Just a quick maybe-not-so-interesting update but still. I need to make sure we remember this car...
It has been in the "parking" bay of my small 2-car garage at home for the beginning of the winter but since we have some work on the Sierras coming up I needed to free that space. This means moving the Capri to my rented storage garage where I keep the snow mobile during the summer, and also where the P11 race car now has lived (and last summer I also tried to keep the rented drift car there as much as I could).
The rented space is a 10 minute drive from home. It probably is an old bus and truck garage, where I have roughly a third of a larger space that I share with an acquaintance. It was actually him that found the offer but it was too expensive to rent for just him (plus the landlord wanted someone with a business and, erhm, stable economy). Sharing a larger open space has its downsides, the years up until now one part has been used by a carpenter/builder and the other part by different people (boat, container conversion). It has been a bit messy but the good thing has been that the others rarely have filled their spaces totally, so there has been space for us to move around a bit. Helpful when getting cars in an out for example.
After the summer I got a text message from the landlord saying they were gonna make some renovations in our space, paint some floors and walls and wondered if we could clear the space a bit. For my part it was fine, I only had the P11, the snow mobile and some wheels there but my "room mate" has a Capri in millions of pieces, a Suzuki Vitara A-traktor project (yeah) and...stuff. It ended up with them just covering our space with tarps.
Then I was contacted again, with the landlord explaining that they were making some changes. Our former "neighbours" had left and they were gonna use the space themselves. Now I called them up to reason a bit about the future and we had a good chat. The idea is to make the entire property a bit nicer and that's why stuff is moving around. But it also meant we would need to change our spot at least for some time.
We used to have the area inside the right door pair at the bottom, up towards the yellow square. The suggestion was not to move to the yellow part. Roughly the same area but a little bit different in shape. The old space we had was around 11,5x5,4 meters and the new one roughly 5,2x10,5.
The upside is we have a man door in the uppermost port in the picture (we had to use that one before too) and that door pair is in better working order than the one we had. But fitting four cars (my "target") in this space is tougher, especially when having the door on the "long" side meaning you have a sharp turn to make entering.
Still, I could not object to our move with the possibility to get it all painted with new lighting etc. But I also pointed out what my future plans for this area is - I want to use all of "my" rented space for myself, as soon as the buddy is "done" with his Capri. It's not cheap but it's a nice place and it would solve a lot of my current space issues at home. I can either keep 4 of my cars here, or 3 cars plus a lot of "stuff".
This is the first trial of where to put the P11, it's right inside the door, stuffed to the wall. The door is wide enough that you still can get a car in there. The rear of the P11 might just overshoot our area by a tiny amount but so far it has been OK.
And here is the entire space.
In the end he turned his Capri 90 degrees. And that is where this update was supposed to go - me getting my Capri in here.
Because of the renovation I couldn't do it much earlier and then it was Christmas. Then it was minus a bazillion degrees but last weekend the temperatures were more sane. But snow... even getting out of the garage, on to the trailer and into the storage would need studded winter tires, at least on the rear. I have no spare 15" winter wheels (to go over the brakes). But I decided to borrow the Cosworth wheels of Kajsas black Sierra.
I had charged the battery in the Capri a couple of weeks ago when I started it up for a while to let the fuel circulate a bit (E85...) but now it was pretty dead. Charging for some hours only helped a bit, and not even the booster pack was enough. Sure, the cold start of an E85 is a bit hard but with around 10 degrees C in the garage it should not be impossible.
Finally I got it running, and let it idle outside as I swapped the rear wheels and connected the trailer. But I stalled it driving it up on the ramps and the battery quickly died again. Doh. Anyway, I could use the winch and then only hope that I could get it started to unload.
As I entered the storage place my partner in crime was there and we quickly decided that it was better to just try reversing the trailer towards the door and unload the car straight in. It's a rather tight reversing manouevre but it worked.
Once inside, I had invested in mechanical dollies;
The floor is quite smooth especially with the fresh paint but I hadn't counted on the slope. But finally we had my Capri in place, where the blue tarp is in the picture above, 90 degrees against the P11. This means the Suzuki (short, narrow) fits well in the space left. I covered my car in two covers to protect it as much as possible and took the snow mobile on the trailer back home.
I am a bit intrigued about the battery though. It is an Optima red top, bought in 2016 (meaning it is not as "new" as I imagined) and while I have not been extremly good at trickle charging it has also never been out in the cold. I took it back home and it is now on the "Recond" mode on one of my C-Tek chargers. Let's see if it wakes up...
:-)
FYI Last winter I Last winter I fabricated a hydro clutch for my friends V6 Capri that had a T5 trans. I posted some pics on Capri World (North America) Facebook group but here's couple: 
