a trip to pat's garage

My flatmate works full time as a mechanic, conveniently just up the road from where we live! Last Saturday I spent the day hanging out in his workshop and all sorts of crazy stuff went down. Patrick owns an '87 Mitsubishi 'Cyborg' which you may remember me blogging about a few months ago on here. This project is a serious labour of love and I always enjoy hearing progress on his build and occasionally I'll head over and get the scoop on what's been going on.



Unfortunately things took a turn for the worst at a recent, er... track day (cough cough - burnout on a friend's driveway - cough cough). The play in the turbo went cataclysmic whilst a sustained loss of traction was going on so Patrick, always looking on the bright side of things, decided this could be an opportunity for an upgrade. It was time to take out the old TD05H with it's 16G compressor wheel and upgrade to a slightly larger model with a 20G compressor wheel.



The old turbo was completely buggered!









On this particular visit Pat was in the process of prepping the engine for the new turbo to be put in. This was taking far too long and I got a bit distracted...



I was just playing around, but unfortunately this gave Pat the idea that I should actually learn how to weld. I tried to explain to him how this was a bad idea (surely I would end up burning my arm off!) but he wouldn't have a bar of that and before I could blink, I already had a torch in my hand!



As you can see, Pat's boss thought the concept of a girl welding in a skirt was quite hilarious.



Okay, so welding was suprisingly quite fun and apparently according to Pat I'm actually quite good at it - although I think he might have just been saying that to be nice!





Also girls, did you know that you can get a TAN from welding?



Hopefully my new 'skills' will come in handy for my MX-5 build. I did just buy a roll bar set-up yesterday so who knows... Pat's garage certainly hasn't seen the last of me yet!