1985 Mazda RX-7 S3 : ...Wheels? p13

on the power runs, the first had 73 whp and nearly 60bhp drag, the other two had 96 whp and 40 drag. it looks like it was run in 4th gear, then 2nd and 3rd graph in 3rd gear

Cheers Graham. It's mainly because I like the idea of mucking around with a 12A! It's part of the car, it's how it should be. I already have a powerful, injected modern rotary so I have the luxury of trying something different with the FB. Spent a long time weighing up all the alternatives and just decided that the 12A was the best way of being honest to the car. Yeah, we could throw in a Series 4 EGi lump and convert it to steering rack while we were at it and all kinds of other upgrades, but then it wouldn't be the same car. I don't want to lose the character of the car, just make it a bit better; I've made that mistake before, of thinking tuning up every aspect is the way to go and then ended up with something that's just unpleasant to drive. This way, hopefully, I'll end up with my car... only better.

and if not, I can always drop in a 13BT

Sorry, mate. Not only did I completely miss this question till now, I've also no idea as to the answer. I wasn't paying attention to such things, makes a nice change for FD lean-det-engine death paranoia!

anyway, some news... just because I'm lazy doesn't mean I'm idle, lol. I'd spent the past few weeks getting stuff ready for what should have been the great hand-over. I wanted to get everything I could sorted before giving the car to Super 7 to fit the new ported engine they were building for the car. Bear with me, this may take a while!

First thing was a jaunt up to darkest Northamptonshire. Mark (K) was clearing out all his remaining FB stuff cos now he's seen the light of FD glory it was in the way and it had got to the point he was going to just tip it. I didn't really need most of it, but like all good hoarders I can't bear to see what are essentially now irreplaceable out of production parts chucked away. Because one day someone will post saying "my windscreen wiper linkage has snapped" and I'll think "ooooh, now where did I put those three I blagged off Mark!". I'm a custodian for obscurity, lol. No, please, no need to thank me

Anyway, it was weird driving actually past Santa Pod and not going in, but at least in a rare moment of perception I'd stolen the waff's F*rd rather than try to fit it all in an RX-7. Just as well. It ended up full. And I mean full!



Big thanks to Mark for insisting I took it all, anyway. I felt a bit cheeky just bunging him some beer money and scarpering. There were certainly a couple of bits that made it worth the trip for me, things I'd been after for a while. Firstly was a decent seat. The one that came with the 2nd hand leather interior I scored had a couple of problems. One was that the foam padding was completely knackered, absolutely squashed flat. Either the car it came from was owned by an elephantine fatty or it had done interstellar mileage, but after a while it got pretty uncomfortable sitting directly on non-upholstered springs and there was no lateral support at all so I tended to slide about in corners. The second problem was that the quadrant gear for the reclining mechanism had stripped all its teeth so the seat back was either all the way upright or all the way gangster lean but wouldn't stay anywhere in between.

So, the first thing I did was inexplicably manage to shatter my 12mm socket getting the runner mounting bolt undone. Yeah, that real PITA one under the rear trans-tunnel side of the seat



Hopefully this wasn't going to be an omen for how the job was going to progress. Armed with a socket that had the advantage of having all six sides still attached, I got the curse word out




Then I pressed on with disassembling the "new" seat from Mark. It's easy enough to split the seat into its halves; just a couple of socket head bolts on one side, one screw in the lumbar support crank and that's about it. I didn't touch the actual spring-loaded mechanism for the recliner; the spring in this is designed to lift fatties against gravity. If it cuts loose you're going to lose an arm!



As you can see in these comparison pics the seat backs were very different in how pert and supportive the lumbar side cushions were. Mark's seat they stand nice and proud;



on mine they're all floppy and baggy. There's probably a joke in there somewhere. Not only that, but presumably because this was a one-off trimming job, the dimensions of the leather are clearly slightly wrong to the point the trimmer couldn't even get it fastened underneath where the back mounts to the base, and all the foam was just hanging out of its gaping gusset. Euwww. Definitely a joke in there



So essentially what holds the seatcover to the frame are hogrings. These are little c-shaped clips that when you squeeze them in the jaws of special pliers (called hogring pliers, imaginatively) make a spiral shape and clamp the fabric or leather to wires inserted through the foam or to the seat springs. Fortunately, having stripped and repaired the leather seat on my FD, I had some pliers and hogrings leftover. The pliers are devilishly simple yet clever, like all the best inventions. They're essentially sprung snipe-nose pliers with a dentent machined into each jaw that grips the hogring and forces it round on itself when you squeeze the handle. The spring keeps the jaws gripping the hogring so they are one-handed to use while you manouvre the material into the right place with the other



