M'coli

after 5 months of enforced stepthrough riding,im very happy to announce that I will be driving shite in time for xmas
its beige,small,and built in the midlands,more info when it arrives

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1991-ROVER-METRO-C-WHITE-/171198368672?pt=Automobiles_UK&hash=item27dc37cba0#ht_197wt_958
 
 

Here, I found some moar Le Jog pics:
 
http://luiscezar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/le-jog-2013.html

BBC's LeJog pictures
 

BBC's LeJog pictures
 

Found it!

VJP 127S was a 1977 304 van bought from the local travelling folk in 1984.  My mother loved it.  Even I did, we still had the second HA van at the time and this was a world away.

Lovely though isn't it, perhaps someone is getting it for Christmas.
 

L@@K here we have a rare BARN FIND !!!1!
 
At least I'm guessing that is what the eBay ad said/will say. Saw it in Kidderminster yesterday. Apologies for pics struggling with a tablet and my own incompetence.
 
 
 
 
 

BBC's LeJog pictures
 

Not sure how much interest there'll be in this on here but Joe reckoned I should stick some photos up.
If I don't get told to piss off then I'll post some more.
 
I bought this 52.1/2ft Ex Admiralty Harbour Service Launch back at the beginning of 2006 (I would have been 17 and it was before I'd rebuilt any cars!)
What was going to be a cheap source of accommodation rapidly transformed into a financially crippling restoration project which is still ongoing....
 
 
As she was when I bought her showing the previous owners Inspired* Shedlike addition:

 
 
Arriving at my new mooring: For reasons unknown the previous owner had painted 90% of the boat in "International Distress Orange"

 
My mother, presumably asking me about the logic behind my new summer* project: (*also winter, spring & autumn)

 
 
Showing genuine barnfind* condition:

 
 
Shortly after getting the boat the garden shed was removed:

 
 
 
And in time a new wheelhouse and funnel were built to as close to what the boat would have had originally as I could manage:

 
 
 
6Ltr Supercharged 2 Stroke Diesel (with twin overhead exhaust valves!):

 
 
 
Which redlines at 2800rpm! the Gearbox has a 3to1 stepdown reduction so the rpm at the propeller is pretty slow:

 
 
A photo taken 5.1/2 years ago before I'd really started on the structural stuff:

 
 
And Finally two taken just last week:

 
 

 
Thanks for reading!
 
Dave

Still enjoying the ST.

Listening to this whilst on my evening stroll.
 
http://youtu.be/9_7O6FIUJgY

An amount of progress has occurred, admittedly not very much but there you go, d'ya wana fight about it?
 
I have done some work on the passenger side outer sill, ready for it to go on. Having learned from my mistakes on the other side, this time I am going to cut more good metal out of the sill so that the new one will be welded on at the original seams top and bottom and then seam welded down each end on to what is currently there.
 
I will also be making sure that this sill is complete and sound before it is attached to the car, something that seems disarmingly obvious now I am doing it for a second time. I have set to cutting out the rust and putting in new metal, the rust on this sill is around the area where it attaches onto the lower rear quarter so will need to be fixed in two layers. With this I have also added the lip back onto the lower edge of the sill which had disintegrated. Uninteresting pictures below:



Lovely Jubbley

2 weeks of Citalopram then 5 days ago I knocked it on the head, been the strangest encounter with the stuff yet, had a "coming up" feeling the whole time which was interesting, also a funny head and tight jaw.
 
Anyways doc signed me off for 2 further weeks but I decided to man up and find out what was going on with my job..
 
Today I worked my first shift since my little melt down and am scheduled for the rest of week. yay.
 
So I'm pleased to have a job, have 2 weeks of £60 in my pay packet which will really fuck Christmas up, especially with my MG costing so much!
 
Today I trained up a new driver,  the chap was ex RAF and plenty of multi drop experience. He says forget doing that for a job!!!
 
Delivering pizzas is stressful.
 
Oh yeah spent a lot of time at my mates house and stayed away from home, he is so lovely lol, also been reading a book called Mind Made Prison. Fantastic book, turns out nothing is good or bad, everything is neutral. Just how you decide to perceive it makes it what it is to you and you only.

Wrong car.
 
I worked on a beef and sheep farm in the early 90s.  I bumped into my boss at the Scottish car show in the SECC who told me he'd just been asked to leave the Porsche stand after asking about getting raised suspension on the 911 as the rear spoiler was just the ideal carrier for a couple of bales of hay to take out to the heifers... :D

Wrong car.
 
I worked on a beef and sheep farm in the early 90s.  I bumped into my boss at the Scottish car show in the SECC who told me he'd just been asked to leave the Porsche stand after asking about getting raised suspension on the 911 as the rear spoiler was just the ideal carrier for a couple of bales of hay to take out to the heifers... :D

Oh hey, I don't think my valve stem seals needed doing after all.  There's no longer a cloud of smoke when I reverse.  I'll get someone I know to follow me down the road so they can tell me if there's smoke when I change gear like there used to be.  That blown head gasket may have been the source of the weird smoke clouds after all.

Exactly what i was hoping to hear. Just bought a 1.0 off eBay for my first car. Haven't seen it in the flesh yet mind so it has the potential to be a dog but at £350 i think i've got a bargain. It's a 2003 in "S" spec.

