A few tales from my days as a mechanic and old car collector.

Cars I’ve owned

I started trying to count how many cars I’ve owned a while ago and gave up at over a hundred. I used to change cars what seemed like every ten minutes when I was younger, usually due to having got bored with the previous car or swapping it for a different car with somebody I knew. Most of my mates had the same problem, so cars could end up having three or four owners in a week. DVLA would doubtless not approve these days, but we never seemed to keep anything long enough to send the log book off!

My first ever car was an NSU Prinz 4. A rather eccentric litle German thing that looked like an upside down bathtub and had an entire 600-odd cc twin cylinder engine in the back. 0-60 in forever, providing you could find gears with what felt like a knitting needle stirring porridge! Unfortunately the age old battle with rust and the dreaded MOT man claimed it after he fell about laughing at my ‘undetectable’ load of filler in the holes in the sills. In my own defence, I couldn’t weld in those days, and I couldn’t afford to pay anybody else to do it so it was ‘blag the MOT man’ time. Trouble was, the old bugger had seen it all before, just like I have now, and all you’d get would be a snide comment about the ‘cold welding’ that some bad person had done. Of course you’d swear you’d paid a man to do it and he’d ripped you off and it wasn’t you what done it, guv, but I guess he knew better! So when it finally died we cut the roof off with a Stihl saw and rallied it round the fields till it snapped in half due to the rust in the sills………..

Followed rapidly by the first of several Hillman Imps. Purchased for a magnificent twenty quid, spent another thirty getting my uncle Al to ‘weld’ a couple of sills on it for an MOT, did the head gasket and brush painted it green with a white ‘go faster’ stripe down the side. Uncle Al’s welding usually ended up as a cross between bad arc welding and worse brazing covered with plenty of underseal, but if the MOT man couldn’t poke a hole in it…….

Unfortunately, the head gasket was never a great success on this first Imp, and usually lasted about a week before the bugger’d boil again. I got it down to a fine art, changing Imp head gaskets, and I’d had the head skimmed that many times our local engine rebuilders were on first name terms. Actually, I should say heads, because you can only skim one so much before it’s buggered! So, after a lot of thinking, and a lot of Imp buying in the hope that I’d end up with one good one out of three or four bad ‘uns I ended up with a Singer Chamois with an engine out of a sidecar racer and every bolt on gizmo you could think of. The little bugger went like a rocket to about 105, then ran out of breath. HWH415E, I wonder if you’re still out there? 

The Imps gave way to a ’sensible’ car, a Viva HB SL90 no less, the one with the good seats and the fake wood on the dash. Scared the hell out of me on the A^ one day when, after reaching the heady speed of 70mph, I had to stop for a set of lights, only to find that the front to back brake pipe had burst due to rust! Since the handbrake on the bloody thing tended towards the abysmal, the only option seemed to be ‘close yer eyes and go fer it!’ Good job there wasn’t anything coming the other way that hadn’t heard me leaning on me horn and flashing me lights like buggery! Slowed down eventually and crawled home, thinking that dual circuit brakes weren’t for wimps after all! It was the only car I’ve ever had that somebody had used ‘Ican’t believe it’s not Vinyl’ style paint on the roof that repelled all efforts to remove it. It laughed at Nitromors, clogged up sanding discs in seconds, did the same to wire brushes and only gave up under the onslaught of a blowlamp and scraper. Bloody stuff!

A few cars spring to mind, like the Triumph Dolomite that expired on the M61 at three in the morning on my way back from the Illawalla nightclub in Poulton. I could tell things weren’t good when the oil light came on at 80mph. The rattling that followed it wasn’t good either, but I reckoned it’d make it on to the services. Sadly it ran out of petrol after a wayward con rod knocked the side out of the block with the fuel pump still attached! Did eventually manage to roll in the services though an salvaged it the day after following a nice refreshing trudge home across the fields in the rain. A quick engine transplant in the back garden and it was back on the road the same day. Happy days!

The MGB roadster that looked great from twenty feet away was another shining example of how not to do it, another fine example of the bodger’s art in fibreglass and filler that was so short of strength that if two of you got in it you couldn’t shut the bloody doors! Got used to ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ entries to that till I sold it to someone who was even dafter than me! At least it was summer so the top was down to make it easy or I’d probably still be stuck in the bloody window frame! I think the MOT man who passed that must have had problems with his guide dog.

