SherpaMog Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 Tales of woe ahoy! I'm sure there will be more interesting or tragic tales, but here is mine. I bought a Renault 5 gt turbo, I was only a pup, 20 I think,(long time ago now), it was pearl white, and I loved it the minute I saw it. The oily rag underneath didn't ring alarm bellz because young and stoopid. Full engine rebuild innit m8. It was a cold snowy winter and minutes after purchase, I drove like a twenty year old, and slid on the snow under braking into a newish BMW. I acquired a large dent in rear quarter, a new bumper needed paying for for the beemer. Later that evening it got very very cold and on the way home from work, I could smell the burning of rubber. Being 20 and not knowing anything about cars, I didn't stop. Turned out the engine rebuilding hadn't included the use of antifreeze and the water pump had frozen up. A visit to a friendly mechanic told me head gasket had gone through overheating, and quoted a price I could not afford. Over the course of the next month I very carefully dismantled and rebuilt the head with military precision, keeping every part labelled, skimming head, everything double checked via the Haynes manual, and dial up speed Internet. The day of reckoning came, and it was time to start her up. There was an audience including an experienced mechanic, who was impressed I disconnected some wires to prime the turbo with oil. The engine, to everyone's amazement, including mine, started within two times of turning over, which was fantastic, until someone pointed out the shit coming out of the exhaust. The lack of antifreeze had cracked the liners, Fuck sticks! I wasn't put off though, sold that one. Took two years of saving up and driving a shit mk2 cavalier to get another. Happy days! AMC Rebel, Fat_Pirate, alf892 and 3 others 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseracer Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 I had always fancied a large-engined Mercedes, so I bought one and ran it (on and off) for a couple of years. Despite this, I am still very good mates with the vendor! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steveo3002 Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 left a fuel hose loose after aheadgasket swap and the engine bay caught light ....luckily had an extingusher and put it out was fairly gutted lol....car lived on , needed a few hoses n plastic bits on the engine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete-M Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 I bought a Rover 827 SLI. It was horrible. I also bought a Merc 190E, which was also horrible. Rest of the time most of my crap has been OK. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dollywobbler Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 Aged 21, I chopped in my Daewoo Matiz for a Subaru Impreza Sport. I felt like the coolest kid in town. It took literally days for me to lose the back end and smash it up. Hero (as in jumped up little twat) to zero (unless we're talking outstanding finance payments) in the blink of an eye. I owned my current 2CV at the time. I should have just stuck with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Hooli Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 Scooby 2.5 TwinCam Leggy. Seemed a great car except for.... Rotten fuel filler so it emptied the tank of the floor as you accelerated.Neede cambelt (surprisingly easy)Duff 'statCracked block/head so it dumped it's water after 12miles Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Station Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 Worst was replacing clutch on Rover 213 (with Minimad on here) in my garage. It was summer, but lying on your back for hours and hours just killed. We started at about 8 or 9pm. He went home at 3am. I finished at 6am. I started it up, something went clunk, and I had to take everything off again and pop the clutch fork back on. It was frigging awful, I have no idea why it took so long on such a simple car. God bless GM for that access panel 1/2 an hour clutch change on the 90's cars.Next clutch change I did I took the subframe out and lowered everything on an angle and slid the gearbox off.Nice looking car though! Swapping engine on MGF during the coldest winter for decades. Lying in snow, not feeling hands and all that. I remember catching my hand and cutting it deeply, and then I kept catching it and re-opening the wound, leaving a massive scar on my knuckle. When I started it I realised I hadn't tightened the clutch to flywheel bolts up properly. Ugh. oldcars, Uncle Jimmy, DVee8 and 4 others 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
overrun Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 ^ Gotta love changing engines on an MR car! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scaryoldcortina Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 ^ Simple when you know how... DVee8, Alanism, overrun and 1 other 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alanism Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 2 events that changed my opinion on vehicular mechanical work forever. Rover P6 rear brakes in the cold on a gravel driveway destroyed my desire to work on cars for fun. Ford Fiesta diesel head/valve rebuilding after cambelt snapping and fitting new belt in the snow at the side of a busy road finished my desire to fix cars forever. I now avoid mechanical work and farm it out whenever possible. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Jerzy Woking 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
