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Prototype: Corgi Mini Hot Dog Van
Another of Marcel Van Cleemput's ideas, pictured in 'The Great Book of Corgi':

Despite having lost its hot dog roof feature over the years (might have been eaten), it still exists today:

The figure looks to be the standalone figure that came with the Ford Thames (Anglia) Ice Cream van

Speedy on a Mini Cooper S chassis!

Starting bid was £300 and it ran to £1700 plus commission
Sounds like a good idea for recreation...

Got home to a parcel from Ana's Hot Wheels site, who I use occasionally to get the stuff I can't find in the shit shops round here. 
First off, a couple of Matchbox mainlines,

I must be about the only person in the country who couldn't find this one in the shops when it came out, but now I've got one. Already got the yellow and metallic blue ones, but I'm still on the hunt for the Target-exclusive Onyx green version, after narrowly missing out on it a couple of times ...



The MR2 looks good in metallic blue,

A very sparkly metallic blue!

Bunglebus beat me to it with showing one of these, but I'm loving the Moving Parts Beemer CSL, like I did the original Superfast one I had as a kid.

I like the new Moving Parts packaging, but FFS Mattel, would it kill you to have tuck-in flaps on the ends of the boxes rather than gluing the bastards down? I wanted to have this one out but it was impossible to get the glued down flap open without damaging it,

Still, it's out now, and it's a lovely thing.

Nice detailing for the size,



Bonnet opens like on the real thing, lift the front first, and slide forward slightly, then open,

To reveal some lovely under bonnet detail.

In all, a little belter!
And a few HW Premiums which, again, I didn't stand a cat in hells chance of getting anywhere else,


Sierra Cossie looks great, apart from that bloody locating pillar,




Finally got the flat-front Escort MK2, again, a nice wee thing.

Very close to the livery of Björn Waldegård's 1977 British Airways-liveried car, one of my fave liveries.



But getting this one was the highlight though, I really wanted it at the time, then kind of forgotten about it until it came up on the sales site,

Yep, it's a bit '90s Max Power with the body mods, etc, but it's a bloody Purple Corrado, so that's good enough for me.



Another little stunner!

As alluded to a couple of pages back I have finally got the new offside front strut fitted to the Z4, and I'm pleased to report that it's transformed the way the car drives - even the knocking that I had thought was a knackered balljoint has gone.  I've got it booked in tomorrow to have the tracking done and it should then hopefully drive as well as a 20-year-old 192k-mile car can be expected to.  Then I just need to sort out its other issues - the sticky steering, the battery drain and the engine misfire when cold / throwing a wobbly if I try to take it over 4,000rpm. 
I was intending to attempt to diagnose the latter two issues this weekend, but predictably when I tried to do so the car behaved perfectly.  I thought I was onto something with the battery drain as the multimeter was initially showing just over 1.2 amps with everything switched off, but after 10 minutes or so that had gone down to about 80mA, and that was the same each time I tried it.  It's now gone three days without flattening its battery, and that's with the smaller battery off the Zafira on there.  I also plugged in the laptop and took the car for a thrash up the coast road to see if I could get a fault code when the engine threw its usual wobbly, but instead it revved happily to 5,000rpm and beyond and didn't even put the engine light on.  I'm pretty sure it has a vacuum leak though as there is an audible hiss at idle, which gets much louder if I give the throttle a sudden blip, after which the engine will misfire for a few seconds.  It's going to be a two-man job to track the leak down though, so I'll run the car up to my mate's at the weekend and get him to listen while I blip or vice versa.
The Lexmoto also threw a bit of a wobbly on Sunday - I fired it up and it ran fine for a bit then cut out, and I noticed petrol pissing out of the carb overflow.  So it looks like that has a stuck float - I've taken the carb off and I'm going to take it to bits one of these evenings and see what's what.
The rest of the fleet has been behaving remarkably well.  I took the Mobylette for its first ride of the year on Sunday, and other than taking a bit longer than usual to start from cold and being a bit spluttery for the first mile or so, it ran surprisingly well - in fact I ended up taking it for the longest ride I've been on since I got it back on the road, and it didn't conk out once, although it still has a major flat spot on part throttle when it's warm so that will still need investigating at some point - not hugely urgent though given that most of the roads round here are NSL so the bike spends most of its time flat out.
The Renault 6 ran fine as it always does (although it's definitely getting more tappety, I really need to do the valve clearances this year), but what I am pleased about is that my brake repair from last year is holding up fine - I did a couple of fairly heavy stops and the brakes didn't stick on at all.  The bungee cord holding the bonnet closed also seems to be doing the trick, for now.  The Volvo also ran great, managing an uphill overtake of a dawdling giffer in an X-Trail (it's not a sporting engine by any means but it still sounds nice when given some beans), the temperature gauge held steady at just below half and it didn't seem to lose any coolant.  I do need to sort the brakes out this year though, they're OK but the offside rear still isn't doing much so it does still pull to the left noticeably under heavy braking. 
The Visa's brake pedal has gone a bit softer again but it's still much better than it was previously.  On Saturday I swapped the wheels front to rear (when I got the car the rears were the correct 155/65x13, the fronts were oversized and rather worn 165/70x13).  It's made a noticeable improvement to the steering - it's lighter at parking speeds and weighs up less in faster corners.  It does look a bit odd with the fatter tyres on the back, but the spare wheel has a nearly new correctly-sized tyre, so I only need to find one more to have a complete set.  To do that I need to find a tyre place that can balance centreless wheels...

