garycox

I dispatched the first 27 calendars last night, the following people will (should) see theirs today via UPS:
@Macscrooge@Zelandeth@rml2345@adw1977@catsinthewelder@gm@dozeydustman@sutty2006@Matty
They've been instructed to put the envelope through your letterbox if you aren't in, hopefully this will work.
 
And I used the Royal Mail for the following:
@AnnoyingPentium @Six-cylinder@Dan302@loserone@Cookiesouwest@davidfowler2000@brownnova@garycox@red5@Sunny Jim@rob88h@Wilko220@castros_bro
My neighbour took them in to the sorting office he works at in exchange for a few beers, so they should get to you today/tomorrow/Thursday.
If your name isn't mentioned, then you are in the second batch of 20 calendars that are due in to me today/tomorrow (Evri can't seem to make their minds up on this) and I'll dispatch them asap.
@chodweaver you expressed an interest early on, would you still like two calendars?  No worries if you don't.

@RobT
@wesacosa
@garycox
I’ve been given some local driving jobs today and I’m in your/our area. I will hand deliver yours in the next hour. Garycox, I’m talking about your second calendar.l, not the one to your address.
Sounds a bit cryptic all this!

Two please when they’re ready 

It is! I miss that car.

Isn’t this the ex @garycox and current @N19  mondeo?

Hey Trigsworthy I was thinking about that car the other day when accidentally watching this quite bad music video. Do you reckon it's your old one? You never see enough of it to properly ID it but how many RHD bright orange Kadetts are there????
Deffo watch with the sound off though because it's so annoying. I really really fancied their singer (still do) though.

This may look like a shameless self-nomination, but in fact I'm just not tech savvy enough to stick a nomination quote from @Broadsword  from another thread into this thread 😂

I bought the Mondeo about 18 months ago now, in the midst of a house move it proved very practical indeed for all the sundry trips to the dump, DIY, garage crap moving etc. At the time I also had the Bluebird off the road for some works. I had thought about selling once I'd settled in and the Bluebird was back, but then realised that a backup is essential and it's actually incredibly useful! It performs daily duties quite ably, although it's happiest on the motorway.

 

And @garycoxturned up in Aberdeenshire, from Brighton.

A damp miserable day but at least it's been productive, I have two large boxes of parts and other bits but will be back tomorrow for more parts from this terminally rusty series 3, the heater box came out okay but I had to evict a lot of spiders and the resident mouse's nut collection 
The floor on the left-hand side is a little frilly 
But I'm up 19p so far and I found some retro entertainment to 
the view out of the back window with added ventilation 
that's all for today, more tomorrow 
 

Outside for the first time in a while, and raring to go. Looks really good with a bit of space round it (despite the glamorous backdrop)


Sadly it's going to be horrendous weather on Sunday so I'm not sure I can be bothered driving it to Brooklands in the lashing wind and rain

I took some detail shots... The newly-plated brightwork really shi9nes agianst the black, and the 'coined' top half is just so bonkers. Gonna try and get together with the 'other' Palladium soon for some photos



 

The time old question of what do you do when you've got several projects.. get another. Preferably bought unseen from  a marque and model you are almost totally unaware of, bonus  points for being off the road for nearly 30 years and almost no parts availability.
Ladies and Gentleshites I give you the 1971 Vauxhall VX4/90.  

 
 
I'd bookmarked it on evilbay and the GF saw it a day later when I was prattling on about looking for something interesting (and a few days before getting the Mustang). And she was smitten with it.  The seller was sadly letting jt go due to I'll health and hand been working on it for the last 8 years.
 
The story (unverified) was it was a Vauxhall pool car in Luton for a while, then purchased by a mechanic ther for his sister and spent most if its life garaged and little used.  Hence allegedly only having 3909 on the clock (the last mot from 92 reads 3500 or so).