However, nothing is as easy in practice as in theory, and before I could even think of using clever pliers I had to strip both seats.. which meant uncurling a load of hogrings. And there are a LOT! Some are obvious, some more hidden. For example, every arrow on this pic of the base is a hogring. The easiest way to to lever a slight gap in the ring with a screwdriver, then un-curl it with longnosed pliers. However, restricted access sometimes makes this a properly irritating test of patience



by way of example, there is one here, in the corner-web of the seat base structure, clipped around the frame of the springs. This space is about two inches by three, surrounded by sharp metal edges. Yeah, these ones had me inventing some new swear words just for the occasion!



However, it's a therapeutically simple procedure and basically I like the fact that an entire seat can be stripped and re-assembled using these few tools;



The back is a bit more complex than the base. It has this weird plastic tray in it, presumably to give the back of it some rigidity. It's held on by freaky rubbery surgical tape where the glue has gone weird with age and heat and basically turned into some kind of permanently gooey un-set tar type stuff that sticks to bloody everything.



The seat cover has pockets that basically stick backwards from the inside of the front face and these are hogring-ed through the foam to the spring structure at the back of the frame. Which means you have to get right down in here with your two pliers/screwdriver routine, all the while needing at least two extra hands to hold the damned thing apart for access. Nadgery doesn't even come close to describing it, and I gained a whole new respect for people who do this for a living!



At first I was stymied as to how to remove the headrest, until I discoverd that a) some squirty grease freed up the seized runners nicely and b) one of the plastic guides that hold the runners in the seat has a little spring clip built into it that you can release through a tiny groove using a small screwdriver. Then I could remove the plastic guides from the top of the seat, the last thing holding the cover on



One of these was broken on my old seat, so it was good to get a decent pair fitted and stop the slight lateral movement in the headrest. So, all disassembled, the poor state of the foam can clearly be seen now. Here the arrow shows where the metal frame of the base has actually worked its way through the foam and the foam itself is all distorted and useless. This is caused by decades of lazy people flopping out of the side of the seat without bothering to use their legs to exit the car, lol



The one out of Mark's seat was a lot better, though I took the precaution of spray-fixing some linen onto the side bolster as a bit of a preventative against similar wear starting. The lines in the foam with the little circles every so often are the places where the wires in the covers go, and the little circles are where the hogrings have to be clipped through from the underside and go around the base springs (or whatever) and the cover wires.



The worst part of re-assembly was this bit at the top of the seat. Imagine the inside of this, where the right-angle of the indent for the headrest is. There are two wires in here that need to be hogringed to the frame, and they're arm-deep within the structure, holding pliers, blind, against the tension of the leather and trying to line up the rings past two ninety-degree bends in the metal. It was one of those jobs where I actually gave up in outright fury the evening of the first day because something was going to get smashed. Went back and started again in the morning, got them done first time. Bliss. The rings on the top rear wire I ended up doing by wiggling the pliers in through the holes for the plastic headrest guides. Took a few goes, but a lot easier than going in from the bottom. Oooer...



Not entirely sure why I took this photo. Maybe to illustrate that even with a choice of two completely different fasteners in the two seats I still managed to use a third one. The lumbar clicky support thing (it's basically a plate on a spring inside the back) had been my only means of adjustment on the old knackered seat so I felt it deserved the best in its new home. Interestingly, despite the fact that the cover was now fitted a lot better than it had been on the original seat, I had to enlarge the hole to let the mechanism here protrude through, which was a bit odd. I guess not all seats are exactly the same size



I know the cover fitted better because I actually managed to get it closed at the bottom. It was tight, but I used the method of putting a hogring in each side, then drawing them together with a cable tie through both, a bit like an industrial-strength zip. The I could get just a single ring through both sides and remove the extra ones and cable ties



And there she is; finished. Looks slightly weird in this photo cos I gave it a going-over with the leather cleaner and hide food, so it's a bit greasy as the stuff soaks in.



