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For those interested in old cars.


DDolfelin
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Lovely collection of Turin's finest there Wolseley, the Alfa Coupe is rather nice too. I had a '15 plate Abarth 595 as a courtesy car for three weeks while my Alfa was in dry dock last year, it was an absolute hoot from the moment I turned the key, and sounded like an angry puppy going up through the gears!

 

Talking of Fiat, I found this recently, the wonderful Lingiotto factory with its roof top test track, well known for its appearance in 'The Italian Job' of course...

 

post-7638-0-41079400-1509630710.jpg

Edited by Rugd1022
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Here are a few other cars that were there:

 

37405992584_28ef0d9df2_b.jpg

 

37406004514_42f3362afd_b.jpg

 

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In case you're wondering what the event was, it was the annual Castagne Day event at Fairy Meadow (near Wollongong) in 2012.  The car show was only part of it - there were stalls, rides for the children and large quantities of hazelnuts being roasted throughout the day.

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A nice find but it'll need at least twice the asking price spent on the shell before anything else gets touched, unless the buyer does it him / herself. Oh well, at least you can actually buy new front and rear doors for it.... but they are not cheap!

 

Odd reg' number... 'KS 074' or 'KSO 74'...?

 

I'll post the link on the Mk1 Performance Mini forum and see what the consensus over there is...  ;)

To be honest, I didn't 'find' it, & wasn't looking for it..it was brought to my attention because of the vendor's promise [ a dealer, who obviously didn't study their wording too well?]....

 

I have come across one or two, of what I consider to be, 'bargains' on ebay recently.....having 'won' {?}..a few taps from a vendor...I noted they also had a Standard Ensign for sale......at just over a grand or so....in reasonable working order, if untidy.  1958 manufacture, a 1600 cc engine, [or thereabouts] so not well endowed with the BHP's...yet, good for 30 mpgs......seemed complete, and eminently driveable as was, with a bit of re-commissioning.  In other words, maybe a week's work, then spend a long time doing a bit of this & that to it, as one drives it. It had a BIN price, as above...it didn't sell.  Probably because it looked tatty, and didn't have the stonking 2'2 litre engine, or the 6 in it.  I reckoned most of the work needed would have been  of the 'cleaning' sort.

 

BArgains are out there..one just has to see the potential?

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A friend of mine was an apprentice at BL during Red Robbo's days. From what he tells me, Mr Robertson used the word "working" but didn't actually do any, along with his brother Union "officers". They apparently preferred to sit around in their union office, at BL's expense.

 

Like other notable Union activists, he seemed to think conflict was the answer to getting the UK's industry back on its feet.

 

 

Brit15

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Talking of Fiat, I found this recently, the wonderful Lingiotto factory with its roof top test track, well known for its appearance in 'The Italian Job' of course...

 

And to think they nearly tore that building down about 25 years ago.

One of my mostest fun jobs was 'facilitating' the Erasmus programme for planning and architecture students at Newcastle. We could pick and choose from the European univs wishing to exchange with us.

Two of the best were Torino and Nancy (in the industrial Lorraine of NE France  - we're just like the NE and Geordieland they argued !)

 

Our students joined in the campaign to save Lingotto and stayed right by it on the Po river bank. No-one at that time seemed to have the vision just to be brave enough to keep the vast structure and slowly fill it up with projects seeking a home. That roof test track takes about 30 minutes to walk around ! A big tourist draw now.

 

There is a rather similar vast early modernist Trade Fair building in Prague which they are slowly filling with wildly improbable old cars, motor bikes and aeroplanes as part of their National Gallery collection - not to be missed.

veletrzni_palac.jpgveletrzni-palac-ng-praha-6300.jpg

 

In Nancy we were privileged to have full access to their very advanced city traffic and transportation Control which was exactly the sort of Cyclops centre where they switched the hard disk that gridlocked Turin in the Italian Job - an early form of cyber attack !

 

It is a huge sadness to me that we are withdrawing from all these sorts of wonderful links and ideas.

 

dh

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Lovely collection of Turin's finest there Wolseley, the Alfa Coupe is rather nice too. I had a '15 plate Abarth 595 as a courtesy car for three weeks while my Alfa was in dry dock last year, it was an absolute hoot from the moment I turned the key, and sounded like an angry puppy going up through the gears!

 

Talking of Fiat, I found this recently, the wonderful Lingiotto factory with its roof top test track, well known for its appearance in 'The Italian Job' of course...

 

attachicon.gifFIAT 1223f4c135e50b4ae.jpg

The factory is now a luxury hotel.

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The fens have long held a reputation for harbouring an eccentric collection of road vehicles well past their sell by date, but I had cause to take a cross country route across the fens today, Newmarket to Peterborough via a number of back roads. Along the way I passed a BMC FG horse box, a Fordson Major tractor, Rover SD1, VW 1303 Beetle, VW 1600E Variant, VW Golf Mk 2, Ford Capri 2.8i, Austin Metro, Austin Maestro, Peugeot 505 Estate, two Citroen 2CVs, Vauxhall Cavalier Mk2 and a 1950s Hillman Minx, all on the road and seemingly in regular use.