And talking of MOTs, I used to go to a local MOT station run by two brothers who didn’t get on terribly well. In fact, you’d often walk in to find ‘em wrestling on the floor watched by a bemused secretary. IF your car wasn’t in the best of nick, it was always a good idea to book it in for 4pm because the brother who’d be doing it had most likely spent since 12 in the local pub and would be fairly pissed, so provided your car had four wheels and ran without making him deaf, chances were it’d pass. And if there happened to be aby booze in the car where he’d find it, the chances got much better really quickly! Plenty of pop-riveted on sills and patches that I’d rather forget about there I’m afraid. Then again, I was only a poor student in them days, what knew bugger all about welding,honest guv!

Owned three Jags, a 68 S-type that I’d rather forget about, because the beer goggles I was wearing when I bought it missed the fact that the botom six inches were mostly chicken wire and filler and the fact that the oil pressure was zero after more that three miles unless it was doing about 5000 rpm, at which point the rumbling from the bottom end would put your teeth on edge. My next Jag cost me £62 off e-bay still taxed and tested (for a month…..) Described as a good runner, reasonable interior but looks like shit, the guy I bought it off was definitely honest! It had a bonnet that more or less fell off when you opened it, a buggered battery, a set of metric alloys with tyres that were legal at some point in the past but would cause an argument with the plod, and a paint job that looked like it had been done with a yard brush. The tank tape rear wheelarches were an added bonus! But it did drive like a good ‘un till the tax and test ran out and cost bugger all to insure as a classic. After an hour with it on the ramps wondering what to weld the first patch to I weighed it in and got £90 for it! PROFIT! The last Jag was a £50 "put yer own dash and heater boxes in it, I’ve had it all out for mine" from one of the lads. Rustier than a very rusty thing, it actually came with 10 months MOT! I think the tester’s guide dog must have been ill that day, but it saved me the bother! Mucho head scratching later, I got the dash and heater boxes back in and working, stuffed two gallons of filler in the bodywork and painted it Moorland green metallic. It’s surprising what you can make if you use enough pud. Arches, door botoms, boot lids and pretty much anything you put your mind to in fact! Then got offered a grand for it, it looked that good. Hadn’t got the heart to sell it, I wanted to be able to talk to the lad, he was a good mate! Even did a mate’s wedding with it as well, but the rust came and claimed it and when the test expired, so did the car.

I used to do horsebox conversions as well, although if there are a more awkward set of buggers than horse owners I’ve yet to meet ‘em! I could spend days fitting out the horse area and nobody could say anything, all my boxes could be set up any way they wanted due to clever designing of the partitions, but the living area? Didn’t matter WHAT you did in there, it was always wrong. If you carpeted the walls, they wanted them panelled or a different colour. If you put cupboards in, they were always in exactly the wrong place. Or exactly the wrong size. Eventualy I gave up and painted the walls and left ‘em at that till they’d told me what they wanted. Made life a lot easier!

At least going back that far, cars were repairable without the aid of a bloody computer every time they throw their dummy out of the pram. If you knew how to adjust and clean a set of points or clean out the jets in your carburetor you could almost fix any breakdowns at the side of the road. Mopdern cars may not bust quite so often but when they do its usually a visit to the dealer for a good dose of daylight robbery!

So, in complete contradiction to my total dislike of anything with computers in it, I’ve bought a BMW 525 TDS. Only for 2 reasons though, one because it’s diesel (the fuel of the gods!) and 2, because it was £200 due to a dead automatiic gearbox as diagnosed by a "proper" mechanic and not a lemon like me!. So I bought the bloody thing, and found out that it was the intercooler pipe that had dropped off the bottom of the radiator, so the turbo was blowing into space and not into the engine where it was needed. So the engine management computer had complained to the gearbox management computer and between them they’d gone into limp home mode. 3rd and 4th gear and no turbo = SLOW! Goes like the veritable clappers now though for the price of an entire new jubilee clip! I did have to put a set of shockers on it though, as the handling was making me seasick!

Update on 22/6/08….. Bought another old shed to play with!

Only been and bought a 72 Vauxhall Viva to tinker with! Saw it in our local scrappy and felt sorry for the old thing before it ended up in the crusher. Not the worst of its kind I’ve seen, it’s yer actual deluxe model and still has most of its original features like plastic seats, rust, trendy dark green paint, rust, an engine that runs, allegedly, a gearbox that feels fairly like I remember them and a brake pedal that doesn’t give the impression that it’s doing a lot when you press it. Still, all the tyres are still up, it’s dry inside and it’s only got to get 300 yards round to our yard. You never know!

It’ll be on its way round there tomorrow night so I’ll try and get a few pics of the old beast up if I can.

