.....that silence was me with my head stuck under the dash of my car trying to sort out the ignition barrel.....of course the "finger" that went from it to the actual ignition switch broke, leaving the tip of it in the switch.So, I replaced the barrel
after dismantling the switch so as to remove the little piece of pot-metal from it.....Now, this would not generally be regarded as a "serviceable" part , ya know the kind a plastic box with plastic moving parts, some little pieces of metal and a random arrangement of springs that all comes out in a real hurry, covered in that white waxy grease.
It was in the thirties(the nineties) and humidity was around 100% just the right type of weather to be underneath the dash......This "car won't start drama" all happened the very day I bought the Tow truck..... I drove said three litre manual diesel to work in peak hour the next two days, clank, clank, stop-start-stop-start........then decided to attack the job.....about an hour later I had the switch back together, all the crappy plastic parts around the column finally found a way to co-exist...I could get to the gig without having to take the tow-truck which is lucky because we got an inch of rain in the twenty minutes it took to drive there and there's no room for my guitars and amps in the cab..... I get up the next morning having to take the car on a 200 mile round trip....after ten minutes it starts, it doesn't take Einstein to work out that my excursion into the ignition switch may have been ill advised.......
Right now it's sitting in my driveway and the tow-truck is once again sitting outside work.
So, yeah, I've been busy but necessarily on the right things....
We got a bit further along on the steering column....the Colonel turned up some bits that we need to finish it. The cam came back after having the lobes resized ....they were initially ground for the wrong series motor, lets just say that fortunately the lobes were too big....bigger than the journals(which were the right size for our motor

), that has now been sorted.