overrun Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 ^ Simple when you know how... Nice.No two poster here, unfortunately! Alanism, Vince70, Dave_Q and 1 other 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Lord Sward Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 I wouldn't know where to start. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doctormop Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Always thought of myself as a "Jag man" nearly bought a series 2 3.4 XJ6 when I was 19, even I had more sense than to actually do it, bided my time for 13 years, had a steady job, spare cash, decided the time was nigh, found a 1989 2.9 manual XJ40, cloth seats, plastic wheel trims very clean and tidy, previous owner was actually a pub landlord, bought it, drove it home, hated it, gutless, underpowered, noisy, couldn't pull a paedo off your sister, all manner of problems making me think that the recent MOT had been acquired by dubious means, sold at auction for £50, put me off Jags for life, or so I thought, years later browsing ebay noticed a 1992 4.0 litre sovereign, no bids, crap advert, seller had no feedback etc, bid the starting price (sub £500) and won it, chronic evacuation of the bowels and repercussions followed, contacted seller and arranged to collect, car was almost immaculate, seller was a Doctor, spent over 3k on it over past 5 years, bills to prove, 3/4 of a tank of fuel in it, he thought ebay was brilliant fun and wished me well.That car was amazing, fast quiet smooth everything a Jag should be, kept it 6 months finally sold it to a neighbour who kept offering more and more money for it until I cracked and took his cash, still tempted by another now but sensible head is saying quit while your in front! Vince70, cros, Uncle Jimmy and 2 others 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Junkman Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 I once bought a Mercedes 300 Diesel.I'm still traumatised. Dave_Q, fatharris, Ghosty and 1 other 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete-M Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 The moral of all successful Jaaaag stories is to buy the ones with the big engines. Doctormop 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Repair - Whatever it's going to take to get this heap 1) Running again and 2) Into a condition that some sucker (read: like me) will actually buy it Purchase/experience - See above. I'm still too smitten with it's rarity/styling/features to scrap it mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bub2006 Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Austin metro vanden Plas automatic bought from a 'friend'. Not running right but I drove it to an Mot where it passed with a couple of advisories. Alternator died on way home and Found out the fuel tank was half full with water. Started slipping in gear so sought advice from a mini specialist who laughed at me as he knew the car and told me the original 33k engine had been removed and had an unknown engine fitted by him prior to it being parked up. Changed clutch packs to no avail. Cut my losses and sold it on eBay. Lots of trouble with 'friend' after. Telling folk I'd stole the car, was only taking it a test drive and I drove off with it and all that bollocks. The Twat won't face me even now to talk it over. I don't care about the car but I begrudge people tainting me with lies like that. Uncle Jimmy 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LC Torana Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 It only took 10 posts for someone to mention P6 rear brakes. I'll have a think about mine. Uncle Jimmy, Alanism and Bren 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerzy Woking Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 The moral of all successful Jaaaag stories is to buy the ones with the big engines. I bought a 1995 4.0 litre X300 having read up on them, knowing all their common faults. A/C belt snapped about 1 mile into my drive home, which was when I noticed a misfire. It had several trips to the local Jag specialist as common fault after common fault came along, and the misfire just got worse and worse. Lost £900 on it in the 6 weeks I had it. Even though the ride quality was superb, I have been put off of them for life! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kiltox Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Spent a good few days battling through the Panda engine swap only for it to run like shit afterwards. It's put me off spannering in a big way and is one of the few reasons I'm packing it all in! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D Spares & Tyres Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 1972 Rover 2000 TC 1990 Citroen XM 2.0 auto Both really nice examples with service history. Both were cars I had always wanted but would not allow themselves to be fixed. I threw a lot of money at them, the Citroen was at a specialist who couldn`t diagnose its faults and no garage could get the P6 running right either. Its rear brakes never gave me any trouble though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dollywobbler Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Oh yes. I've had two Rover P6s, and both ate money in a truly alarming fashion. With the V8, it did feel worth it, but my 2000SC was slower, sounded nowhere near as nice and drank just as much fuel. Definitely a car where it pays to buy a really good one rather than something a bit marginal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crapcarcollector Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Spent a good few days battling through the Panda engine swap only for it to run like shit afterwards. It's put me off spannering in a big way and is one of the few reasons I'm packing it all in!But I really like your hopeless Panda and feel the need to rescue it. Then again I am a masochist who has just spent 3 full days removing and replacing the dashboard from a GTV to replace the entire heater / air on assembly. This is on a car that has had the engine replaced, complete front suspension, half the electrics, exhaust and god knows what else. A fuggin war. Somehow I still seem to enjoy it. I'll change the gearbox next month... Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Cleon-Fonte and Dave_Q 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaughant Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 My first series one Rs turbo. Bought in the dark out of the free ads with literally no knowledge of fords (despite being a ford apprentice at the time, industrial electrical/mechanical though) as I had cash burning a hole in my pocket. Just sold a mk1 golf gti (now worth £1,000,000 obviously m9) which was bought with no mot but flew through needing only a tenners worth of work so my confidence on buying 2nd hand cars was high. As soon as he started it up and took me round a few bends I was sold, the turbo noise, the recaros, the handling as it was 1mm off the ground was all immense. Total bargain at £1500. Problem was the young blood selling it had no idea what it was up for as his mum, fed up with it being in her way had advertised it. Cue major argument between the two of them and him then trying to get £2000 out of me. I didn't budge and it was mine for £1500. I now know this to be a con as literally 10 mins after buying it cut out and wouldn't restart. My mate had to toe me down the m4 on a rope with his cavalier 1.6 diesel. Gr9. It then started by sarn, happy days, then stopped again 5 mins later. Got it home and used to occasionally drive it to the bottom of the road where it broke again, wait 1/2hr and try it again,when it world start and misfire all the way home. This was back in the day where you could still buy bits from ford for reasonable prices and with my discount I treated it to all new wings (£15 each brand new genuine in 1997!!!), sills, bonnet, all cos they had surface* rust on them. Couldn't fix it so tried selling it, had at least 20 total time wasters round " swapz u a mk2 cav and ewe gives me £700 MUSHHHHHHH ", no Xbox back then M9. My mate made me an offer on a fiesta xr2i and I nearly tore his arm out of his socket. He took it to another guy to get it sprayed and it was rotten front to back, I felt bad but he still got it all welded, put a second hand metering head on it and drove it for a few years then sold it for £1,000,000 I would expect. Most disappointing car was a mk3 golf gti, absolute wank and a disgrace to the gti name and most money lost in a short period was a pug 106 derv that the crankshaft oil deal gave way on the m4 at 36000 miles and expired the engine. Only lost £4000 on it and paid a loan bank over three years with nothing to show for it. Bitter? Of course not*. chodweaver 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Snipes Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Lol, similar story from me. £4K loan for a nearly new Fiat Punto. Got bored after about 9 months, so sold it for about half as much. Bought a Manta GTE Hatch, which was stolen and crashed within the space of a month. Used the payout to get a rusty GTE Coupe. Very rusty, but such a cool car. NorfolkNWeigh 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlo Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 The third Peugeot 405 I bought was a nightmare from start to finish. I bid too much for it really on ebay as the 406 I was driving wasn't doing too much for me, so really wanted to get back into a 405 again. The collection of this unfortunate car should have forewarned me of the dramas to come. Got the train from Devon to a South London train station to meet the vendor at the agreed time. No sign of him. Left texts, rang him to no avail, so, thoroughly pissed off, made tracks to my brother who lives in Middlesex. He then rings me at 9.00pm, apologising and saying he had had a family crisis, and would deliver to my brother's house that evening. At this point I really should have walked away but thought, 'sod it, I want the car and I don't want to get a train back', so I agreed. So he turns up full of smiles and apologies with the car obviously hot and running, but there's still something not quite right. I found out what the next morning, as the car was a pig to start and blasted out mountains of white smoke when cold. And it ran on less than the required four cylinders until warm. Consensus was head gasket, so decided to take the plunge and get my mechanic to get the head off, which (suspiciously) didn't look too bad. It had also had a very recent water pump. Whilst I was getting it skimmed the said mechanic fell ill for a few months, so I made the latest in a series of mistakes and got my local garage to finish the job off. Which they did at an agreed maximum price, but when finished the car refused to start, it had low compression apparently and couldn't even be bump started as an auto. Possibly the cylinder bores had been damaged by having the head off for so long - no one seemed to know (or care particularly). At this stage the garage gave up on it and said they couldn't do any more. I decided to give up too. So having spent not much short of a grand I had an immovable parts car. And had learnt not to get two different people work on