And then back in the car. Yeah, it doesn't look madly different from where I started but in terms of comfort it's a whole new car all over again. Plus I have the satisfaction of knowing it's better than new, the foam is more resilient than factory and hopefully I'll never have to see another hogring. Ever

So, whilst I was waiting for Coke to dissolve rust, I could turn my thoughts to a bit of TLC in the engine bay. There were quite a few bits of rust starting and as y'all know, once you let these cars start rusting, it's like time-lapse film they dissolve so fast. So I started in on this;



In actual fact, I really noticed how grim it was all getting when jacking the car up to get the brake caliper pistons pumped out. I treated some rust forming in the arch, twigged how filthy everything was, how the wheels had started to corrode quite annoyingly despite plenty of Rimwax allegedly protecting against the winter weather...



...then I noticed stuff like this ridiculous item still being in situ...



and one thing led to another. Before you know it, half the front end's in pieces! Dirty, rusty pieces at that. And yeah, that's the bottle for the headlight washer jets. Which hadn't worked in all the time I had the car, and indeed there weren't even any jets connected since I'd swapped the Elford bumper over. Not really much use in carrying a ballast tank around then, unless you're driving a submarine. My first mission was to get rid of it, something that proved easier said than done. First thing to yield up after much penetrating fluid was...



...apparently about the only brake vent deflector plate left on a UK FB, judging by my failed attempts to find another! Indeed, I don't have one the other side either. Anyway, set to work wire brushing it back and though rusty as hell there were only a couple of places it had blown right through. Looks like I saved it just in time.



How useful it actually is I'm not so sure. On the stock bumper these sit behind the little straked vents in the valance but the Elford bumper has these replaced by foglights, so there's no real airflow for the brake vents to direct. But since I've got it, I figured I might as well use it and if nothing else it'll stop some of the road slurry getting flung up inside the front of the arch. So, a couple of coats of good old fashioned lumpy Hammerite later it was ready to go back on



but first I had to divest that area of the washer reservoir. Getting the tank itself out would have been easy enough, but that would have left a big unnecessary bracket, and this was much more tricky to get gone. Mazda in their wisdom held it by a few bolts, one of which faced towards the front of the car. Maybe with the original bumper valance this is accessible but on my setup it really wasn't. In fact, without actually removing the front bumper the only way I could get to the bolt was to clip together just about every socket extension I had with a UJ in the middle and then go in through the sidelight hole! Accuracy was a bit variable with about a three-foot long socket extension with a hinge in the middle, thankfully the bolt wasn't seized or I'd have been in trouble. Eventually, after much patience and an bit of wiggling analagous to trying to fit a frozen turkey through a catflap one-handed, I was triumphant!



It was still full of stagnant water that had been there for at least the three years I'd had the car, probably a lot longer. I guess I ought to count myself lucky not to have caught Legionnaires Disease or something, lol. So I polished back the wheels as well as I could. Annoyingly, there's some pitting to the polished rims but they came up well enough with a lot of Autosol. To get them any better I'm going to have to bite the bullet and get in there with the wet and dry and some mopping, which I just didn't have the time or inclination for just now. Irritating, but I should have known better that just cos a manufacturer claims them to be all-weather doesn't mean it's true



So now I could get on with what I wanted to in the first place; tidying up the bay a bit. Simple enough to strip down the radiator shroud panels, though you need some other method of supporting the radiator while they're off (I used bungees, lol). So I ended up with these disreputable items;



and the little bracket that the expansion bottle clips into. I have to say, I love the easy way the bottle just slides into detent on this bracket, it's a nice touch and makes me wonder why all the tanks on an FD are such an occult pain in the to get to and remove



So these were wire brushed back



and treated with rust convertor... and one thing I've found over the years is that all rust convertors are not created equal. Kurust might have been bought out by Hammerite, but in fairness they know a thing or too about rust treatment anyway, and the original Kurust for me is still the best. For a start, it actually stays where you put it... cheap brands tend to be too thin and run off the place you want them to stick and work on. Also, I find you can sand it back without it disappearing completely and it seems a more permanent solution in as much as it stops rust coming back



I painted the radiator cowling with spray Hammerite because I want it to stay black, not turn back into rust as soon as it rains. I know many people hate the stuff, but I don't mind it; it serves a purpose, and it gives a much better finish nowadays than back when



The expansion tank bracket I painted body colour. Not really sure why, just because I could, I suppose. It had originally been just galvanised without paint at all. The paint I actually got from Halfrauds. Yeah, they are good for something! Just give them the paint code and for twelve quid you get a colour-matched rattle can. It's not a perfect match, I mean I wouldn't try to blend in a wing using it, but for brackets in the bay and such it's fine. In fact, my paint isn't a factory colour match any more anyway; when Jason sprayed the bodykit the paint code came nowhere near matching as years of exposure had taken their toll, so we ended up mixing an almost bespoke colour somewhere near Tender Blue but not quite. It's quite possible the Halfords one is how mine would have looked 28 years ago



While the radiator ducting was all apart I took the opportunity to fit a pair of decent horns to replace the whisper-quiet and tired originals. I made up a mini-loom for them, which gave me a chance to renew my long dormant soldering and connector crimping skills. I actually bought a proper OE-quality connector crimp tool a while back but this was the first chance I'd had to play with it.



