Butchered 601's diary

Are you sure the bolt you needed was 11x1.25mm as a lot of old Japanese vehicles used 7/16UNF bolts for seats and seatbelts as there was a USA standard at the time that required these to be 7/16UNF for any vehicle sold there. It catches a lot of people off guard (including me) as every other bolt on the car is metric.

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I’m sure that this was only for the American market of which I think that only the Terios was ever directly exported there. The Miles was the only Daihatsu 901 electric under license-built passenger car ever exported to the States:

ElektroMOVE_Antrieb

ElektroMOVE_Antrieb_U

ElektroMOVE_HL

ElektroMOVE_Batterieen_H

ElektroMOVE_L

ElektroMOVE_HR

Other than that, all fasteners in my 601 are metric

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I have procured a set of old Renault Twingo headlamps, in case originals will no longer be made available. They’re ugly as sin. However, they’re cast from glass and an aluminum plate cut to fit could surround the vacant space surrounding each lamp, in order to conceal their ugliness as best possible. For them to fit properly, not only would I have to weld in a bulkhead from a Twingo. The turn signal lamps would also have to be severed where the yellow line is drawn:

If I were to eventually lose any future historical registration, simply because original headlamps would no longer be available, my prefered conversion would be to modify the bonnet for accepting the headlamps from a Ford Escort XR3 like this ill-fated one pictured of which are also made of glass. Adapting these would make the front end of the 601 look less feminine:

Scheinwerf_XR3_2

image

I can’t Photoshop yet. The end result would look similar to and hopefully much better than:

XR3601

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This is the cheap piece of work of which I ended up ordering. I good one would have costed well over 50€. However, ordering something of that level through the internet would be impossible to eveluate, until delivery is taken. There wasn’t any physical possiblity to puchase a good one, within any reasonable proximity.
Ordinarilly, if I knew that I was going to use such a tool more frequently, I give out the extra money for getting one. Buying quality tools is never foolish, given that cheap tools either fail or are not up to doing their tasks properly:

Gewindeisen

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