This is about the best I can do, re: Flip Tops chat!

A box arrived yesterday containing some bargainous Lone Star Flyers
Corsair & Jag are complete,just have some chips
Alfa Spider just missing the steering wheel
Lotus Europa had a wheel issue
I had this though,so easily fixed

Lastly,the Ford Taunus which is really nice,but it does have a slight issue

I have a plan for that though........

MOT time yesterday-failed-on the bloody handbrake!
Took on @RoverFolkUs advice and looked through the hole at the pivot shoe and it looked new-along with the springs-so didn't take the hub off. Adjusted up the shoes (should have rechecked after a while) and the adjustment at the handbrake . Still a bit of adjustment on the handbrake and rear shoes I think.
Garage is going to do it next Monday -I could have a fiddle but away for 4 days and easier if its with the garage that mot'd it.
MOT guy said its a very good car-no advisories.
Also it seems that Allan the previous owner had all advisories mentioned in the MOT's fixed-I checked with him and he confirmed this. Last years were pitted rear discs-there are new discs on the back and it looks like new handbrake springs etc.
So hopefully should be MOT'd next week. 

I love the Mira and Mercury examples! Thats right up my stradale.
The rally version looks very similar to a Solido model.
 

The caliper came today, it was dry outside and I had a few free hours in the afternoon and evening so I cracked on.
Horrible job tbh. I've done a few calipers but this one was very awkward. For a start, the only spanner size I don't have is an 18 and guess what the caliper carriers are held on by? A quick dash to Halfords netted an offset ring 18 and a combination 18 as well. Although almost everything bar the carrier is aluminium, all the bolts were incredibly tight and hard to access. I had to use a scissor jack under the spanner to get some leverage as my breaker bar would not get near the carrier bolts.
Got there eventually though:

You can see that the rear seal of the piston has been pissing out fluid.
Cheerio

New one on:

Comes with a new handbrake motor

Theres a bit of a procedure surrounding all of this. First, you need to put the car in 'jacking mode' so the air suspension stays level when one corner is raised. Next, you need to wind back the handbrake motors via the scanner. Before fitting the new caliper, you need to remove the handbrake motor to access the torx fitting which allows you to wind the piston in with the pads fitted until they just touch the disc in no more. Next, after bleeding the caliper, you need to reset the parking brake with the scanner,  before finally turning off jacking mode via the MMI menu.
The brakes on this car aren't very good and the pedal has never been that sharp. The car rewarded my toil by throwing up a brake pad warning. There was at least 6 or 7 mm left on them so they were reused but obviously that's not good enough😅 I think it needs new pads all round but fuck that for today. At least I can drive it again when I come back from my holiday.
 

The caliper came today, it was dry outside and I had a few free hours in the afternoon and evening so I cracked on.
Horrible job tbh. I've done a few calipers but this one was very awkward. For a start, the only spanner size I don't have is an 18 and guess what the caliper carriers are held on by? A quick dash to Halfords netted an offset ring 18 and a combination 18 as well. Although almost everything bar the carrier is aluminium, all the bolts were incredibly tight and hard to access. I had to use a scissor jack under the spanner to get some leverage as my breaker bar would not get near the carrier bolts.
Got there eventually though:

You can see that the rear seal of the piston has been pissing out fluid.
Cheerio

New one on:

Comes with a new handbrake motor

Theres a bit of a procedure surrounding all of this. First, you need to put the car in 'jacking mode' so the air suspension stays level when one corner is raised. Next, you need to wind back the handbrake motors via the scanner. Before fitting the new caliper, you need to remove the handbrake motor to access the torx fitting which allows you to wind the piston in with the pads fitted until they just touch the disc in no more. Next, after bleeding the caliper, you need to reset the parking brake with the scanner,  before finally turning off jacking mode via the MMI menu.
The brakes on this car aren't very good and the pedal has never been that sharp. The car rewarded my toil by throwing up a brake pad warning. There was at least 6 or 7 mm left on them so they were reused but obviously that's not good enough😅 I think it needs new pads all round but fuck that for today. At least I can drive it again when I come back from my holiday.
 

Today was Drive It Day.  So I drove it. 

Weekend over, 250+ miles and almost exactly a tank later and the car did well without trouble aside from an annoying rattle from a heatshield with the top down. Pretty sure this was also the first time I drove over the Hardknott pass, which happened to be during a bicycle hillclimb type event...

