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Dec 14, 2019 18:02:46 GMT
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Had my first Opel Monza and crashed it a few months after buying it in 1991 September Friday 13th whilst listening to Enigma! Very vivid memories of it, got it fixed and then a Cadbury’s chocolate saleswoman crashed into the same repaired side. Sold it on and the new owner fixed it again! Funny thing was the newer Monza I replaced it with was a complete lemon with endless faults breaking down but I was hooked and addicted to the brand and model and got more but the rest were much more reliable, why is it some cars are “Friday 13th cars”?
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Best car was my Saab 900 T. My worst car ever was my wife's Saab 900 T. Her's, a red convertible, spend so much time on a tow truck that local towies started waiving at my wife as she would drive to work or shops etc.
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ChasR
RR Helper
motivation
Posts: 10,191
Club RR Member Number: 170
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Dec 15, 2019 10:29:47 GMT
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A few cars come to mind. The first was a 2006 VW Passat S 1.9 TDI we bought off a mate. It was high on miles but it was a 2 owner car, and a base spec one should make life easy right? Wrong! If Car Mechanics were to do a buyer's guide on what can go wrong on a B6 Passat, my car would be a great contender for showing that. It was that bad! In short: -Steering Lock went. It's a new steering lock and steering module required. Because mine was an early car, it's meant to have a new convenience module as well, as it's not compatable with leter steering lock modules. The module is only £900 and the steering lock module can only be coded by VW for pretty obvious reasons. Fortunately, a Polish bloke in Coventry manaaged to fix it. -The car had a very dangerous twitch. I've scared people through driving a little quick occasionally, but not from the car twitching on its own at any speed above 40MPH, as soon as it sees a big bump in the road. In short, most of the bushes were gone at the back, and in this case, it was down to the track control arm bushes being completely shot, to the extent the sleeves fell out. -When we came to change the rear brake pads which seemed to have not lasted long from when our mate changed them, we found out the calipers were seized to Kingdom Come at the back. Being EPBs, they were over £150 each! Ouch! The PO had changed the caliper motors previously, but obviously, they probably went due to the bad calipers. The EPB would become the downfall when the entire dash died on the car one day due to the aforementioned steering lock. Basically, we couldn't get the handbrake off at all. Evnetually, we removed the motors and did it that way, which I can appreciate isn't the advised method. -It smoked like a choo-choo train when we got the car. Everyone told me the MAF was shot. However, disconnecting the MAF made zero difference, and a MAF IME won't cause a constant misfire that goes away at idle. The misfiring was down to a severely worn camshaft, and Followers that had no metal left on them in key places. After a camshaft swap, the car was spot on, along with all of the previous repairs we did. -It had a variety of electrical gremlins, including the fan blower not working despite the fuses being fine and the motor itself being fine. We only owned the car for a month with all of the above issues. The final straw came when the gearbox decided it would spit its diff out, and it spat a chunk of metal out of the Bellhousing. And that was that! With another gearbox secondhand appearing to cost £600 then when they turned up (and yes, I did try looking for alternative 5 speed 'boxes to fix), That was the final straw The car was broken for spares, to never harm any poor soul again. Base spec cars are the best buys? I don't think so. In this case, the 5 speed gearbox was known for going and was more expensive than the better specced 6 speed cousins, and the module issues of the car being a base spec really hit it hard. RIP the POS: Other bad buys? 2004 Mondeo : To be fair, that car taught me alot about garages causing more problems, the importance of using the right parts for your car (i.e auto engine into an auto car if key differences are on the block; this only transpired through my work now I admit), and what not to buy on a car if you see it. 1975 MG Midget : The car was just a bodge fest from start to finish; with it being a patchwork quilt underneath 1985 Escort RS Turbo : It's the only car I've had which has chucked its oil onto a racetrack and had its brakes undo themselves on me. 1970 VW Beetle : I'm going to say this was unlucky for me not getting to own it long enough. Basically, I rebuilt the brakes on it and revived the car to go. It however used to cut out at completely random intervals. The cause? Faulty new rotor arms! I was so sick of the car at the end that it had to go. Suddenly, the Stag and the M3 seem OK! Looking at this MG Midget now, it does look like a bodge job from the off!
