New year-new start!

Firstly- a very Happy New Year to you all!
First day back today after arriving back from Cornwall a few days ago. A lovely quiet Christmas with my sister and brother-in-law - eating lovely food and enjoying helping with the herd of 8 cows and with letting chickens, ducks and geese out and putting them to bed again in the early evenings (Mr Fox ate up all their baby quails despite the Fort Knox security arrangements).
 As always, after Christmas, something comes up which has to be dealt with- last time it was cleaning rotted soya beans out of the hold of their coaster ready to take on a new, clean cargo on Boxing Day, this time it was the central heating packing up in one of their cottages which entailed John's spending the entire week after Christmas day taking all the pipes and joints to pieces to find the blockage and cleaning it out. My sister and I, in between digging holes in the ground to find an electricity cable (so that the new one from their wind turbine-to-be can cross over it) were, summoned to hold buckets at strategic points so that water could be hosed through the pipes from the loft to the ground floor.
Back in Norfolk after all that excitement I was pleased to find my bungalow had not gone over the cliff while I was away.

There was an email waiting to tell me that the blue tractor which we did last year is now up for sale and asking if we knew of any potential buyer. A look back over the www.1260engineer blog will tell any possible new owner just what has been done to it. Any offers can be emailed through to us here to be relayed to the owner. His reason for selling it is not connected with the tractor.

Yesterday, both the Rocker shaft support AND, at last, the con-rod shells for the Z120 arrived in the post (the latter kindly sent by my super-helpful niece from the States). So things have moved on today in the workshop.

The Rocker shaft has been refitted- after all the other parts of it had to be  moved to their right places from where they had been wrongly fitted at an earlier point in the tractor’s career. The fuel tank was, as suspected from the leak stains, pitted with rust induced pin holes all along one side so a plate had to be cut and welded on.