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Missy Charm

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Everything posted by Missy Charm

  1. That thing is nothing but an egregious example of billionaire ego-stroking. Fair enough, it's Ratcliffe's dream car. Congratulations to him for designing and building it. The thing is, however, that he should have built one. Doing so would have satisfied his needs and that would have been that. Assuming that other people would also want his dream car is arrogant beyond belief; they don't and they won't buy them. The factory is a vanity project that he'll support until he can't afford to, or the tax benefits dry up and the workers will end up on the dole. Good for you, Ratcliffe, but you aren't the first. Remember John DeLorean? The Cizeta-Moroder V16? The Wiegert-Vector thingy? They never work. Vanity cars are like vanity books: by all means have one to show off, but don't expect to compete on the open market. You don't know what you are doing. My dream car is a properly converted RHD Mercury Monarch with a manual and a warmed up engine. That is not your dream car, and I don't expect it to be.
  2. There's only one answer: All right, two answers: They do everything you need, little you don't and are good to drive. The early Focuses excel at nothing (other than handling), but the corollary is that they fail at nothing. They are slightly better than average in every category one can think of, which is what an ordinary family car should seek to do. The best ordinary car of all time, in my opinion.
  3. The Gravel Expresses were Impreza estates, in spec roughly equivalent to the WRX. The modifications consisted of raising the ride height an inch or so and fitting the various plastic goodies pictured (they may also have bigger wheels).
  4. Oh, those! Interesting idea from Mitsubishi. The RVR was the shortened version of the Chariot; the ordinary versions of both were sold here under the names 'Space Runner' for the RVR and 'Space Wagon' for the Chariot. The Chariot was longer. If one desired that additional length, but still also required Lancer Evolution running gear, then a solution existed in the form of the Chariot Resort Runner GT: However, if one really wanted the pseudo off-road people carrier looks of the Resort Runner GT without the need to carry people, one had to turn to Subaru. They came up with the brilliant wheeze of applying the plastic, fake 4x4 bits to a car; not just any car, a genuinely four wheel drive car. Why not, then, give it the performance of their own rally car? No reason, so here's the Gravel Express: A car got up to look like an urban 4x4 crossover thingy, which is actually four wheel drive. I'd like to have one.
  5. Most soldering, other than the tedious business of sticking electronic components to circuit boards, is hit and miss. I've done soldering, well lead soldering and brazing, for craft work and nothing really gets close to a flame with a sniff of oxygen in it. Oxy-acetylene is possibly overkill, given the modern propensity for oxy-LPG in jewellery making and the like, but it does get lovely and hot. A gas soldering iron from a supermarket is likely to be junk (sorry), as at heart it's nothing more than a glorified cigarette lighter. Trying to solder metal will be beyond it, for reasons of heat conduction away from the work piece. You might be able to soften or even melt solder with it, but that's about all you can do; getting stuff to actually stick together requires more heat. So what? Don't lose heart because a toy soldering iron doesn't work properly. Proper gear, and indeed welding equipment, does. You might never be a great welder, or even a good welder, but at least with a proper welding torch you'll have a tool that is capable of sticking two bits of metal together and you therefore might be able to. You haven't a prayer without something that's good enough to do the job.
  6. I think that's an Australian spec. Land Cruiser. They still get the old shape one in all sorts of variants, including utes.
  7. The armoured version of that Stutz probably has the worst power to weight ratio of all time.
  8. Oh, the Integrale coupe. It's an aesthetically brave thing, but I prefer the five door. Some of you may go looking for article in which the photo of the black car originally appeared. If you find it, you will also find an image of the interior, which is as drab as the exterior is bold. Interestingly, the car sports, in addition to the usual complement of controls, a button labelled 'CITY MATIC'. What on earth is that? Apparently, to save poking about, it was an early go at a stop/start system; the engine would stop when the car came to a halt and would start again when the clutch was depressed, something like that.
  9. I make no claims for the Pilot being modern, in styling terms, for its time; my point is merely that the car is handsome and well proportioned. It is. One must remember that tastes didn't change overnight. Not everybody liked full width radiators and the loss of mudguards, and referred to some of the early pressed steel cars as 'inverted bathtubs'. It was similar in a way to those who bemoaned the end of the traditional saloon in the eighties. Ford did sell Pilots, so there were enough people with conservative tastes knocking about in the fifties to make post war production viable.
  10. As one of the most accelerative cars of the period, the V8 Pilot was able to get from 0 to 60 in 21 English seconds (none of this metric nonsense). I assume that's for the proper 221 cubic inch version. Pilot pluses include some of the finest styling applied to a British car of that period and a genuinely nice art-deco interior with a Bakelite dashboard. The Pilot's party piece is the fitment of not terribly well silenced twin exhaust pipes; they are one of the best sounding cars of all time: Starting to get expensive, however, after being very cheap for a long time.
  11. There's an 'h' in that comment that shouldn't be there...
  12. 1998 Josse Car Indigo 3000 A Swedish designed and manufactured drophead that was supposed to be a low-cost TVR alternative. It had the usual composite plastic body and spaceframe one associates with this sort of thing, but used Volvo running gear. The engine was the 3.0 litre straight six from the later 960, driving a Volvo manual gearbox. Not many were made, as is often the case. There are, of course, echoes of Marcos about it, given their earlier experiments with Volvo power.
  13. The VW Fox, the old British market one, would be an ideal candidate for 'cars you were aware of at one point but have now totally forgotten'. You used to see a few of them round Essex when new, on the basis that we'll drive any old rubbish as long as it's got a German badge, but they all seem to have disappeared. What happened to them? Perhaps the leases ran out and they were exported to other counties?
  14. Missy Charm