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time
Part of things
Posts: 152
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Dec 15, 2019 21:55:17 GMT
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1999 Ford Explorer 4.0 Loved it and hated it Owned it 6 months, in that time I rebuilt the rear axle as all the bearings wear shot, replaced inlet manifold seals to cure a misfire. Fitted modified timing chain tensioners to stop the chains rattling. Changed ball joints and top arms on the front end. Replaced the leaking air assist shocks on the rear end to cure the saggy , Changed the transmission valve block gaskets and all the cooler lines as they were perished. Fitted a new coil pack after driving home from ikea running on 3 cylinders, had to replace this twice as the first one was faulty All this on top of a normal service and changing all the brakes. It also had loads of sensor issues that normally involved me unplugging the sensor then cleaning the contacts in the plug The wife got fed up with it so I ended up trading it with my dad for a very rotten jeep Cherokee- this was my dads idea I told him the Explorer was curse word but he insisted on the swap ( he didn’t tell me the jeep was rotten though) He ran the Explorer for 3 years only thing he spent on it was petrol and never had any trouble with it whatsoever He then sold it to his friend for £800 which was double what I bought it for
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Last Edit: Dec 15, 2019 21:56:57 GMT by time
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Dec 16, 2019 21:19:51 GMT
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Gotta be the BRG 1966 MG 1100 I bought for £25 around 1978. It was already a write off then, with some damage to the o/s/f wing and a broken headlight and a busted clutch side engine mount. This turned out to be caused by a slight kink in the floor back of the subframe mounts, but never mind, I repaired the visible damage, wrestled an engine mount into it, then another a fortnight later when the first one broke. A week later, a mate borrowed it to pick his girlfriend up from work. He never got there as he was involved in a head on collision with a London Brick company lorry. The lorry was on HIS side of the road, he and the car were blameless, nevertheless, HE was lucky, the only injury he sustained was a cut on his forehead where the bonnet came through the screen and hit him. HIS girlfriend was lucky she wasn't in the car yet as she would certainly have been decapitated! But the car was very unlucky, I saw the wreckage and from the front it was totally unrecognisable. This time it really WAS a write off, for the second time in 6 weeks!
Green cars unlucky? Nah it's just an urban myth! And a pure concidence that every green car i've owned (the MG, 2 Ford Zephyrs and a Humber Sceptre) have all been written off! I'm not superstitious, not even a little bit, but i've stopped buying green cars, even bargain ones!
Steve
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I don’t have a single photo of it. I can’t remember the registration number,even though I remember the registration numbers from previous cars.It was that bad....😂 What makes it worse was I bought it brand new,cash,no finance,off the showroom floor having ordered it specifically 😕
A couple of years before I moved back to the U.K. from South Africa,( I was born here), I decided to buy a new pickup.,(bakkie) SA car manufacturers in those days quite often continued making older models if they thought there was a market for them. . Vw was good with this. So whilst you could buy a VwGolf 4 off the show room floor, you could also buy a Citigolf ,basically a tarted up Golf 1 with electronic fuel injection and revised bumpers etc.Very popular with students and pensioners alike. On the pickup side of things,they didn’t have anything new in the 1/2-3/4 ton capacity ,so they did the same with the Golf 1 /Caddy pickup
I had an original Golf1 pickup at the time, running over 350bhp ,2l 16v turbo and nitrous. Very reliable, never broke down apart from throwing a driveshaft into the Dyno ,much to the tuners delight...😂. It was just very thirsty, good fun,but thirsty. 10mpg if your right foot was heavy... It was getting a bit expensive commuting 40minutes each way to work.Grow up time... So sold that, plus my two gearbox carts and went to the Vw dealer 5 minutes from home and bought a new Golf 1 Bakkie. And that’s where it all went Mammillary glands up.....
First thing that happened was Vw Uitenhage went on strike. Delivery date of next week went out the window. Hired a car... Six weeks later having threatened legal action, they settled on paying for the rental car,and I reluctantly settled on a dark metallic blue caddy bakkie,a colour I really did not want as heat is a real issue and you don’t want to be getting into a dark coloured tin box after it’s been in 35c sun for an hour or two...
Delivery date came and went. More spitting my dummy out and they agreed to deliver it to work the following day. Which was odd. Why deliver forty minutes away? Transporter arrived. 13 km on the clock of my new wheels. Sat inside. Looked at bonnet. Got out. Told them to put it back on the transporter as I wasn’t accepting it. Big scratch in the paint. And that was the beginning of the nightmare. It was obviously a lemon that never passed its pre delivery inspection, that they fobbed off on me 😡
First hassle was the insurance, as the commencement date had been changed so many times. So whilst I was assured it was fully covered ,it took about three months to get a standing debit order to go off, and I got lumbered with three months premiums in one hit. The first year, apart from regular servicing ,it spent 32 days with the agents.