And it was probably just as well I was messing around with wiring because it led me to discover perhaps the reason I'd been experiencing a few electrical gremlins. A couple of times the car struggled to start and the battery seemed to not hold a charge as well as you'd expect, despite the voltmeter showing good charge. Think this may have been the culprit;



Guess that's what 29 years of over-tightening a battery clamp will do. Someone had added in a spacer at some point, and it had just chewed right through the metal over time! Annoyingly, the only way to get the knackered clamp off the cable was to cut it and then the cable was just too short to reach the battery terminal with the new clamp. So I had to cut the cable off the union below the fusible links and run a new length with a new clamp. Still, it gave me the chance to replace it with a bigger gauge wire so hopefully that'll work better than ever. While I was messing around down there with cables I replaced the nasty plastic clips on the HT wires with some nice alloy ones, as discovered over the Pond by Jesse



So the re-assembly could now begin, Stainless fasteners throughout, of course!



I also found time to make a new home for the VIN plate, which was dislodged from its original place on the firewall because it was right where the buttress plate on the strut brace went. I originally intended to put in some rivnuts here, but handily the thickness of steel was enough that I could just tap a thread directly into the top of the turret plate. Which is good, cos it meant an M4 hole instead of a gurt big one that might compromise structurally strength rather more!



So here it all is going back together. I put blanking grommets in where the holes for the washer pump wiring and that had been, though there's not much you can do about the big hole where the filler neck used to go



and of course this was another opportunity to feed my braided steel hose fetish, so I replaced the unlovely rubber overflow pipe with some nice braided



and spent a few extra hours swapping out every rusty bolt I could easily get to with stainless, such as here on the fuel pressure reg, which I can't remember if I posted pics of before. But anyway, here it is, and the bolts had rusted already (seems the Italians are still using the same quality of steel on their automotive products that Mazda were three decades ago!). Much of this wiring will be tidied up as part of the engine swap, including I guess losing the little throttle-blipping starter robot. Which is actually a bit sad, really, lol. I wanted to move onto the nearside of the bay and the other radiator shroud, which meant taking the battery out and all that, but I ran out of time.



On days when the weather meant I didn't want to be outside or under the bonnet, I plodded on with a few other jobs. I finally found a company offering alloy intake trumpets for Webers... Weber only offer plated steel, which looks utterly cack and very few companies in the aftermarket seem to make them in alloy for 48IDAs. So, the alloy ones I eventually found were an improvement but could be better still



I think because they're spun they have little striations all around the circumference, which meant whilst they were nicer than the steel, they weren't exactly what you'd call shiny. So I got busy with the masking tape to protect the mounting flange from damage...



... and started sanding back. It's always a bit dis-heartening taking something halfway decently finished and making it look curse word, but it'll pay off in the long run



At least these are small, flat (or at least mostly single-planar) so it didn't take long to work up through 120, 240, 400, 800 and finally to 1200 grit sandpaper. This is at the point of a final sand with 2000 grit before polishing... the one on the right, obviously, lol. Un-sanded one included for contrast



Annoyingly, my bench grinder blew up mid-way through polishing the vast expanse of a mates' straight-six Opel Commodore rocker box so I had to do the final polishing with a drill and arbor mount, so the fini9sh wasn't quite a s good as I'd have liked. If Frosts ever get round to delivering the replacement grinder I ordered I might give them another whizz over. However, they're certainly shinier than they were;



...especially when compared against the eezzee-scratch steel original Weber ones!



Here my work is being subjected to the Conrad Quality Scrutiny Test. Seems to have passed. Of course, these will mostly be hidden by the tea-strainer airfilters, but that's not the point. I'll know they're there and the inch or so that shows will be shiny as hell, lol. Don't I always say it's all about the details...

