Right, I've been a member here for ages and hardly every visited or posted. May as well change that given I own/have owned several retro cars at this point.
First up the motor I've owned the longest my Doloshite:
I bought this car in 2012 at the age of 20. It was the second car I'd ever owned, the first being a 2008 Toyota Yaris as my parents were dead set against me having an old car as a daily transport (rightly so, as it transpired).
I did all the things you should never do when buying a car, it was the first old car I went to see, it was local, I never really looked over it properly, I never drove it, the owner never went over 45mph on the test drive. I handed over £1400 (haggled down from £1600 at a time when you could buy a minter for that) and drove it home.
One owner for over 30 years (and then many in a short space of time), low mileage (with no documentation to back it up), bought by the owner from a dealer in Newcastle (who probably tarted it up for sale) having just had most of the ignition parts replaced (with repo bits made of cheese). What could possibly go wrong?
The car immediately showed itself to be unreliable, frequently refusing to start in cold weather despite being garaged. The throttle linkage was bodged up with wire. The O/S headlight was wedged in place with a bit of garden hose as the mount had rotted away entirely. The electrics were terrible and using the indicators and wipers at the same time would cause the radio to die. The car was wearing 7 year old budget tyres and handled like and the driver's side door lock used to occasionally lock me inside for no discernible reason. It did however look alright:
I obviously had grand plans for it and mocked them up in Photoshop, as one does:
Within 300 miles or purchase the car suffered it's first major mechanical failure, when driving homewards one day there was a knock from the engine bay followed by a loud tapping sound and the car only running on three cylinders. I managed to limp it the remaining few miles home.
It transpired a rocker arm had snapped, on the shaft, through sheer wear and the top end was coated in solidified oil:
Oh dear. Being fairly impoverished at this point I bought a second hand set of rockers from a Spitfire and fitted them, the has been running them ever since.
The car continued to be unreliable as hell until I fitted electronic ignition as the parts fitted, despite being brand new, were wibblepoo quality. With that done the car became a lot easier to use and I racked up quite a few miles, blew two head gaskets, killed a starter motor and altenator and noticed that the car was starting to use quite a bit of oil...
Then it's MOT ran out and I did the sensible thing and bought a 1976 Dolomite 1850HL instead of fixing it.
I'll detail the trials and tribulations of that in another thread (in summary I crashed it within 2 weeks of purchase and it was never quite right afterwards).
I sold my modern car at the time and used the 1850HL as my daily driver and eventually got the 1300 MOT'd just in time for me to move out of my parent's place in to my own home. I even got into Craptical Plastics!
The 1850HL then failed it's MOT on needing every single brake component replaced, the discs were shot, the pads/shoes were shot, the pipes were rusty and the hoses perished. It also had massive holes in one of the chassis legs. I'd just spent quite a bit of money having the propshaft U/J and rubbers fixed and moving house so couldn't afford to have the work done so I set the car to one side and threw the 1300 into daily use.
For about 6 months the Doloshite lugged me to and from work clocking up 60 miles a days. It got about 35mpg but also drank 5L of 20w50 a week, the exhaust gave up, the starter died (twice), another alternator bit the dust, the clutch hydraulics started leaking, I reversed it into a parked Ford Fiesta and creased the rear bumper/bootlid, the exhaust snapped at the downpipe and then the manifold studs sheared off.
At the time I was working 50 hours a week with an 45mins of 50mph commuting each way and lacked any garage to work in, I ended up farming most of the work out to my local garage which cost a fortune, the 1850HL continued dissolving into my driveway.
By this point the 1300's bodywork was also starting to suffer badly, old filler repairs to the front wing tips had buldged back out, the rear wheel arches had been bodged up at some point and were literally peeling away from the rest of the car and life on the Aberdeenshire coast was just eating away at it.
Then when leaving work the day before the MOT was due I found the tired starter motor had completely died, and that the clutch had run out of fluid... My supervisor had to push start the car and I drove it to my parent's place and shoved it in their garage. I asked my Dad if he could give me a lift to work for a few days until I could get the car fixed and he bought me a 2005 Honda Civic the following day and instructed me to stop trying to use ancient crocks as daily transport.
For the following year the 1300 sat in my parent's garage, the 1850 was moved to a friend's shed. My parent's then moved house so I started renting a garage nearby my place and had the 1300 trailered there. In the interim the 70,000 mile Civic snapped a halfshaft and the exhaust disintegrated leading to me spending more having it repaired than it'd been bought for.
Late 2016 was a bad time for me and the cars, no progress was made, I was diagnosed with severe depression and started counselling and then in Feb of 2017 I lost my job largely due to my deteriorating mental state.
I gave the 1850 to the bloke who's shed it was in and decided to free myself from the miserable environment that was the rural north east and moved to Glasgow. Jumping from a detached house with a drive to a one bed flat on a packed street. At this point I was still renting the garage for the 1300, now a good 200 miles north. I hatched a plan to go fetch the car.