the same job. Irony was I found a brilliant 405 a few weeks later for £350. Uncle Jimmy 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xtriple Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Some cars just refuse to be repaired. It's a fact! You can throw time and money in VAST quantities at them and they still won't work properly. Those are the cars once owned by the Devil himself and now possessed of such evil and malevalence that their entire reason for being is to destroy the faith in good God fearing car enthusiasts. I had an Alfa GTV that consumed money faster than I could get holy water blessed and yet still failed at everything related to being a car... I had a Lotus (enough said really) that was so opposed to using the Queens highway that it would literally fail/explode/burst into flames every time a Vicar walked near... I had a Bentley that every part number on the car begins with '666' and is currently sat in a garage with a crucifix duct taped to its bonnet... Asimo, crapcarcollector, chodweaver and 2 others 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dave21478 Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 As a mechanically inexperiencerd teenager, my beloved Mini had expired on my way to my first day at fulltime work. In need of a working car in a hurry, I scanned the "under 500" section of the local paper and settled on a mkII Fiesta, which sounded nice from the 3 line description.I got a taxi to the sellers house via a cash machine. It was dark and raining...ideal car buying conditions. It looked pretty decent to my eye so I paid full price and drove it home.Next day started ok, but kept stuttering and losing power. Once at work one of the mechanics had a peek and it was only the points needing changed so I was very happy. I was less happy when he pointed out that the inner wings and pretty much the whole engine bay had been sculpted from filler. It was an amazing job....they had replicated all the standard contours, stiffening bumps and so on....probably more work than actually welding the thing properly. I didnt care though as it had several months MOT so I ran it every day until a few days before Christmas a friend and I were on a country road and a corner was a lot sharper than expected and I understeered it through the barbed wire fence and into a field, scattering a flock of startled sheep. Sitting there wondering what to do, an exceedingly angry farmer turned up and tore me a new one then called the cozzers. A Panda car turned up with a male and female officer. The farmer ranted at them for a while and the lady took me in the back of the panda car for the formalities. My papers were in order and she told me the guy was being a right cunt about it all, so I should just let the insurance company deal with it rather than offer to fix the fence myself as I had been considering.As this was happening, we were treated to the sight of an apocalyptically angry farmer and a rather....er....portly.... policeman ocasionally running past the car, immuminated by its headlights and flashing blue light, chasing the sheep and trying to herd them into an adjacent field. The verge was too bumpy to extract the car through the way I came in so had to drive to the gate to get out the field. The approach to the gate was thick, deep mud. The farmer had stated that it would cost me 100 quid for him to tow me out. Fuck that. By the power of my 1100cc engine, 155 section tyres and a bit of momentum, I plowed through the mud and kicked up a massive wave of it all over the car. Made it out though. The only damage to the car was some very deep gouges in the paint from the barbed wire, and after a quick jetwash, she was back in action and served me well till the MOT expired. I scrapped it at Persley in Aberdeen and later that week saw another Fiesta go through the car auction (this was when it was at the exhibition centre by the beach) with my old, gouged bonnet. Nice to see a bit of that car living on. My insurance renewal was a shocker though - the farmers claim for 20 feet of barbed wire and some rotted old fenceposts was well into five figures. Sheefag, Richard, Supernaut and 2 others 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stevebrookman Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 Many years ago, a friend of ours had a y reg Escort Ghia. He decided to wrap the front end around something (we never found out what as he was a pathological liar).Asked a few of us to help him out by putting on new wings and a new front panel. He told us he didn't have much money A weekend was spent putting it back together and it looked half decent even if he had bought the later type wings. Exactly one week later he turns up in a one year old Rover 827Si-how we laughed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(NOT) Steve rainagain 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kiltox Posted January 8, 2017 Share Posted January 8, 2017 But I really like your hopeless Panda and feel the need to rescue it. Then again I am a masochist who has just spent 3 full days removing and replacing the dashboard from a GTV to replace the entire heater / air on assembly. This is on a car that has had the engine replaced, complete front suspension, half the electrics, exhaust and god knows what else. A fuggin war. Somehow I still seem to enjoy it. I'll change the gearbox next month... Sent from my iPad using TapatalkCome and see me with a trailer and £40 CASH and you can rescue it if you like! Barry Cade and crapcarcollector 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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