 

Parked or abandoned in gardens and yards along the way were an even more eclectic mix of another Cavalier Mk2, Ford Granada Mk2, a couple of Morris Minors, a collection of Austin Champs near March, various assorted Land Rovers, a 1950s Chevy pick up keeping what looked like an early '60s Ford Taunus Transit company in a barn, another BMC FG, a Ford Transit Mk2, an ERF LV tractor unit and an early 80s Volvo F7 which was being loaded so also presumably in use.

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At present I'm doing railhead treatment trains and me and my operator are always on the lookout for old cars in the fens.

There is a compound near Fordham full of mk1 &2 Granada's and Sierras and another compound with a couple of mk2 jaguars sadly I think all this lot is for the banger track which seems to be the sport of the fens.

Earlier this year some idiot out there put a Granada coupé on the track , they were always rare so why do that nowadays

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At present I'm doing railhead treatment trains and me and my operator are always on the lookout for old cars in the fens.

There is a compound near Fordham full of mk1 &2 Granada's and Sierras and another compound with a couple of mk2 jaguars sadly I think all this lot is for the banger track which seems to be the sport of the fens.

Earlier this year some idiot out there put a Granada coupé on the track , they were always rare so why do that nowadays

 

In the old goods yard compound at Elmthorpe between Hinkley and Narborough there's a slowly diminishing number of '60s, '70s and '80s cars, the old boy who owns the plot has had a clear out fairly recently but I think there's still an Austin A40, Humber Snipe and Mk1 Cortina there. Not so long back he had some Mk1 Escorts, Mk3 Cortinas, Singer Gazelles etc, and a pair of very tidy Mk2 Granadas parked well away from all the other vehicles, fingers crossed they've both been saved.

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UPDATE: new H4s now in the CX. They are a touch brighter than the original Osrams, but the reflector bowls in both headlamps are going to need resilvering - the offside one looks really bad now that I've had a closer look, and maybe a bowl in better condition would be sensible......which means finding a scrap headlamp.....which is not easily found these days......

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UPDATE: new H4s now in the CX. They are a touch brighter than the original Osrams, but the reflector bowls in both headlamps are going to need resilvering - the offside one looks really bad now that I've had a closer look, and maybe a bowl in better condition would be sensible......which means finding a scrap headlamp.....which is not easily found these days......

 

Line it with kitchen foil ?

 

Also Horsetan,, google citroen cx's  for spares and loads come up.

Edited by allan downes
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Line it with kitchen foil ?

 

Also Horsetan,, google citroen cx's  for spares and loads come up.

 

When I had the BMW, I used kitchen foil to line its tail lights as you could unscrew the lens and pull that away. It sort of worked, but the foil kept shifting, so I swapped that for adhesive foil from Hobbycraft.

 

The CX is a bit more complex as I can see that I would have to somehow break the seal between the lens and the headlamp body to get at the reflectors. Not easy. Probably easier to replace whole unit, and then work on the shonky one away from the car; does anyone do chrome paint that can be polished once dry?

 

One other thing that struck me when changing the headlamp bulbs was how loose on their seats the bulbs appeared to be once the retaining spring clips had been fastened. 

 

Have already contacted a couple of CX dismantlers on eBay, but they don't seem to have headlights available. Also you cannot use Series 1 headlamps in a Series 2 - they are different!! Some of the Google search results are a bit old.

 

The driver's seat squab is going to need some needle-and-thread as the stitching has given way at the side. Might buy some seat covers, as the original herringbone fabric is way too good to sit on.

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When I had the BMW, I used kitchen foil to line its tail lights as you could unscrew the lens and pull that away. It sort of worked, but the foil kept shifting, so I swapped that for adhesive foil from Hobbycraft.

 

The CX is a bit more complex as I can see that I would have to somehow break the seal between the lens and the headlamp body to get at the reflectors. Not easy. Probably easier to replace whole unit, and then work on the shonky one away from the car; does anyone do chrome paint that can be polished once dry?

 

 

Coincidentally this popped up on my Facebook feed today. No idea whether it's any good to you or whether it might be obtainable in the UK.

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This XM has been lurking under a tree in a very quiet corner of south Gower for quite a while now. It doesn't seem that inclined to move on....

 

26439159069_9de831279a_z.jpg

 

I know little about Citroen but I did once buy my wife a Xantia 1.8i. Whatever others say about those cars, it took absolutely everything that she could throw at it [and she did try] and ran for years with only a need to change the spheres and reline the brakes. It was quite nippy too.

 

Tony

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This XM has been lurking under a tree in a very quiet corner of south Gower for quite a while now. It doesn't seem that inclined to move on....

 

26439159069_9de831279a_z.jpg

 

I know little about Citroen but I did once buy my wife a Xantia 1.8i. Whatever others say about those cars, it took absolutely everything that she could throw at it [and she did try] and ran for years with only a need to change the spheres and reline the brakes. It was quite nippy too.

 

Tony

What a sad waste. We've run Citroens since 1992 (BX, AX, Picasso and now a C4 Cactus), and have been very happy with them.

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