A few driving impressions: Generally quite comfortable, the suspension and seats are definitely long-distance worthy. Noise levels are high with both the top up or down (naturally) at motorway speeds but the only comparable car I have ever driven was a 2-series convertible.

It handles well although I couldn't get even close to its limits with the gf in the passenger seat (constantly shouting slower SLOWER even at normal speed limits)😂. Tracking is quite easily affected by uneven road surfaces, much more than the usually much bigger cars I'm used to. That compactness really helps with the lake district's many one lane roads though.

Its not quite summer yet but with temperatures rising I'm definitely looking forward to some more top down motoring. Maybe I'll actually get the SL500 sorted and MOT'd in time to be able to compare the two.

The caliper came today, it was dry outside and I had a few free hours in the afternoon and evening so I cracked on.
Horrible job tbh. I've done a few calipers but this one was very awkward. For a start, the only spanner size I don't have is an 18 and guess what the caliper carriers are held on by? A quick dash to Halfords netted an offset ring 18 and a combination 18 as well. Although almost everything bar the carrier is aluminium, all the bolts were incredibly tight and hard to access. I had to use a scissor jack under the spanner to get some leverage as my breaker bar would not get near the carrier bolts.
Got there eventually though:

You can see that the rear seal of the piston has been pissing out fluid.
Cheerio

New one on:

Comes with a new handbrake motor

Theres a bit of a procedure surrounding all of this. First, you need to put the car in 'jacking mode' so the air suspension stays level when one corner is raised. Next, you need to wind back the handbrake motors via the scanner. Before fitting the new caliper, you need to remove the handbrake motor to access the torx fitting which allows you to wind the piston in with the pads fitted until they just touch the disc in no more. Next, after bleeding the caliper, you need to reset the parking brake with the scanner,  before finally turning off jacking mode via the MMI menu.
The brakes on this car aren't very good and the pedal has never been that sharp. The car rewarded my toil by throwing up a brake pad warning. There was at least 6 or 7 mm left on them so they were reused but obviously that's not good enough😅 I think it needs new pads all round but fuck that for today. At least I can drive it again when I come back from my holiday.
 

The Falkirk registration on the light blue one probably explains why it has received so many fails and advisories for corrosion!

I love the Mira and Mercury examples! Thats right up my stradale.
The rally version looks very similar to a Solido model.
 

You can just pull them off with your hands without having to remove anything.

Got a blowing exhaust, sound like it's at the front.
Hopefully I'll get that looked at this week.
Can't really grumble the Ceed rarely costs me money.

I love the Mira and Mercury examples! Thats right up my stradale.
The rally version looks very similar to a Solido model.
 

@Datsuncog remember this market find? A little bit of work and it's gone into the fleet with plenty of other Bill Day scratchbuilds for company.

Today's finds

Yesterday's market stall finds.
Corgi Ford Escort mk3 in Smoll and Smollerer flavours. 

Corgi 924,still with rear paper taillights intact.


Corgi Ferrari,was too nice to leave behind.

Lastly this Matchbox "Dinky" Cadillac. 

Not a bad haul for €10.00.
"You keep tellin yerself that M8"
 

You can just pull them off with your hands without having to remove anything.

I love the Mira and Mercury examples! Thats right up my stradale.
The rally version looks very similar to a Solido model.
 

I like a Mirafiori, especially an Abarth.
Here's a Luso Toys one




A Mercury Carabinieri



And finally a Mira Seat 131 Especial

The caliper came today, it was dry outside and I had a few free hours in the afternoon and evening so I cracked on.
Horrible job tbh. I've done a few calipers but this one was very awkward. For a start, the only spanner size I don't have is an 18 and guess what the caliper carriers are held on by? A quick dash to Halfords netted an offset ring 18 and a combination 18 as well. Although almost everything bar the carrier is aluminium, all the bolts were incredibly tight and hard to access. I had to use a scissor jack under the spanner to get some leverage as my breaker bar would not get near the carrier bolts.
Got there eventually though:

You can see that the rear seal of the piston has been pissing out fluid.
Cheerio

New one on:

Comes with a new handbrake motor

Theres a bit of a procedure surrounding all of this. First, you need to put the car in 'jacking mode' so the air suspension stays level when one corner is raised. Next, you need to wind back the handbrake motors via the scanner. Before fitting the new caliper, you need to remove the handbrake motor to access the torx fitting which allows you to wind the piston in with the pads fitted until they just touch the disc in no more. Next, after bleeding the caliper, you need to reset the parking brake with the scanner,  before finally turning off jacking mode via the MMI menu.
The brakes on this car aren't very good and the pedal has never been that sharp. The car rewarded my toil by throwing up a brake pad warning. There was at least 6 or 7 mm left on them so they were reused but obviously that's not good enough😅 I think it needs new pads all round but fuck that for today. At least I can drive it again when I come back from my holiday.