Me and a friend would go up on a Friday, get the car running and driving for the first time in two years with the help of my 1850 storing mate and then I'd drive the car back to Glasgow, over the Cairngorm mountain range in winter, to a pre-booked MOT. PERFECT.
We headed up there and weather conditions were highly favourable both for driving a decrepit car in and working in a garage with no power.
We reached the car late on Friday, saw that it was indeed still there and retreated to my parent's place near Strathdon to sleep.
Saturday and early Sunday was entirely spent working on the car. Messing with the ignition timing, un-sticking jammed throttle/choke cables, replacing fuel lines, replacing the fuel pump with a brand new one which transpired to be DOA so refitting the old one and finally bleeding the clutch in the dark on Saturday night in a gale force wind warming our hands on the engine block...
On Sunday morning the car was given a final going over, some fibreglass and Halford's rattle cans were employed to "repair" some rather extreme rust holes, the tyres were pumped up, I gave the car two spins around the block and declared use good to go...
The drive back to many hours but at about 10ish on Sunday evening I arrived outside my flat in Glasgow with hardly any bother aside from some minor on-the-fly ignition timing tweaks on the first bit of the trip.
It went in for it's MOT the following morning and failed, as expected, but on nothing really major aside from a rusty sill which I had welded up. I then left it with the garage for them to sort out the inefficient rear brakes.
They kept the car for so long I got bored and bought an £850 Triumph Acclaim to replace my Civic (more on that later). Then the Acclaim failed it's MOT so I took the Dolly home and sorted the brakes myself. At this point the thing became MOT exempt so I never bothered sending it back.
Since then I've been generally tinkering with it. The engine is still a bag of wibblepoo and sounds like it's full of marbles but it still goes alright despite the massive oil consumption. The bodywork looks pretty shabby but structurally the car is good. I managed to fix up the rear panel/bumper so it looks less crashed and currently the only problem is that it suffers from fuel evaporation when it gets hot and one of the front brakes is binding slightly.
It currently serves as a backup car and local cruiser while the Acclaim is used for commuting and long trips. Now I have more free time and am loaded up on anti-depressants it is far easier to stay motivated and to actually get some work done on the car. I've also improved my skill set considerably and now think nothing of dismantling large bits of a car at the side of the road or embarking on a 13 hour weldathon to get a car to MOT standard in a single day...
I no longer want to modify the car in the same way either, I've come to embrace it's scruffy, giffer-tastic demeanour. Although I would quite like a nicely built mk4 Spitfire engine and overdrive gearbox to give it a bit more oomph for when the original engine finally dies to death.
First up the motor I've owned the longest my Doloshite:
I bought this car in 2012 at the age of 20. It was the second car I'd ever owned, the first being a 2008 Toyota Yaris as my parents were dead set against me having an old car as a daily transport (rightly so, as it transpired).
I did all the things you should never do when buying a car, it was the first old car I went to see, it was local, I never really looked over it properly, I never drove it, the owner never went over 45mph on the test drive. I handed over £1400 (haggled down from £1600 at a time when you could buy a minter for that) and drove it home.
One owner for over 30 years (and then many in a short space of time), low mileage (with no documentation to back it up), bought by the owner from a dealer in Newcastle (who probably tarted it up for sale) having just had most of the ignition parts replaced (with repo bits made of cheese). What could possibly go wrong?
The car immediately showed itself to be unreliable, frequently refusing to start in cold weather despite being garaged. The throttle linkage was bodged up with wire. The O/S headlight was wedged in place with a bit of garden hose as the mount had rotted away entirely. The electrics were terrible and using the indicators and wipers at the same time would cause the radio to die. The car was wearing 7 year old budget tyres and handled like and the driver's side door lock used to occasionally lock me inside for no discernible reason. It did however look alright:
I obviously had grand plans for it and mocked them up in Photoshop, as one does:
Within 300 miles or purchase the car suffered it's first major mechanical failure, when driving homewards one day there was a knock from the engine bay followed by a loud tapping sound and the car only running on three cylinders. I managed to limp it the remaining few miles home.
It transpired a rocker arm had snapped, on the shaft, through sheer wear and the top end was coated in solidified oil:
Oh dear. Being fairly impoverished at this point I bought a second hand set of rockers from a Spitfire and fitted them, the has been running them ever since.
The car continued to be unreliable as hell until I fitted electronic ignition as the parts fitted, despite being brand new, were wibblepoo quality. With that done the car became a lot easier to use and I racked up quite a few miles, blew two head gaskets, killed a starter motor and altenator and noticed that the car was starting to use quite a bit of oil...
Then it's MOT ran out and I did the sensible thing and bought a 1976 Dolomite 1850HL instead of fixing it.
I'll detail the trials and tribulations of that in another thread (in summary I crashed it within 2 weeks of purchase and it was never quite right afterwards).
I sold my modern car at the time and used the 1850HL as my daily driver and eventually got the 1300 MOT'd just in time for me to move out of my parent's place in to my own home. I even got into Craptical Plastics!