So, I got an FC oil cooler from Ian and while it was perfectly serviceable it had a couple of drawbacks. One was that it had taken a bit of a clout was dented quite badly along the top and that many of the fins were damaged and crumbling. Not enough to compromise integrity, but enough... if you see what I mean. The other was that it didn't have any oil lines with it, which wasn't necessarily a problem except that it meant it was rather difficult to measure up the fitting sizes required to make up replacements. Anyway, MR TOOL came up with another setup, and this time it included the lines.



although having seen how nasty they are, I almost wished I hadn't bothered! They're the usual stock manufacturer compromise of efficiency over aesthetics; nasty nylon overbraid combined with random metal sections and grimy rubber surrounds, plus the gnarliest and rustiest banjo fitments to finish it all off. As an added bonus, this cooler kindly picked up for me by Ramon was still full of some particularly noxious oil, which I left to glop out in it's own time. It didn't seem in any hurry...



anyway, having spare oil coolers never hurts, and at least I had the original lines to use as a pattern now. These coolers have a reputation for being the best and easiest upgrade for the FB and they are made by Calsonic, who are a quality firm most memorable for their sponsorship of the awesome JGTC Skylines a few years back



So the first step on the path to make this quality item righteous once more was to straighten out the bent fins. This is tedious but not especially difficult.



A few minutes... OK, quite a few... spent straightening with a small, thin penknife blades either side of each bent fin soon had them all proper and ready for airflow again



The next step was to clean off all the horrid, manky edging foam. I achieved this by the rather unexpected method of making it really inflammable with some strong solvents and then inadvertently setting fire to it by accident. This included setting fire to me as well, since a big chunk of burning foam fell into my boot and gave me quite severe gyp while I was still trying to stop the garage burning down! Remember to be prepared, kids, and don't play with fire, lol



anyway, the cooler wasn't much improved for the removal of the foam, so I took it upon myself to give it a bit of a polish. As is usual with these things, it turned into a lot of a polish. Not a perfect job, but it's hardly going to be seen where it's gonna live so good enough



then a quick Google Images-sourced printout yielded a stencil that in best Blue Peter method I got an adult to help me with the scissors on



Sadly, the first attempt I did in black came out OK but there wasn't really enough contrast between the surface of the cooler for the lettering to stand out;



Plan B involved... well, changing the colour, basically



which I feel turned out rather better. Due to having done the other side black already I had no option for avoiding it ending up a muddy mess but to try for some natty 70s style shadow writing, which came out OK but probably would have been better if I'd just done it plain red to start with



After asking around it seemed that most people with experience of various oil line fittings feel that Torques stuff is almost as good as Earls or Goodridge whilst being a fraction of the cost, so I ordered some in. Still not exactly what you'd call cheap, mind, but I'd decided there was no way I was going to re-use the original lines, even if they would stretch far enough



The only dismaying thing about these fittings is how easy they are to scratch the finish. Even with the correct sized alloy spanner and with tape around the alloy to protect it, I still managed a couple of nicks and scratches. You need to be quite brutal with them to get them assembled onto the lines properly, and it seems inevitable there'll be some damage to the finish in the process. For future reference, the fittings into the oil cooler are M18 and the one into the rear plate is, too. The front cover fitting, just typically cos Mazda like to keep you guessing, is M16. So I ended up with three M18 to AN-10 unions, one M16 to AN-10 and then three 90º bends and one 120º one for the front cover connection. I measured that two metres of -10 hose would be sufficient, and it was... just!



Still, if you compare it to the earlier state of the cooler when I first got it, hopefully once again you'll agree it was worthwhile? Or maybe I really am losing it...





However, my insistence on using "proper" fittings caused another problem; the width of the fittings meant the oil cooler needed to fit quite off-centre to accommodate them. this meant that the architecture of the intake area stopped me from using a simple U-camp to mount at the offside end



you can see the run of the lines and the distance the fittings stick out from the side of the cooler meant the whole lot had to be shifted as far across to the drivers' side as possible. This is a quick test-fit to see how it all went



Anyway, I made up a template and cut a bracket to mount the end of the cooler from. Annoyingly, the only alloy I had was quite thin and every DIY or ironmongery shop I tried only had the same thin stuff or alloy floor chequer plate, which I point-blank refuse to utilise for anything cos it makes me think of hideous 80s Reliant trike conversions made out of angle iron and chequer plate. So I had a go with what I had



and to be fair the finished thing looked OK, fit well and used pre-existing threaded holes in the car structure so saved me having to drill and tap anything. I wasn't desperately pleased with the rivets, but that's the downside of not being able to weld, I guess