    Rozzer Shite

    And apparently trialling a VW Beetle panda car in 1970! The number can't be an accident! VW Beetles were not, alas, adopted by any British police forces.
  15. I've had a flick through one of my old books and the mystery car does resemble a Frazer Nash Targa Florio: The short front overhang, open mouth and round headlights fit, as does the very flat rear deck and upright windscreen. The mystery car also has a central air intake, a la Frazer Nash.
  16. The bodywork looks rather like a Pepsi can some kids have played football with. Well done! Hope it continues to provide good service.
  17. If the blue car isn't really there, why are the pedestrians in the vicinity looking at it?
  18. No doubt. I think it's Italian, as it bears a passing resemblance to all sorts of things such as the Moretti, SIATA and Cisitalia convertibles. Can't say for definite that it is any of those, however. The front has a little bit of Cobra about it, but the picture is too early for one of those. The oddity is the apparent shape of the rear wings; they are flat, whereas Italian roadsters of the period tended to be a bit more shapely round the back.
  19. I have been in, driven, owned and worked on most generations of the Fiesta and do feel this is a real shame. The proper ones, Dagenham built mark one to four (facelift), were everything a small car should be: stylish, sensible, nippy and fun to drive on a back road. They were democratic, cheerful and cheap and, crucially, never naff. There was nothing comical about driving a Fiesta, in the way there was with a Metro or, later, Micra; that was aided, of course, by the XR2 and the successors. Remember the turbo and the RS1800? They were really special inside and out. All right, the Endura-E was an antique by 2002 but it just kept going. Even someone like me was able to all sorts to it, along with sorting out all the other service bits. That counts for something. Is the Fiesta dead? Yes. Long live the Fiesta? I expect so. The economy is going down the tubes and three ton electric monster trucks are going to soon seem like a bad joke to many. What then? A loosening of a few regulations, a few greased palms, and faxes sent post haste to Messrs Ramakrishnan and Da Silva of Ford of India and Brazil (respectively) asking if they've got any small hatchbacks with small engines they might like to put on the next Europe-bound freighter.
  20. They were quite popular in middle Europe at one time, Trans-Sports not pressure washers, so not completely outlandish to see one in a German photograph. The European ones were slightly different, having smaller engines and manual gearboxes (possibly), but looked the same as the American market cars. They never made it over here and there weren't any RHD examples, to my knowledge. Shame as they're nice looking cars.
  21. That Viper (SRT/10) was, however later personal imports were simply badged 'Dodge Viper' as they were American market cars and not subject to the same copyright concerns. To answer @LightBulbFun's question: there is a vehicle called a Dodge SRT-10, which is an official Dodge product rather than a misnamed Dodge dodge (dodging copyright). The real SRT-10 is a variant of the Ram pickup, fitted with the Viper V10 and a Tremec T-56. It carried various other Viper styling cues and was rear wheel drive: There are, no doubt, a few knocking round here, which is perhaps what you're looking at on the DVLA record for 'Dodge SRT-10'. Note that the truck is the genuine SRT-10, and the 'SRT/10' when applied to the Viper is just a marketing ploy. It's possible that the SRT/10 name only existed on sales brochures and the like.
  22. They must have done. The British specification* Viper, sorry SRT/10, somewhat pre-dated the new Dodges you have mentioned. *I think the UK spec changes were extremely minimal, possibly just amber indicators and appropriately dipping headlights. They were LHD for a start.
  23. The Viper was sold here as the 'Chrysler SRT/10' for the reason that the Dodge nameplate is (was?) reserved for Renault trucks in Europe and there was already a kit car called a Viper. Ironically, the Viper kit car was an AC Cobra replica, meaning that a fake snake stole the real snake's name! Watch out for copyright constrictions and slithering lawyers, boo-hiss!
  24. Does the Fisker Karma count? I seem to remember there being various newspaper articles suggesting it would 'definitely' come here, but another source suggests only two actually made it. Fisker have gone bust but the car lives on in China, the rights having been bought by one of their manufacturers.
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