So I have actually been doing things since my last update, including playing a full round of “Let’s Have Gastro”.
Last week, the cerium oxide turned up, so I dragged Narry up to polish the windscreen. Blue tape on the inside is to make the scratch easier to find when the outside is covered in stuff.
I spent ages on in, with moderate success. 
To be fair, the photos are deliberately unflattering. It’s not perfect but it’s MUCH less obvious than it was, both from the outside and when you’re inside.
Then a couple of days wasted with my head in a bucket, before moving onto Blagna. It started running badly the other day - stuttering at light throttle and sometimes hunting at idle, which I assumed was a vacuum leak, or maybe a dying MAF sensor.
So I figured this would be the opportunity to (finally) get around to replacing the rear cam cover gasket and hopefully find the other problem while I was there.
. 
The original gasket between the two parts of the manifold is a rubber coated metal one - I’ve never seen one that wasn’t re-usable, but this car has a garbage aftermarket paper gasket.
So that was good to find, and an easy fix using the original gasket from Narry’s old 3.0 engine.
Onto the cam cover…
This is the “new” gasket that had been fitted by a gronk. No shortage of wrong and missing bolts on the way to this point either…
The cam cover was trashed by the bolts being stupidly over tightened and flattening out the edge. I had a go at panel beating it back into shape but gave up and just grabbed the cover from Narry’s 3.0. 
On the bright side, the plugs were new.
I also touched up the terminals in the distributor.
Interestingly, it ran better but not correctly at first, but progressively improved over about 10km - I assume the ECU is relearning (or unlearning) how to deal with the lack of vacuum leak.
Suitably encouraged, I decided that it will be the car I drive to Mildura on Wednesday.
This lead to the spontaneous decision to fit the struts out of Batman for their stiffer springs (pastel green = Dobinsons??). Added bonus is that the struts themselves are newish Sachs, rather than the original 200,000km old struts that I removed.
And then when I realised that Batman has a set of 294mm 380 front brakes, it meant that I have a spare set… so they went onto Blagna at the same time.
And then I decided to fit the 380 wheels with the taller 215/55 tyres rather than the 235/45s on the Advanti wheels.
All of this was a huge win.
The rattle over bumps has gone, the car sits heaps nicer on bumps, the gearing is slightly taller, the speedo is within 1kph of being perfectly accurate and the brake pedal is much firmer. I haven’t actually “tested” the brakes yet, but I am sure they’re not a step backwards.
Added bonus is that it spat out a pair of excellent 276mm rotors for Narry.
The Chinesium tyres are definitely a step backwards from the RE003s, but I will buy a pair of 215/55 RE003s ASAP and put the cheap tyres on the rear.