That’s excluding the second time it spent in their body shop ,as that was purely my fault. I was renovating the house. It had lovely Oregon pine floors, skirting boards, doors etc. All being stripped back to bare wood. Had a friend who had a furniture factory so took all the skirting boards down to the factory to run through the drum sander. Went for a very liquid lunch. Got home 1 am in the morning. Went back to the factory the following day to collect my pickup, his guys had loaded all the skirting boards back onto it ,,but,whilst I had a trestle on the back with the skirting boards fastened to that and the roll bar, they left the trestle out ,so the skirting boards were pointing more skywards than when I loaded them.
There was a newly built shopping mall with underground parking pretty close to home. I had been in there early the previous morning ,enroute to the factory, to draw some cash to pay for the very liquid lunch. The bakkie ,loaded with long lengths of skirting boards went in fine. Sunday morning, having fetched the reloaded bakkie I went back to said shopping mall to draw more cash. Pressed button to get the boom to open so I could drive up the ramp to get into the parking,( parking was on the first floor, with the shops and banks being on floors 2-3. ) There was a God almighty bang and the back of the Vw reared up. SOME FRIGGIN IDIOT HAD REAR ENDED ME...Err no.... I had smashed the lovely, refinished skirting boards in to the low level roof of the parking. Wedged them into a steel pipe that ran along the ceiling. Bashed them partially through and under the tailgate, lifting the rear wheels off the ground. Can’t go forward. Can’t go backward. Walked up to the hardware shop in a rage ,bought a chainsaw,chopped the skirting boards up and drove home to sleep off the hangover. The first insurance premium had gone of the night before.( Let that read three months of insurance premiums) That,plus the chainsaw plus the excess plus the very liquid lunch made for a very expensive weekend. Mileage 1700km and the repair bill the insurance company got was about a quarter of the value insured....
And that was just the beginning....it got worse To be continued.....
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Last Edit: Dec 17, 2019 6:19:30 GMT by Deleted
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Not so much a car, but a brand - Volvo. Had 4, 3 S60's and a C30. One S60 had an ECU failure costing 1400 quid to fix (not me thankfully, the warranty) One had a module failure, and the C30 lasted just 3 days before total electronics failure, so 75% failure rate What makes it grate that almost everyone else can do galactic mileages in one with no issues. Shame because I really like a Volvo
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Paul
Posted a lot
Posts: 1,907
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Dec 17, 2019 11:54:19 GMT
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Maxda RX8 - I have some photos somewhere but I wouldn't waste any more effort on it at all..
Spent 'good' money on it (because I expected cheap RX8s would be broken) and bought one with a rebuilt engine that had clearly been rebuilt with apex seals made of chocolate.
In no particular order...
Stereo was knackered Airbag light came on within a week and no amount of diagnosis, cleaning, resetting, jamming resistors in it would fix it. Heated seats didn't work. It drank oil and petrol like they were going out of fashion (although this wasn't unique to this car). I've still got gallons of 10w 40 in the garage left over. Starter motor gave up, which caused the engine to flood. On a rotary this is an incredibly frustrating problem to fix, involving pulling the plugs, pulling various relays, turning it over on a jump, feathering the throttle etc. etc. and repeat only to generate a massive cloud of smoke that the neighbours still haven't forgiven me for after about 2 days of trying. New updated starter cost £££ Power steering was incredibly heavy on one side, light as a feather on the other. Spent £££ on tracking, balancing etc. etc to no avail. Upon investigation most of the loom was held together with cable ties and gaffa tape. Washer fluid level sensor was FUBAR - a common fault - but yet another light on the dash. Headlight levelling sensor was FUBAR, so the headlights would only ever point 5ft in front of me. Replaced it (at no small cost) to no avail. And the engine itself became slower and slower and slower to start - leaving me stranded in the middle of a dual carriageway when I'd stopped and (foolishly) switched off at the site of an accident. Cue the police waving me through, and me just shrugging at them until I eventually got her going. Spent £££ on uprated (and very pretty) coils and leads to make her run better. They didn't.
Spent over £2k to buy her, probably the best part of £1k in parts, then sold it to a P.O. for about £500. Rubbish.