09/07/2008

And it’s definitely arrived at work, I can see it lurking on the ramp at the end of the workshop when i walk in each morning. After a bit of a steam clean, which dislodged about half a ton of old leaves and greenmould, along with a few bits of front panel and sill, I made an attempt to get the bugger running. A points gap of 1/4 inch, the leads being on in the wrong order and starting in the wrong place and the timing being a clog out weren’t helping at all. half an hour and a fresh gallon of petrol later it ran reasonably happily, but the tappets sounded like a skeleton in a biscuit tin! To anybody who’s ever set the tappets running on one of these, it’s amazing how much oil runs all over the floor, and how many of the locknuts don’t lock any more hence the din! A bit of flattening in the vice and they were fine and now it’s lovely and quiet.                                         Both silencers fell off after the first ten minutes even though they still looked shiny and had the labels on them. Must have fallen apart from inside. And it’s amazing how many exhaust firms don’t do a silencer for a viva anymore. Still, two bits of silencer from our local tyre fitting firm’s scrap bin and there’s no leaks at all! Doesn’t look too bad in the photo does it? Proves that the man who said the camera never lies wasn’t always right!

19/07/2008

Just to prove that I did do a bit of bodywork on the old girl….

26/07/2008

 What can i say? After 3 weeks of fettling, including a sill, two bottoms in the front wings, engine mounts, a good oiling round the wiper mechanism to get them out of their rastafarian "I is wiping the windscreen sometime today man" kind of mood, a steering column coupling, a set of inertia reel belts in the front, four tyres and two new headlights from my mate Trev’s shop cellar (where there are all sorts of old car bits lurking in corners) and a good tidy up to get the dents out of the roof where somebody’d trod on it in the scrapyard and a fettle on some of the more lacy bits and respray in good old Conifer 2-pack it passed its MOT this morning and is now trundling about quite happily. Brakes weren’t in bad nick at all, surprisingly enough and cleaned up fine. The battery that’s on it doesn’t fit the carrier but no bugger stocks the right size for one of these anymore! It’s a good laugh to drive, the steering’s so light it doesn’t feel like it’s connected to anything and the brakes’ll quite happily lock up in the wet with no effort at all. A bugger when you’re used to a BMW with ABS and all mod cons.

07/08/08

After trundling round for a couple of weeks the little car’s still fine, just needed the battery changed for the right one and the fan belt tightening up after it polished the rust off the pulleys…..

24/03/10

It seems like ten minutes since I posted the last one, in fact it’s nearly 2 years! Little car trundled round quite happily till October  when the cold and damp finally got to me and I started driving the BMW again. Sat in the corner of the garage at work till March, wended its weary way back onto the road (amazingly with no effort at all to MOT it) till it got too cold and its inability to demist its windscreen finally finished me off. The BMW had already been finished off just before Christmas when some knob opened his door into the front of it while I was driving past. The road was too bloody narrow to avoid him, and I was going so slowly I managed to stop level with his drivers door , wound the window down and said "I suppose that’s a bit of a mess then. You OK?) Nobody hurt, Bm needed a wing, bonnet, bumper and indicator. His honda basically needed a new door, pillar, wing, windscreen, etc etc.

Cost me £40 to put a wing and indicator on the bloody car to keep it mobile, Insurance assessor came out , estimated damage at £1700, wrote car off as a CAT C and sold it back to me for £100 after they’d paid out on it. Never felt happy in it after that though and got rid, partly ‘cos I couldn’t be arsed VIC testing it.

Bought a Saab 9-3 after that, good car, dull, dull, dull.

Poor old Viva then sat on the car park from September till January this year, when I got sick of folk laughing at it. Swept about a foot of snow from round the door, unstuck the frozen lock , got in being watched by some of the lads who’d laughed at it. Pulled the choke out, jumped up and down on the throttle a few times, spun it over for about a minute and it started! None of these wimpy jump packs for a Viva! Minus bloody 16 and it started under a foot of snow after 6 months of being ignored. Decided to pull it on to the ramp in the workshop to see what the rust moth had done to it and was stunned to find no rust underneath at all. Couple of zits here and there on the body but still solid!

Rear shoes and cylinders later and it passed its MOT last Friday. Not all good though, the condenser decided not to bother on the way home and the new bits only arrived today. Still,it got me back to work under protest and it’s now waiting for open dizzy surgery……

Saab’s gone to a new home and been replaced with a Nissan Maxima. Biggest Nissan I’ve ever had! All the bells and whistles, ABS, aircon, cruise, electric heated leather seats etc, not bad for a 94! Still can’t get the hang of the radio yet, never seen as many buttons on anything, radio and CD handbooks are thicker than the car’s! Just need to stick a cambelt in it, V6 24V, how hard can it be? According to Autodata, less fun than threading a Pye P76 tuning drive! Have to see about that|