that its cracked – something has hit it 😦

We pull the shock out of the car to have a better look.  The fitting is ruined and even with the help of ‘the man’ Murray Coote we couldn’t find anyone that had anything even remotely close to this fitting.  ‘Its an m10x1 thread’ Murray has said during this conversation – hmm, that’s the same thread as my banjo bolts for my brake calipers, and I have a spare one.

Then we find this absolute champion of a bloke called Luke, spotted as he was wearing an MCA shirt.  He helped us out in putting together a solution so that we can keep running.  First thing, we need some thin oil.  What do I have???

Will this jack hydraulic fluid work?  After wiping a bit on his fingers, we got a ‘yeah, that’ll do’ from Luke.  We got the shock filled, bleeding it, filling, bleading filling etc.  Almost there.  A couple more strokes of the shock to get the final air bubbles out and – we run out of oil.

‘What else you got?’  Says Luke.  looking into the toolbox at the air tools – any air tool oil? ‘At home, yes’.  I wonder off to see if anyone else in the service park has 20ml of any type of thin oil, while Jo is doing the marathon run to the BP servo to see if they have anything suitable.  During this time Beau and Luke have pulled the drain plug on the air compressor and have drained some of the oil out of that, and have the shock filled up.

We’ve got nothing to pressurise the system, filling it up with as much oil as we can is our only option.  Using a banjo bolt from my brakes, some alloy crush washers and an alloy spacer we get the whole thing cobbled back together and we have at least a partial damper.  There is about an inch of movement where there is no damping (air bubble), but there is at least something for the rest of the stroke of the damper.  Its not pretty, but as long as we can keep some oil in it we should be ok.  Time will tell.

Cody the superstar tyre changer does his thing, and the tarmac tyres are put back on ready for the drive to Busso and around the Special Stage.  Left rear tyre is soft 😦  This was fully inflated this morning, another job.  Jo runs off with the tyre and finds the Dunlop truck (Thanks Boys!) who check it, and can’t find any leaks in the tyre.  We grab another old Khumo what we had in the truck, and get that fitted to the rim to be sure.

Day 1 is almost done…