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Dec 18, 2019 17:57:52 GMT
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Only just seen this but what the hell - I'll put in my tuppence worth. Step forward "Bruce" my 1275 GT. This was my second ever car and replaced my terminally-rotten Mini 1000. This used to belong to a friend of mine, and although bodily sound, there were a number of issues. It also had 17 previous owners in 16 years... The exhaust back box fell off on the drive home - not ideal but it did sound rather gorgeous. The engine had been put together - I say that because it wasn't "built" - by a bloke known as "Iffy", and hadn't been properly set up. The timing was all wrong and it had a very high-lift cam for road use. Still, I pressed it into regular use. The electric fuel pump packed up (simple wiring but I didn't know at the time) and left me stranded. Someone had re-wired the stereo using a number a black wires, and there were no fuses. Cue much Lucas smoke and a broken stereo, plus a thankfully avoided electrical fire. The (toughened) windscreen shattered on a pitch black February night on a country road. I used the jack handle to remove the rest of the screen and drove the 5 miles home freezing my butt off. 30 mph is plenty fast enough without a screen! I hit a patch of diesel on a 90 degree bend and spun into the kerb, bending the radius arm. Then it started jumping out of 3rd gear. I eventually sold it 15 months after I'd bought it. Strangely it's the only car I regret selling, as when it was working it was an absolutely cracking car. However I did not have the knowledge or skills at the time to solve all the problems. Ah well...
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Last Edit: Dec 18, 2019 18:17:26 GMT by mrbounce
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Dec 19, 2019 18:29:53 GMT
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This would the last daily i bought, 2 days ago just as a stop gap/for a laugh a 2003 rover 75 cdti for £150 - bargain i thought.
Owned by a guy at our work who had it for 9 years - first time for 37 years not owning a rover - best car hes ever owned, seen him using it everyday for 4 years without any real issues hes a nice guy knows enough about cars etc.
Gave me the keys Tuesdays morning i go out to it at dinner time, front drivers side tyre flat as a pancake, swapped it over no problem.
Wednesday night sudden crack and loud rubbing noise while driving down a country road. front spring snapped, unseated and straight into the tyre.
left in layby over night
Today - AM, In laws go to AA it this morning - window smashed, nothing inside to steal.
Today - PM, gone for scrap.
Guy was gutted forced the money back to me, which id already got back from a breaker, so we agreed to stick in the works charity tub.
Shortest time ive owned a car.
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Cue much Lucas smoke and a broken stereo Lucas smoke
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60six
Posted a lot
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Posts: 1,658
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I picked up a saab 900 lpt on ebay for 500 quid which had not been run for at least 10 years. It was really solid and was going to be a quick turn around to pay for the other cars I had at the time.
Whenever I drove it - the clutch would start slipping although it had been replaced along with the fluid - I had to bleed the clutch every journey - turned out the master cylinder seals were breaking down leaving bits of rubber to clog up the slave on the return.
It then had the oil leak from hell. A microscopic crack would appear in the oil feed line to the turbo but only when it felt like it. A LOT of oil would appear in the engine bay but I could never see where from. It was so fine a leak you couldn't see it but oil would come raining down on you from the sky through this high pressure leak which I eventually spotted and fixed with a bit of fuel hose. About 30 mins later the head gasket went. Fixed with that steel seal stuff which worked a treat for a few months.
Stereo decided to turn on/off with the indicators. Auto wind down windows was around the wrong way so they would automatically go up instead of down - trapping hair, sleeves, hands etc.
Slammed the car door hard when was really cheesed off with it - this blew out the back window straight on the concrete - new rear window needed.
Heated seats would get so hot they gave me buttock heat rash and would smell of wet dogs.
bonnet lock would pop open whilst driving and lift right up like a wing - only to entirely block your view when trying to slow down and stop.
Learnt a lot about saabs because of that car! Sold to a guy from germany who never had a problem, and said it was the best saab he had ever had .... how?!
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Some 9000's, a 900, an RX8 & a beetle
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Had a Beetle. The floorpan was in two because it had completely rotten from one side to the other and had been badly patched up over and over again leaving the front part of the floorpan not in line with the rest. The wiring had been completely bodged up with household extension leads. Engine was mint though, ran beautifully.
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2001 vauxhall corsa 1972 VW Beetle 1986 Ford Capri Laser1999 BMW E36 323i Touring 1991 Volvo 940 estate 2002 Mazda 323f 2.0 sport 2016 Mercedes Sprinter 1999 nissan almera 1.4 1995 lexus gs300 1995 lexus ls400 1975 bmw 1602 fiat punto 2003 ford fiesta something else...
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