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Did a track day at Mallory Park in a £350 ebay special saxo vts, was great fun and it spent five sessions with the throttle pedal getting very intimate with the carpet. A mate started to drive it back to the south west the next day and it vibrated horrendously as soon as the throttle was pressed more than a fraction, after a quick bolt check and finding everything tight I muttered something along the lines of there's driver's and then there's driver's and limped it home from Nuneaton basically at idle, regretting my bravado every time I needed to go up an incline!!!
Further examination at home found that the inner long driveshaft had eaten itself to the point where there was only one bearing left and one other peg without a bearing, the third peg had evaporated into thin air, assume that it had happened whilst being enthusiastically driven the day before as it was fine for the couple of hundred miles it was shaken down before the track day!
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Did a track day at Mallory Park in a £350 ebay special saxo vts, was great fun and it spent five sessions with the throttle pedal getting very intimate with the carpet. A mate started to drive it back to the south west the next day and it vibrated horrendously as soon as the throttle was pressed more than a fraction, after a quick bolt check and finding everything tight I muttered something along the lines of there's driver's and then there's driver's and limped it home from Nuneaton basically at idle, regretting my bravado every time I needed to go up an incline!!! Further examination at home found that the inner long driveshaft had eaten itself to the point where there was only one bearing left and one other peg without a bearing, the third peg had evaporated into thin air, assume that it had happened whilst being enthusiastically driven the day before as it was fine for the couple of hundred miles it was shaken down before the track day! My wee bro and his pals were big 106 / saxo fans back in the day. After seeing some of their special go faster engineering the thought of a £350 saxo would fill me with fear! Highlights included; mole grips on rear brake lines and missing calipers, an intercooler fitted on a n/a engine, battery wiring replaced with the thinnest wires to save weight and a supercharger installation that looked ok until you realised that clearance for the pulley was made by smashing the back out of a headlight...
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Nothing quite so 'interesting' as some, being a young'un, but.
My cheaper-than-a-new-starter-for-the-proper-car K11 Micra... Hit a pothole, which bent the rear panhard rod (actually handled better after), cracked the windscreen pillar to pillar and knocked the exhaust off just after the cat. Two weeks left of MOT, so I commuted loudly until Mr Scrappy picked it up the day after the ticket ran out. I could hear him pulling around to the next street and loading it up from inside my house. Neighbours didn't speak to me for a while...
My Fairlady had a small (genuinely) rust bubble on the rear sill, so I threw it at a body shop and asked them to patch the sill and put an MOT on it... two weeks later they phone me back with a very large number. Turned out it needed the entire floorpan welding back on along both sides, only being held together by the underseal! Handles much better now. Later in the same car, the exhaust blew a nice two inch hole in both downpipes roughly simultaneously. Fifteen miles from home. Didn't carry on commuting in that one. Sounded like the angry bits of the Old Testament, but the tinnitus wasn't worth it.
Collecting the exhaust for said Nissan from just north of Derby in my old Volvo XC70, I noticed a squishy front left tyre. Spare already on front right. Tyre had loads of tread in the middle but was down to canvas on the very inner edge. Pulled into tyre shop, they jacked it up and the wheel went 'clunk' and cambered out by three quarters of an inch! Unloading the wheel had revealed a very very upset ball joint. Weight on the wheel pushed it back into place(ish) and held it in, so I figured I'd just go home a bit slower. A long 130 miles at late-o-clock on a weeknight. Absolutely no signs of the failure on the road though. Drove straight as an arrow and made only the tiniest little whisper of a clunk on big bumps. Only other fault with that car was it ate headlamp bulbs as they were on all the time, and every time one blew, something else went haywire. Bulb gone, cruise control won't work and the windows won't go down. Replace bulb, windows fine, cruise control fine...
Not an unsafe vehicle, just inappropriate: With the Nissan in yet another one of its little grumpy periods, I pressed my ,at the time, daily driver Rover 100 into service for the Autosolo at Goodwood Weekender last year. Really not appropriate in any way for a race track, but oh well. It didn't overheat, at all, despite the ferocious temperature out on the tarmac. This is the same car that previously approached boiling point at -2*C in the snow.... Yeah, don't know how you can overheat below freezing and be fine at 35+... K series life I guess.
Oh, and my Mazda 323 I bought for a pint. Engine mount had gone to the point where the gear stick was only ever within two inches of where you last put it, never in the same place! New mounts are unobtanium, so I turned up some top hat washers and squeezed them in around the remains of the rubber. Drove mint after that. Sold the car for a case of ales. Profit.
