Saxo

Most Retro Rides thread on here for ages.

Sh1t car.
F-k all budget.
Do stupid things to it til it’s cool.
Win.

When I think of a Saxo in my head, all I see is the boy racer cars on wheels too big. What’s a difference a nice drop and some cool wheels makes, even before the crazy (in a good way) paint it’s almost unrecognisable.

40 thousand miles a year is some serious time in a small car!

Big wheels were yet to come at that point haha. Total cost for the car for first year of running (including initial build cost) was £350 which included replacing all the front suspension components and driveshafts, engine mounts, exhaust downpipe etc etc. Parts cost next to nowt. At this point I'd also added a second battery, a sub box that takes up most of where the rear seats would be with 2 JBL 15s in, 4 7" woofers and tweeters in the doors and a couple of amps to power them.

I then got bored and decided to make some changes. Although at the time I was into hot rods/fast hatches most of my nights as a unruly yoof were spent doing burnouts and tray drifting stuff at the Ponty/Wakefield/Barnsley cruise and many others. I also grew up in the next village to Carlton Automotive/Delta Styling. As it's so out of fashion chav bits are cheap. Quite rare too, think most got chucked in the bin. However I didn't just want to do a copy of what was around at that time. The main limitations at that time were lowering methods and tyres. You couldn't get stuff off the shelf to make cars properly low, and you were limited to the clearance provided by fairly big tyres anyway. That's why all the bodykits were huge as they tried to disguise it.

So facebook/eBay scouring got me a Mk1 front end, set of angel eye headlights, dark tint rear lights, DTM mirrors, smooth tailgate etc etc. All the stuff people spent months paying off on the old Ripspeed credit cards.

I then chopped the front springs and chucked some 17" C4 VTS wheels on with 165/35 tyres, then chopped the flat rear arches out and welded some front arches in their place (back to front). A set of spacers got the wheels sat about right. The rear bumper is a VTS one with the center cut out, then the plate hung underneath.









The intention was to fit a bodykit then paint it again. However as I mentioned they were huge because the cars weren't that low. I bought a kit off ebay and discovered I'd have -2" of ground clearance and just stopped working on it at that point. It was still doing the same mileage, and I don't look after cars so it just got tattier and tattier. And then the rear crank seal went, which brought on the next bit. 

That's bonkers.

So at this point the car is sitting at 180,000 miles, with 80,000 of them in my ownership (mostly at 80-90mph down the A1), and it's leaking like the Exxon Valdez. In those 80,000 miles I put some fresh antifreeze in and checked the oil level twice and that was it. I didn't think it would last this long so I never bothered changing it.

I had a glance round at other cars for sale and nothing floated my boat as a daily, so decided to fix it. I had no idea of the history of the car and it was well overdue a cambelt, and there were various other oil leaks so I thought I'd refresh the engine. I pulled it to bits and carted it to work expecting it to be knackered, and all it did was confirm my suspicions that the Citroen/Peugeot TUD5 is the most durable diesel engine ever made.

Bottom end wise it had 3 tenths of a thou bore wear, zero ring wear, the bearings still had untouched coating and the oil pump was like brand new. So I stuck the bog brush down the bores, cleaned it all and stuck it back together. The head was slightly worse in that it had hammered the valve seats a bit, so Chris the head man at work did a top job sorting that. Didn't need guides or owt, just chucked a set of inlet valves in so they didn't need tipping off to get in range of the shims.

Total cost of engine - £57 Inc new oil/fuel filter/cambelt kit and water pump

Hoorah.
It wasn't until the swap meet thread that your saxo appeared here I think. Loved your vitara build (what happened to that?), I like how you seem to just nonchalantly bosh stuff together but it turns out 'right'
The paint scheme is mega.

Wow not much tyre on those new wheels! You must have to be a bit careful around the potholes.

I've done 30k with them on and they're not as bad as they look to live with. I try and avoid them as much as possible same as I do in any car. Only thing I found was that they need a fair bit more pressure than normal to be comfy. I run them about 40psi.

Did you happen to take advantage of the free insurance offer?