ONE OF THE mysterious side-effects of getting older, if you’re a bloke, is that you accumulate a collection of trouser belts that no longer seem to go the full distance around your waist. They’ve all somehow become too short but, obviously, that’s only a temporary situation and it would be foolish to throw them out.
Such misplaced optimism was rewarded when I swapped over the tired, too-small battery in my Model T for the larger and fresher one from my Alvis. The bigger battery actually fitted its cradle beneath the bed of the pick-up body better than the small one, but it needed some means of securing it.
I rooted through my (sadly) extensive collection of redundant belts, and picked out three that were roughly the same length and style; inevitably, the holes for the belts’ prongs were in the wrong positions, but that was quickly sorted with the aid of a set of metal leather punches bought some time ago from ‘the middle of Lidl’.
I also took the opportunity of adding a Dis-Car-Nect battery immobiliser to the terminal of the negative lead, one of a boxful that I liberated many years ago during an Octane office clear-out. I’m a big fan of this very simple device, which basically is a metal sandwich separated by an insulator: one plate clamps onto the end of a battery lead while the other is clamped to the battery terminal. A removable plastic knob with a brass core screws through the sandwich, thus bridging the metal plates to complete the circuit.
It’s not that I worry about someone stealing the Model T – huge kudos to any car thief that knows how to drive one – but I like the peace of mind that an unseen
