Uncle Jimmy

Who every time something doesn’t go right stands and says ‘I wouldn’t have done it like that’ but can’t explain what they would do or how they’d fund it? 

Because Labour would have it all sorted out! 😂

Im an outlier, but i hardly drive anywhere. In general i only drive for pleasure. Abolishing VED and adding it as a component of fuel duty would suit my usage more realistically and to my eyes would be fairer, but also i don’t care. 
For instance id like to have a post 2006 taxi- id hardly ever use it, and theres the rub. £800 per year just to use it occasionally- no thanks. But im an eccentric outlier and they have to make some sort of generallised basis to legislate from.

This is the mentality you are dealing with that they think by putting up the tax a hundred quid a year will have you all running out and buying a £40,000 electric car. Life is very straightforward in the minds of a lot of the middle/upper class that are in Government. Simply put your hand in your pocket and spend your way out of the issue, I can honestly see a situation coming about where the average working person is put back to a position they’d be in the fifties where access to a car was unlikely unless you had a fair bit of wedge in your pocket. 

quite agree, until they come up with a plan as to how they are going to fund all these things they plan to do without raising taxes all I see is a even less competant lot than the Tories.
What we all have to face up to is we saddled ourselves with an enourmous debt during covid (which all parties agreed with) and over the next few years we have to pay this back while trying to grow the economy and while maintaining things like the NHS,  it seems almost inevitable that whoever is in power will continue to raise taxes to one degree or another, I'm old enough to have lived through the Brown Blair era, those guys took taxation and partcularly stealth taxes to a new level.

This had been on marketplace for ages & I was slowly watching the price lower to a more affordable price. It turned out to be a 6 minute drive from my house so it was rude not to go take a look. I'd promised myself before I was 50 I'd either build a kit car or buy a yank tank. I turned 50 last October!!
It was imported, Registered & lived on an American Air force base for over 20 years.
Previous owner bought it as a father son project but unfortunately, his son became ill so his health became the priority. 
The car needs all new brakes, wheel cylinders, shock absorbers etc but luckily that's all supplied.
Biggest stumbling block is the 3.8 V6 engine has single point injection & this seems to be playing up. Apparently it ran perfectly well when parked up but now splutters & dies.
So I'll definitely be looking for advise on the 308 Windsor engine issue.
It can't be too much as the car has a genuine 37000 miles in the clock!
The car is so clean it still has most of its factory decals. No rusty holes just mild surface rust.
The lower trim has been removed & all holes welded up. I'm going to colour match the lower section then use steel wool & soap to nib off any surface rust on the body, then boiled linseed oil & white spirits as a varnish
My plans are to sort the brakes, suspension & get it running however I've been advised to rip out all the smog stuff & then look into getting the 14" factory steel wheels banded so I can use the oem P slit hubcaps. 
Enjoy & any feedback & help with the engine issue would be great & how to remove the smog stuff.

“Sorry my 6 yr old kid managed to log on my eBay account and buy 14 cars in one night” kinda story? Had that a few times in the past. 

What are we betting the £5,150 was from someone whose cat jumped on the keyboard. 

Ah shit man, just look at how much more you could have earned with a poorly-drafted description and a few hastily-snapped photos outside some old pile. 
£50 says this is back on the bay before the month is out.

HFM?
"I have sauced a new from old stock on route"
Nice.

The Mk2 Cortina at the same auction made very similar money.

This went through the ACA auction today and sold outright for a measly £2500, the same as I sold it for as an 'unfinished project'.  How refreshing (for me) to not come out the worst off on one of these old clunkers. It was sold with no reserve - would love to know what happened with the next guy. I'm sure you would put a reserve on if you were just after a 'quick flip'.

Hi all, you may recall i stomped off AS 6 months back after getting annoyed at the wanky moderation on here. Well I must have got over it to some extent, as i had been logging in from time to time recently, mostly to see what was on the for sale board, and guess whats happened? I've ended up with another car.

I need more projects like I need a hole in my head, but this turned up on the FS board with no back wheels and no price and I was intrigued. Struck up a convo with @Snake Charmer who was looking after it on behalf of the owner Alan. It had been on Snake's driveway for 15 years and it seemed like it was 'out of sight out of mind' for Alan. Anyway photos were exchanged, I had a chat with Alan, more photos and videos came down the wire, then Alan said I could take it away for £1000 and pay after it was collected!!! Very decent of him. (I think he mostly just wanted a painless sale and a good home for it). At that price i could not refuse. So @worldofceri was drafted in for logistics, Snake refitted the rear wheels and home it came to castle bo11ox!!!
I think both Snake and Alan are interested to see how I get on with it, so I'm chucking a thread up on here to record what happens with it (if anything).
So lets have a look at it.



So its a 1968 Zephyr Mk4, 2.5 Essex V6, 4-speed manual box and column gearchange. Snake has rebuilt the engine, and its got a new clutch and various other bits and bobs. It does run but doesnt drive as the rear calipers are dismantled and in the boot. Also the exhaust is rotten. I did bust out the mop on the bootlid and roof as well, I need to go right round it still.