I made up a couple of rubber shims, sandwiched between aluminised heat barrier, to give the cooler itself a bit of isolation from the mounts



Sadly, my fears were confirmed and on test-fitting under the weight of the cooler, the new bracket deformed slightly. Not too bad, but it would weigh even more when it was full of oil, so it seemed my alloy attempt just wasn't man enough for the job



Oh well, live and learn. On to Version 2! This one I made out of steel, specifically the massive oversized numberplate holder that came on my MazdaSpeed FD bumper which obstructed about 80% of the airflow through the bumper, so I immediately took off and threw in a drawer in the garage. Seven years later it finds a new use, and at least there'll be a tiny fraction of my FB that is forever genuine JDM y0!



For the other end I was able to use the simple method of putting a massive U-bolt around the reinforcement bar in the chassis. I got a 50mm-diamter super-strong marine stainless bolt that I think is meant to act as a mooring point or something!



A cheapy Halfords U-bolt sacrificed its clamping component, and I made two sets of spacers up and sprayed them all to avoid rust issues later



My plan was to clamp the U-bolt to the chassis, then use spacer and bolt the cooler to the U-bolt. This would mean the cooler could be removed if need be without having to remove the entire clamp and everything. In practice, this was a mistake because it meant as I tightened the U-bolt in place using the first set of spacers it splayed the arms out slightly, meaning it no longer fitted into the bracket to mount to the oil cooler "ear". Caused a bit of swearing and sweating to overcome. I might go back and make it just the one fitment. As it turned out, this was the least of my worries. Somehow, probably because I'd copied version 2 from version 1 bracket, and I was in a rush because time was running out, and because the original bracket was bent, and because I committed the cardinal sin of not measuring twice and cutting once...



Yep, properly on the curse word! This is made worse by the fact that the U-Bolt was slightly miss-aligned and could be moved round a bit, but I'd still got the holes in the wrong place on the offside mount. Ah, well, can't win them all. By now it was 4 p.m. Friday afternoon and the car was due in Super 7 for the engine swap that week. I decided that it was good enough, and that with all the other work they'd be doing, they guys in the shop could hardly begrudge re-drilling a couple of holes for me, so I set off to deliver the car. This had been a couple of weeks of work, most spare moments spent on one or other of these jobs all in and around each other. Overall I was pretty satisfied, despite a couple of wonky brackets, lol. However, I didn't know I was about to meet a complete retard in a Vauxhall Corsa who hasn't the sense God gave the hole in a cow's and doesn't know enough to not smash into other traffic.

And the rest, as they say, is history...



...or it will be, one day. ONE day I'll look back and laugh...

Basically, a spotty youth in his £100 Corsa completely failed to Give Way at a Give Way and pulled out right into me. Since it was a narrow road parked on both sides and since I was right bloody well on top of him, the blind cretin, I literally had nowhere to go and that was that. Smashed the Elford bumper, which is essentially irreplaceable and hopefully can be fixed or it's gone forever. The wing is mutilated, still trying to source a good replacement. The wheel was pushed far enough back to touch the rear of the wheel arch and tear out the mounting bolts for the sideskirt, so the suspension is knackered; strut, control arms, droplinks, etc.

Seldom have I been angrier in my life, and I think it's fair to say the old Bill were called as much because of my reaction and in fear of the kiddies' life than because of the actual accident. Now fervently praying the insurance company don't write it off as beyond economical. And yeah, he didn't mean to do it, and yeah, he admitted he didn't see me (like, HOW? I was right in front of him) and yeah he's young and can't help being an idiot but then again I didn't ask him to smash my car to bits after I'd spent weeks working on it either , did I? I mean, just look at the bloody thing



getting angry again now just thinking about it. This, kids, is why we can never have nice things...

Thats such a sad sight especially after all the work that had gone into it. Hope that rare front bumper can be repaired as it looks awesome, look forward to seeing it back on the road as soon as possible

Great to see some positive news on this as its a great looking car nice work on the polybush opportunity too, I'd love to know where the insurance company are finding these couple hundred quid FB's as I'd have one for myself!

Also nice to see the FD being used as a totally efficient parts hauler my jag currently has a Ford Fiesta tailgate on the backseat so I know the feeling somewhat haha

Glad to see all your progress, and happy that the insurance is sorted.

Thank god this is being repaired.