Boot Straps

 The Stylus has a boot. It's not a large boot. It's almost as wide as the car, but shallow, perhaps the oddest thing about it is that the aperture is almost - but not quite - wide enough to fit the soft top in.

In order to maximise the space I decided to collect all those bits & pieces one needs for a kit car road trip into defined areas, I haven't been able to do that before because the things would move about while travelling & stop the boot hinges opening and if I can't open the boot, there's no need to take the stuff that's stopping the boot opening (sigh).

So anyway - there's a bunch of good people called Church Products UK who sell all manor of straps & clips, so I put in an order for some clips & 2 metres of orange strap, then drew up & printed some clips to fix it all to the boot sides.

The point of this is that there are bits of boot where the roll bar comes through or where the tail lights are, or where the hinges are that aren't a lot of use unless something is the right shape & contained.

So the jack, the tyre pump, the puncture repair kit & the emergency tyre goo aerosol went right up in a corner, with a couple of straps to hold it all in place.

In a similar location the other side is the jack winder, a bag of nuts, bolts, wire, connectors, fuses, tyraps etc with enough spare strap to put the spare fuel pump in for the really long trips.

The orange is good 1/ it's orange & 2/ these are dark corners, so it helps to see what is strap & what is buckle. The bag is also good, I have several, they are American Airlines goody bags from when I used to travel business class. the family had the bottles of moisturiser / girly stuff & I had the robust zip up bags.

While rummaging about in the back of the car I started looking at the boot release, it's never been good & in due course I'll buy a new one so I can make the route much better, but when I pulled the release, it came a very long way before the latch opened - EEK!

That turned out to be the cable outer slipping at the tee handle end, I superglued it for now, but that started me thinking, how would I get in the boot if the latch failed? It turned out I'd thought of this already some years ago when I fitted the latch. there are hidden bolts on the outside of the car that release the whole latch / bracket assembly - trouble was I'd forgotten I'd done this & when fitting the new number plate light I'd tyrapped the wiring to the bracket so my cleverness would've been all in vain. Obviously I've sorted that out now. Whether I remember how to gain access should I ever need to remains to be seen.