So far all I have really done is stare at it, I absolutely love how it looks. I always liked the shape of these and they seem to have avoided the crazy prices and knucklehead image of most old fords. Probably cos they supposedly drive like a half-burst lilo on the Whitley Bay Leisure pool.
It seems amazingly unmolested really. Pretty much everything is present and correct. Stuff like the carpets and door seals etc do look like theyre 50 years old, but thats because they are right? I can't find any signs of it being welded amazingly - look at this flitch panel behind the NSF wheel. No splash guard - looks like it has the factory coating on it, yet all there is is a bit of surface rust.

NS sill flange:

Amazing! The only bits of rot I've found yet are the front wing tips and this little hole in the corner of the windscreen:

That'll be a screen out job to sort, but I did find a company in Oz that make new screen seals so if I can get hold of one of those, the screen can be cut out to avoid another palaver like I had on the horsebo11ox. Amazingly this does not seem to have rotted out the bottom of the A pillar!!!
Anyway the biggest problem is the lack of brakes. My driveway is sloped, so I've got the wheels chocked but with no brakes at all its completely immobile till i can get something sorted. The calipers were removed and dismantled some time back, heres how they look now:

Snake reckoned they might be salvageable but looking through the bits I could only find one piston!!! (should be 2 obvs) Also, these calipers are pretty unusual, theyre the same as you get on a Rover P6 and they have some very weird mechanisms inside them. I decided I needed another pair of calipers 'intact' so that i could see exactly how they assemble and be sure I wasn't missing any other bits. @barrett put me onto some stammering geezer in Brighouse who has a stash of P6 parts so I had a trip up there and came back £70 lighter but with with 3 more calipers ("probably don't even need a rebuild m8")
So today my workbench looks like this:


Now I've got 5 calipers! on the far left there is one which I am planning to keep intact as a guide to how the thing assembles, the other 4 are now in bits. Also I found the missing piston. Also got 2 new seal kits.
Now then, the real nub of the problem here is the pistons:

All the pistons I have, are in really poor condition like these. Theyre a really weird design with that arm on one end and clipped inside is a female-threaded adjuster that wobbles about, check it out in the middle of this cross section:

I noticed past parts sell reconned calipers for these/P6's so i thought they must have a source of new pistons, so I rang them up today. They reckoned they re-use pistons but bore out and re-sleeve the caliper bodies. I sat and thought about it and decided that sounded ridiculous - why fit a new sleeve, when the seal is static in the bore and the sealing surface is a moving piston? Then I sat in the garden for some hours wondering how I could get some new pistons machined up in stainless and how to attach those crank arms to them. I even opened one up to have a look inside:

Didnt really come up with a satisfactory answer TBH.
Then I had a brainwave when I realised that the main piston is not actually hydraulic at all!!! its the little one on the left of the X-section that is, that must be the one that PP resleeve. So actually, those miserable looking pistons will be perfectly OK after all. I will just clean them up as best I can and chuck loads of vaseline over them to protect them.
I'm hoping I might be able to go up to Cobblers' place and get some of these bits cleaned in his ultrasonic cleaner before reassembling but hopefully i can get them back together in the next day or two either way.
Also gave the backplates a clean up and a coat of red oxide & satin black (forgot to photo the finished jobs!)

Ive got this week off work, booked it ages ago so I could do loads of horsebox stuff - Ive not touched that at all yet, as i am still in a 'love haze' with this Zephyr. More soon!

Dez, another alternative could be to post on RR? 

One thing I’m curious about is what makes you ‘check in’ on your cars DVLA record, and why by the sounds of it do you do it daily?!
Too much of a coincidence for you to have by chance checked in on the very day they issued a new V5?!
Ive only ever checked any of my vehicles if I’ve forgotten when the MOT runs out, just curious as to why you’d need to constantly check in on it?

I do hope that Dez can get this thing on the road sooner rather than later.  Then he can just worry about whether it is going to start in the morning, like the rest of us. 

At the end of the day the model coding etc is not meant to be a public facing feature.
You know about it as an enthusiast/researcher but the chances are, if you complain to DVLA they won't really know what to do with it.
There must be tons of people with imports etc who don't have a coded model and manage to use their cars just fine.

You are taking all this stuff far too seriously M8.
I know zilch about computer search systems, but is it possible that your industrial scale DVLA bashing has alerted them in some way, and they are wondering why somebody is so interested in such an obscure group of vehicles?   Not suggesting you are being in any way dishonest, but sometimes it's best to keep your head down.  Just saying.

Shouldn't that be     601  Hycomat Spazial Variante ? 

There's got to be porn potential in videos called Fake PIP Assessment. Pay a few models to rock up to a fake DWP office in an Invacare after an easy way to get a higher rate DLA award...

I do feel sorry for any Invacare owner whose doctor has put him on a strict diet of Viagra and powdered rhino horn. 
Permanently priapic in plastic with no chance of an outlet for his spendings.

Or spunky cold semolina. Oozing from every fibreglass orifice...

Or spunky cold semolina. Oozing from every fibreglass orifice...

Or spunky cold semolina. Oozing from every fibreglass orifice...

Or spunky cold semolina. Oozing from every fibreglass orifice...