well, following on from herman’s embarrassing hill-climbing exploits in whitby the other week and also from some advice i got on the brickyard forum, i decided to see if his clutch just needed adjusting up, before resigning myself to the complete arse of a job that would be replacing it.

i perused the workshop manual for the correct settings and found that the clutch pedal should have 20mm of freeplay in it. herman’s clutch pedal had none at all. it was as solid as a rock and the biting point was so high you had to lift your foot about three or four inches off the floor, before it started to engage.

luckily adjusting the clutch is a fairly simple process, as it is doable from inside the cockpit, without having to feck about, crawling under the van. so it only took about twenty mins to half an hour until i had the fecker adjusted precisely, as per the recommendations in the manual.

it was well out! - i had to tighten the cable by up about an inch [or was it loosening it off? - i cannae quite work it out], to get it right.

clutch pedal adjustment is on the bulkhead behind the pedal


before adjustment - note the metal adjuster on the end of the clutch cable just emerges from the hole in the bulkhead


after adjustment - now the metal adjuster is completely pulled through the hole. that was easily an inch of adjustment needed



what a difference! - at first i thought i’d overdone it as the pedal felt really soft and wobbly, compared to how it had been before. but the biting point is far better now. you just have to lift your foot slightly and the boy starts to roll. he also feels like he’s pulling a lot better now. pressing the ‘pedal to the metal’ and the ‘heel to the steel’ disnae cause the engine to race like a bastard with no result any longer. it revs slower and you can feel herman accelerating a bit more than previously, where he seemed to lethargically get gradually faster by a process of osmosis.

of course the real test will come when i next throw him up a steep hill. unfortunately there aren’t any near where i live, so that test will have to take place in the wild, next time i go off somewhere. i’ve got a feeling that the clutch will have been worn a bit by being so out of adjustment and slipping for so long and will probably need replaced eventually. but i’m hoping it’ll be good enough to at least last the summer out, as i’ve got other stuff i want to be getting on wi and lots of trips and visits planned. i dinnae want to be spending the whatever sunny days we get, crawling about under the van, wrestling with the clutch.

not content with going to the far western fringes of wales a week or two ago, this weekend, herman turned his flat fizzer in the opposite direction and headed off to whitby on the north yorkshire coast for our annual trip to WGW.

hulme to whitby - herman adventure no.2 


hulme to whitby [close-up] - herman adventure no.2


no problems at all on the way there. he chugged along merrily for the three hours or so the journey took and only used about half a tank of diesel. and he reached 73MPH on the motorway for a few dizzying seconds. nosebleeds were flying out of us in all directions, i can tell you!

home-from-home sweet home-from-home. herman outside our B&B in whitby. mazza in the background, over the road.


on the way back, it was a slightly different story:

when you’re coming into whitby, you’ve climbed slowly up through the north york moors national park before you descend quite steeply into the town. naturally, on the way back this is reversed and you have a steep climb up out of the town into the park.

i noticed when we set off that herman felt pretty sluggish. i put it down to the fact it was a damp, wet, drizzly day and he wasnae really in the mood for it. as we started crawling up the steep hills near sleights, on the way back tho’ i knew something more serious was wrong; i had my heel to the steel and the engine was revving like a bastard, but we were just trickling up the hills at barely over ten or fifteen MPH.

once we got past that vertiginous section and were on the gentle downslope through the national park and then later still, on the motorway, he was pulling like a train again and smashed his world sprinting record by reaching 76MPH on a downhill section of the motorway.

we got safely home without any further incident, but there’s obviously something not right wi the clutch. it seems to be slipping - although i’d have expected to smell burning if it was. but it definitely ain’t right. we even got overtaken on a hill by a family car pulling a caravan, for feck’s sake. how embarrassing!