Meh! Taking far longer that it should. I got the pattern made, however plan A didn't work out as I had hoped so this first (yeah, there's more) was scrap. Needed to make another but before I could get that going I needed to order more polyester resin and chopped strand mat and get that delivered, which also took far longer than 'normal' to actually arrive on, I assume, account of Christmas All the stuff here I got another pattern off the mould and started on plan B. Essentially the 'lump' needs to be slightly flatter and slightly longer. But to try and maintain some sort of integrity I am doing it in steps. Here we are mid operation... To make it longer the back part cut off and re-set 5mm back. Middle piece then has a taper slot cut so the peak can be lowered about 5mm. And the front part cut off so it can be adjusted to match the middle bit once that has been set in place. Like I said, meh!  

All good stuff here gents.

Stoichiometric is for cars with CATs. You’ll probably find you get a much better idle in the high 13s or early 14s, and it will be easier to get it to pick up crisply from idle. Lower cruising speeds (40 to 60) try for late 14s to mid 15s. Higher cruise (60+) more like stoichiometric. Full bore you shouldn’t need less than 12.5. More than that is forced induction territory or more to stop things melting than anything else. 

Useful people! I've got two proper British-made Record vices (a 23 and a monstrous 25), and both have knackered jaws that previous owners have attempted to pigeon-poo weld back on as the screws have given up the ghost.

That'll be to do with the direction you're cutting in. In one direction, the turning of the tool against the work will make it try to 'climb' out. You can control it, but as it generates more force in odd directions you'll need more force to steady it. Check out 'climb milling' for a fairly succinct explanation of it (I think This Old Tony does a video on it). Happens big time with wood routers for some reason. One direction is fine. Go the other direction and the thing will take every possible opportunity to try to kill you 🙃

We'll I've metaphorically burned the boats.  My carbs have gone off to make another spitfire run better! I'm starting to improve a few of the things I threw together to get it running.  I've improved the throttle connection but it's still not briliant.  The more I fettle my setup the more I appreciate why others on here have done things the way they have. The car is running well and is improving all the time, but I'm convinved there's 20% or more performance and drivability left to find in the tune.  I'm still learning about VE tables, my current thinking is broadly that you want stoiciometric at cruising set points (14.7:1), lean-ish at ilde (15+:1), and rich when accelerating (11-13:1).  Accelleration enrichment and fuel cut on decceleration are another set of decisions to make, but the setup I'm currently operating is working ok for now (base accelleration enrichment slope, and an 80% leaning on decceleration, not fuel cut).  I'll mess around with fuel cut at a future date. Also I can see why people use idle control valves.

Send him this:  

A friend of mine had a similar problem after selling car parts to a gentleman who only paid part of the money and kept ringing and texting my friend but never turning up. My mate finally told the bloke he couldn’t come and get the rest of the parts as he was going away on holiday for 2 weeks.  3 days later the bloke turned up thinking my mate was on holiday and started nosing round the back door when my mate set his Staffie bull terrier on him, that was 4 months ago and no calls texts or visits since

While I think you're broadly right about the left being less tolerant of differences in opinion, I think this is something we're slowing growing out of (I say as one of them). The whole identity/purity politics stuff has been rightly recognised as completely toxic (and, incidentally, is right out of the CIA's 'how to disrupt political movements' handbook. Genuinely, it literally is).  Not that I think the left will ever get to a point of being more tolerant of differing opinions, but there's significant distance to travel from where we are now. There's also the thing that there's a whole massive bunch of 'left' you're missing out there by skipping straight from 'far left' to 'middle right', which kinda fits with how the media (and society in general) pitch the left. There's this bunch of 'loonies' out on the fringe that get a lot of airtime, and then the solidly sensible bunch of left folks that aren't that fringe (within which I count myself) gets completely ignored. Feels like a deliberate tactic by the media to discredit us, which fits considering we want to tax them properly and stand a better chance of achieving it than the fringe bods. I'm also not sure that folks on the 'middle-right' are that much more tolerant. Not if you actually start testing it with anything. What I think they are is infrequently challenged, because broadly society has conformed to their views for quite some time. And I think their intolerance comes out when you try to change that status quo. The lifetime tendency to become more conservative with age thing has also definitely been exposed as a bit of a truism, and I think is based on a false premise. The idea was that as people got older they got more conservative...but that doesn't seem to be happening with my generation (we seem to be getting more left wing the older we get). What has been demonstrated (in multiple studies) is that people tend to get more conservative as they accrue wealth, and the idea of people getting more conservative as they age has been based on the experience of the folks born from the 40s to the 70s, where they have objectively accrued wealth as they aged (as a population, not necessarily as individuals). From my perspective, it feels like if the system's broadly worked for you and the people you know, you're more likely to want that system to stay the way it is (conservatism/'middle right'). If the system's blatantly screwed you and everyone you know, you're more likely to want to change that system (left...plus whichever hard right folks can get convinced by Murdoch that it's all brown people's fault instead of theirs). For most of the older generation (not all), the system has largely worked. Folks worked hard, but they got their rewards for it. Folks today can quite obviously see how that's not particularly true any more (and to a decent extent, may not have been back then either).