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dikkehemaworst
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 1,581
Club RR Member Number: 16
Member is Online
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20 years ago, My father towed me in my classic fiat 500 with a gearbox problem, dead battery , torrential rain, back to our unit with his mercedes. Hé forgot I was there and we were doing 90 miles an hour , in the dark with no wipers... I was sticking my head out the sidewindow to see something and it was truely frightening experience.. Btw...90 miles per hour is the fastest the little car ever drove in it's life...
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Not so much now, but I used to have an attitude of "I don't give a fu*k"...
Wanted a big merc v8 engine years ago, so bought a very rotton w126 560sel down in Rochester. Waited till Sunday morning and drove it home to Buckinghamshire round the M25 with no tax, no insurance, no mot, but all the rust. Parked it in the back garden feeling quite pleased with myself for getting away with it, and over the next few months parted out the car of everything I could sell via Ebay.
Fast forward 6 months and we are left with a car with no doors, no bonnet, no boot lid, no bumpers, no lights, no interior, half an exhaust, but a running 5.6l v8 and autobox. The plan was to get this thing onto a borrowed trailer and take it over to my unit to finally harvest the engine and loom. But a 560SEL is a big car, and of course it wouldn't fit on said trailer. So in the early hours of the following morning a Battery worklight was zip-tied to the slam pannel, and I screamed this thing the 10 miles or so round all the back roads over to my unit. I don't think the few people that saw that one could quite believe what they witnessed, as some nutter sitting on a milk crate shot past in something straight out of mad max.
Those days were fun.
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1988 Mercedes w124 superturbo diesel 508hp 1996 Mercedes s124 e300 diesel wagon 1990 BMW E30 V8 M60 powered! 1999 BMW E46 323ci project car
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Did a track day at Mallory Park in a £350 ebay special saxo vts, was great fun and it spent five sessions with the throttle pedal getting very intimate with the carpet. A mate started to drive it back to the south west the next day and it vibrated horrendously as soon as the throttle was pressed more than a fraction, after a quick bolt check and finding everything tight I muttered something along the lines of there's driver's and then there's driver's and limped it home from Nuneaton basically at idle, regretting my bravado every time I needed to go up an incline!!! Further examination at home found that the inner long driveshaft had eaten itself to the point where there was only one bearing left and one other peg without a bearing, the third peg had evaporated into thin air, assume that it had happened whilst being enthusiastically driven the day before as it was fine for the couple of hundred miles it was shaken down before the track day! My wee bro and his pals were big 106 / saxo fans back in the day. After seeing some of their special go faster engineering the thought of a £350 saxo would fill me with fear! Highlights included; mole grips on rear brake lines and missing calipers, an intercooler fitted on a n/a engine, battery wiring replaced with the thinnest wires to save weight and a supercharger installation that looked ok until you realised that clearance for the pulley was made by smashing the back out of a headlight... Wow, it wasn't quite that bad although it certainly had some quirks!! Highlights including a very lowered front suspension with a standard height rear beam of questionable pedigree, a gearbox that actually lunched itself and seized solid about 300 miles after the track day, an ability to have 3 inches of rain water in it as soon as the sun went behind a cloud and the best part, the passenger door hinges had been reattached with a very wonky arc welder, the paint over that repair was flawless and took me a while to notice it!!! Ironically, really miss the fun of driving that car and the fear of impending doom it could cause!!!
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Badger
Part of things
Posts: 250
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Back in the early 2000's I was going out with a girl who lived in a rough part of Bristol, and one night a group of local delinquents took a dislike to both me and my Mk3 Fiesta. They smashed in the windscreen and I ended up Ace Ventura-ing it at 1 in the morning a half mile to local repair shop for a new one. Later on they smashed in nearly every body panel. Between that and my 20 stone mate trying to Starsky and Hutch across the bonnet it looked a wreck - I got pulled a lot by the Police, but people gave me plenty of room in traffic!
More recently I hit a massive pothole in my Mk1 Leon, after which it had some funny handling. It looked OK when I inspected it, so thought the rear was just out of alignment, and it turns out I was kind of right... After driving it back home an hour on the motorway I jacked it up for a proper look and realised the left wheel could move back and forth about 6" (which obviously I couldn't do with weight on it). Turns out one of the two rear suspension mounts on the subframe had separated from the bushes. The entire subframe was pivoting around the remaining mount. In hindsight I think I was very lucky!
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I saw a YouTube clip of someone with a similar car, where they went a bit fast round a bend, clipped a kerb, and the whole rear subframe got ripped off!
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