Take a good book, sit in the corner and read it.  I finally worked this out recently; when I was young, I enjoyed parties at people's houses best if they had some decent books in the house.  No books or shit books = bored me and shit party.

Hi, I followed a link from pistonheads, so I thought I should say hi.
 
My previous car history has included a lot of shite, but recently I seem to have 'veered' off course, perhaps midlife crisis ?
 
Previous cars include :
 
Fiat 126
mk2 fiesta 1.1 car derived van with rear side windows
Flying zit
various mini's (850, clubman, 1000, mayfair)
Metro 1275 sport and mg Turdo
Mk2 Cavalier CDI auto (£6.64), 1.8 Sri (£40), calibre (£1400)
Mk3 Astra's - I wrote off all 3 in accidents that were totally my fault
51 reg Volvo S40 sport 1.8 VVT costing £350....Sold with broken gearbox and rattling VVT top end for £350
B reg Polo which was shite beyond shite
Ax 1.4 D - with GT wheels. 11 years ago, I was achieving 45 mpg thrashing it at max on a 55 mile each way commute. It was horrible and slow and we kept in 4 years.
 
Now we own :
 
2001 oxford built MINI cooper - purchased totally because of the colour
Mk1 Mx5 Monza - Poverty spec 88 bhp - purchased because my wife's friend was selling it
04 Accord 2.2 Deisel - Purchased because I had the cash and I thought I could save £2K a year on fuel, but have saved £1200 a year on fuel and lost £1000 a year in depreciation. But my kids call it "dad's grown up car"
 
Oh erm We live in Miseryside, but I currently work in Derby
 
 
Anyway I  a spirit of random photo's here's some shite I took on Anglesea near LLanddona, when my mum took us for a boxing day walk.

Today we fixed the head gasket. I found out that the weird 'Coalite-y' smell I'd get through the vents occasionally was coming from the engine, it was pretty pungent once the head was split from the block and after some thinking about it, Dad reckons it's the same smell as a product called Seal-It (may be spelled differently). So that's another bodge uncovered and rectified. The entire block face was covered in a strange black goop but the head face was lovely and clean and flat as I'd expected it to be.
 
Speaking of bodges, I'm not sure what monkey had been at the engine before but the rocker cover bolts are dogged up so tight they can't be undone so I couldn't do the valve stem seals without risk of shearing bolts. The headbolts were no better with 9 of the 10 far too tight and one far too loose.
 
The head gasket had blown between cylinders three and four but also showed signs of blowing across compression. It looks like it blew in a minor way some time ago and it was only recently that it properly failed. This might explain the peculiar cutting out issue I would randomly get and why now some of the strange little noises and driving sensations that I could never pin down have now gone away.
 
 

 

 
 
We made sure to clear all the water out of the bores and headbolt threads before bolting the engine back together. Casualties of the work were one sheared manifold bolt, one shattered sparkplug and quite a few skinned knuckles. Eventually I'll need to get the bolts for teh manifold replaced as two of them are not in great shape and one seems to have partially stripped the thread in the block. This does mean that the small blow on one corner of the manifold gasket is still there but it's so minor that it doesn't really effect anything. We're probably going to gum things up short term to try and resolve it properly.
 
After some cleaning and checking of surfaces we had no reason to believe things couldn't just be bolted together so that's what we did. Bit of confusion over the firing order since I had nothing to mark the spark leads with and apart from a comedy backfire-with-flames through the exhaust we got the firing order correct and the car now burbles away quite happily.
 
Took the car for a quick drive and the first thing was how much more torque was available low down where there was nothing before. I didn't have to go up and down the gearbox as much and the temperature gauge barely got to quarter when normally the run we did would have pushed it to half. Things are quieter and less smelly in the cabin too so I reckon we've cured quite a few niggles that I could never pin down to one thing by doing this job.
 
Happily, my Lotus wheel nuts arrived today too so I can get the alloys on properly and make sure the rear suspension arms are set correctly as they may be the cause of the strangeness with the rear end settling lower when the car isn't being used.

It'll break for more than the asking price. I just thought I'd offer it here before dealing with the mongs of eBay.
 
This is the place where folk like to champion the under dogs of the motoring world isn't it? Where unfashionable motors are lauded? That's why I offered it on here. It's an old Ford with zero "scene tax" for anyone to complain about.
 
Still. Couple of years time when these things get rare no doubt a thread will appear with "I didn't buy one of those for £450" type smugness.

I've told you (I don't know how many times) flog it now while it works!

The brakes are fine, just unservo'd.  They might need a decent shove because of this but rarely do they experience severe brake fade during normal use.  There are too many cars that are over assisted* these days, thus it skews the opinion of unservo'd brakes.  The Polo's unservo'd set-up I'd trust more than the (servo'd) 3-stud Pug 106's brakes on aftermarket OEM-standard kit.
 
In short: good driving position for a small car, decent fuel economy, cheap tyres, good snow performance and a huge washer reservoir makes for fantastic cheap long winter journey student/young person motoring, circa 2002.
 
Get it bought.
 
*This is my opinion as a reasonably sturdily built bloke.  If it were an ideal world, then we'd be able to select the amount of extra assistance we require - some tiny people require a lot, but others don't and prefer heavier steering, brakes and throttle.