The 1850HL then failed it's MOT on needing every single brake component replaced, the discs were shot, the pads/shoes were shot, the pipes were rusty and the hoses perished. It also had massive holes in one of the chassis legs. I'd just spent quite a bit of money having the propshaft U/J and rubbers fixed and moving house so couldn't afford to have the work done so I set the car to one side and threw the 1300 into daily use.
For about 6 months the Doloshite lugged me to and from work clocking up 60 miles a days. It got about 35mpg but also drank 5L of 20w50 a week, the exhaust gave up, the starter died (twice), another alternator bit the dust, the clutch hydraulics started leaking, I reversed it into a parked Ford Fiesta and creased the rear bumper/bootlid, the exhaust snapped at the downpipe and then the manifold studs sheared off.
At the time I was working 50 hours a week with an 45mins of 50mph commuting each way and lacked any garage to work in, I ended up farming most of the work out to my local garage which cost a fortune, the 1850HL continued dissolving into my driveway.
By this point the 1300's bodywork was also starting to suffer badly, old filler repairs to the front wing tips had buldged back out, the rear wheel arches had been bodged up at some point and were literally peeling away from the rest of the car and life on the Aberdeenshire coast was just eating away at it.
Then when leaving work the day before the MOT was due I found the tired starter motor had completely died, and that the clutch had run out of fluid... My supervisor had to push start the car and I drove it to my parent's place and shoved it in their garage. I asked my Dad if he could give me a lift to work for a few days until I could get the car fixed and he bought me a 2005 Honda Civic the following day and instructed me to stop trying to use ancient crocks as daily transport.
For the following year the 1300 sat in my parent's garage, the 1850 was moved to a friend's shed. My parent's then moved house so I started renting a garage nearby my place and had the 1300 trailered there. In the interim the 70,000 mile Civic snapped a halfshaft and the exhaust disintegrated leading to me spending more having it repaired than it'd been bought for.
Late 2016 was a bad time for me and the cars, no progress was made, I was diagnosed with severe depression and started counselling and then in Feb of 2017 I lost my job largely due to my deteriorating mental state.
I gave the 1850 to the bloke who's shed it was in and decided to free myself from the miserable environment that was the rural north east and moved to Glasgow. Jumping from a detached house with a drive to a one bed flat on a packed street. At this point I was still renting the garage for the 1300, now a good 200 miles north. I hatched a plan to go fetch the car.
Me and a friend would go up on a Friday, get the car running and driving for the first time in two years with the help of my 1850 storing mate and then I'd drive the car back to Glasgow, over the Cairngorm mountain range in winter, to a pre-booked MOT. PERFECT.
We headed up there and weather conditions were highly favourable both for driving a decrepit car in and working in a garage with no power.
We reached the car late on Friday, saw that it was indeed still there and retreated to my parent's place near Strathdon to sleep.
Saturday and early Sunday was entirely spent working on the car. Messing with the ignition timing, un-sticking jammed throttle/choke cables, replacing fuel lines, replacing the fuel pump with a brand new one which transpired to be DOA so refitting the old one and finally bleeding the clutch in the dark on Saturday night in a gale force wind warming our hands on the engine block...
On Sunday morning the car was given a final going over, some fibreglass and Halford's rattle cans were employed to "repair" some rather extreme rust holes, the tyres were pumped up, I gave the car two spins around the block and declared use good to go...
The drive back to many hours but at about 10ish on Sunday evening I arrived outside my flat in Glasgow with hardly any bother aside from some minor on-the-fly ignition timing tweaks on the first bit of the trip.
It went in for it's MOT the following morning and failed, as expected, but on nothing really major aside from a rusty sill which I had welded up. I then left it with the garage for them to sort out the inefficient rear brakes.
They kept the car for so long I got bored and bought an £850 Triumph Acclaim to replace my Civic (more on that later). Then the Acclaim failed it's MOT so I took the Dolly home and sorted the brakes myself. At this point the thing became MOT exempt so I never bothered sending it back.
Since then I've been generally tinkering with it. The engine is still a bag of wibblepoo and sounds like it's full of marbles but it still goes alright despite the massive oil consumption. The bodywork looks pretty shabby but structurally the car is good. I managed to fix up the rear panel/bumper so it looks less crashed and currently the only problem is that it suffers from fuel evaporation when it gets hot and one of the front brakes is binding slightly.
It currently serves as a backup car and local cruiser while the Acclaim is used for commuting and long trips. Now I have more free time and am loaded up on anti-depressants it is far easier to stay motivated and to actually get some work done on the car. I've also improved my skill set considerably and now think nothing of dismantling large bits of a car at the side of the road or embarking on a 13 hour weldathon to get a car to MOT standard in a single day...
I no longer want to modify the car in the same way either, I've come to embrace it's scruffy, giffer-tastic demeanour. Although I would quite like a nicely built mk4 Spitfire engine and overdrive gearbox to give it a bit more oomph for when the original engine finally dies to death.