Evening! My first car was an 'A' reg black Mk1 1.3HLE, bought from the auctions in Glasgow in August 1990 for £900 - still the most I have ever paid for a car! Sold the following June for £800, made way for a Lada Riva, then a Fiat 126.
July 1992, bought a 1981 1.0 HLE in beige for £250, with sectarian abuse (I lived near Glasgow at the time) scratched into the rear paintwork. Being beige, this was an improvement! Oh yes, the Mot it came with was false, so I suspect it was clocked, too. MOT'd & put on the road in September that year, I did 27,000 miles in it in 20 months (it went over 100000 miles just leaving the M73 on the way down to see the Lombard in 1993-great fun, it had just had new remoulds on the front and was demon in the snow!!) Sold to my uncle in May '94 after a rear-end for £150. I'd got £250 to put the back-end right, so when I worked out what it cost me per mile, including repairs, insurance, tax, MOT, servicing and petrol, it was 9.5 pence per mile!
Jump forward 9 years, and I get a 1994 5 door diesel for £150 off a work collueage. Sold with a blown head gasket in the August for £150, I knew I wasn't finished with them!
January '04, I was having a look on Autotrader, spotted this silver mk1 in Stockton, went up with my wife to have a look.
A 1 owner 1983 with 40,000 on the clock, I let my heart rule my head, and within the week it was mine.
It soon recieved Rover interconnected suspension(I drive on Leeds roads) and the ride is much improved. An SRE head followed just before my mate and I went off to the Highlands for a holiday - 2nd hand it needed a skim so the original head went with us just in case, and the re-torque took place in a youth hostel carpark on Lewis where I bumped into someone who I had been to uni with!
Here's a picture from Skye, and I did get out of the passenger door!
Go out to the Highlands if you can but beware the buses on Harris, they don't slow down and it's single track roads. It was on the third stop (well, by this point I'm using "stop" in the loosest sense of the word!)from 60 inside 2 minutes that told me I needed new pad material on the front, so EBC's green stuff went on.
Anyway, I was working on an Avenger(Mrs Peel) at the time and got it MOT'd in September '04, just before the Metro's MOT ran out. Good job. Next follows a photo account of the Weld-a-thon.
Took the front wing off to see this:-
So did this
and then this
and found this
but more of that anon.
I went to replace the rear radius arm too(there's less noise involved in thas, and it meant that I could work on into the evening) but found myself staring into the sill, from the wheelarch, saying "I shouldn't be seeing this..."
July 1992, bought a 1981 1.0 HLE in beige for £250, with sectarian abuse (I lived near Glasgow at the time) scratched into the rear paintwork. Being beige, this was an improvement! Oh yes, the Mot it came with was false, so I suspect it was clocked, too. MOT'd & put on the road in September that year, I did 27,000 miles in it in 20 months (it went over 100000 miles just leaving the M73 on the way down to see the Lombard in 1993-great fun, it had just had new remoulds on the front and was demon in the snow!!) Sold to my uncle in May '94 after a rear-end for £150. I'd got £250 to put the back-end right, so when I worked out what it cost me per mile, including repairs, insurance, tax, MOT, servicing and petrol, it was 9.5 pence per mile!
Jump forward 9 years, and I get a 1994 5 door diesel for £150 off a work collueage. Sold with a blown head gasket in the August for £150, I knew I wasn't finished with them!
January '04, I was having a look on Autotrader, spotted this silver mk1 in Stockton, went up with my wife to have a look.
A 1 owner 1983 with 40,000 on the clock, I let my heart rule my head, and within the week it was mine.
It soon recieved Rover interconnected suspension(I drive on Leeds roads) and the ride is much improved. An SRE head followed just before my mate and I went off to the Highlands for a holiday - 2nd hand it needed a skim so the original head went with us just in case, and the re-torque took place in a youth hostel carpark on Lewis where I bumped into someone who I had been to uni with!
Here's a picture from Skye, and I did get out of the passenger door!
Go out to the Highlands if you can but beware the buses on Harris, they don't slow down and it's single track roads. It was on the third stop (well, by this point I'm using "stop" in the loosest sense of the word!)from 60 inside 2 minutes that told me I needed new pad material on the front, so EBC's green stuff went on.
Anyway, I was working on an Avenger(Mrs Peel) at the time and got it MOT'd in September '04, just before the Metro's MOT ran out. Good job. Next follows a photo account of the Weld-a-thon.
Took the front wing off to see this:-
So did this
and then this
and found this
but more of that anon.
I went to replace the rear radius arm too(there's less noise involved in thas, and it meant that I could work on into the evening) but found myself staring into the sill, from the wheelarch, saying "I shouldn't be seeing this..."