Its remarkably original and untouched about with. Rust as it is is confined to the door bottoms on the LHS as well as some on the front wing and lower rear behind the arch. There are some dents and dings and some bubbling but it all seems pretty decent and shines up well.  He had refurbished or replaced a ton of parts from brakes to cam belt and returned a fair amount. The interior is all there and pretty decent (50 years of age yadday)



It came with 4 good doors and 2 NOS front wings and rhe boot was full kf parts (steering rack, rad, lights, brake pistons, mirrors oodles)
 
It runs tho the carbs are well out, one seems to be running super rich and the other incredibly lean. Plenty of rasps and parts. And the brakes need attention as they barely work, its had ne cylinders on the back and new calipers on the front tho the it looks like  a pair of lefts as this is the RHS one..

Here arriving care of Ceri, top man. (Even if he brought the rain with him)

 
Overall well chuffed as is the GF.. she even found stuff about it on the internet.

 
The plan is to get the brakes bked and the carbs turned and give it a good shakedown. All the electrics work, the seller had new tyres fitted, it's all really solid underneath  front the limited driving it in and out if the garage show clutch is good and it fires up easily with good oil pressure tho the tracking is out and the sterring wheel near up sideown! The only bits missing are some of the "Vaxhall" letters off the boot (err most of them) and the interior light fittings (ones ther but it's about an inche too long)
 

I'm now the proud* owner of this absolute heap.
It's got a 2L petrol H20 engine in, the cab is mostly holes and the bed is knackered.
I'm going to be fixing it over the next few months and getting it restored back to a decent standard, then building it into a proper motorhome.
This one has been on Salvage Hunters once and handed about between buyers for the past few years.
The current plan is to sort out the running gear and electrics. The bodywork, reupholstry etc will mostly be done in Morocco (I'm driving there to see my partners family in this...) once it's structurally sound enough.
Everything that gets done with it will be documented in this thread.
So far I've managed to find an engine manual and some info about parts cross compatability with the industrial H20 they put in forklifts, if anyone knows much about these do let me know...




(Wheel distorted due to fisheye lens)

I reckon the hardest part is picking a colour to respray it.

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!

I'm in with the Orion.

 

Yep, there are only x2 of the UK “Launch Cars” left. I used to own the other one, which is now with a friend down on the south coast. This one I found in a garage a few years ago after 20 years of hibernation. It was on the road for a year and a bit before going in for bodywork. 
 
I wouldn’t have gone so far with it if it wasn’t one of these last two D-reg. It was perfectly good enough for another decade of I’d just left it mechanically sorted. But eventually the wheel arches would have needed chopped out. 

I should probably introduce my 24012...
Known as the Moskvitch Aleko.
The 20142 was built here in Bulgaria and the additional 2 on the end donates an actual Moskvitch engine opposed to the usual Lada lump.
Bought it from an old dear in Pleven, and the car buying process here is such a pain I dont actually own ten cars here yet. In fact it put me right off! You and the seller have to go to a Notary with all the correct documents, in the case of this sale the seller didn't and had to visit the town hall three times!
After the Notary draws up the sale and you pay the taxes and (lie about the sale price) Notary fee you are . Tired. And free to spend another day registering your car at KAT... your local traffic police station. Here you get a Talon (V5) and if you want local number plates. Up until recently this was a must, but I kept the EH Pleven number plate cause ... well...  tight. Or I like the EH. Then insurance, then vignette, then village tax
It behaved well until it stopped behaving well after 4 weeks. I took it to Romania with my parents which it didn't like. And the border officials were not impressed as they had to push start us into Romania. It made it back just but then died in Vidin.
In some order new plugs, brand new carburettor and a coil side rewire and new alternator the thing has been okay since apart from a gypsy stole it one night when we were drinkng and burned the clutch out then pushed it back onto my drive and pretended nothing happened.

After rebuild photographed in Rila Mountains

My local petrol station some English suprised to see me in the Wild West

It didn't like Romania

Old carb here stripped and new bits put in but eventually found new complete unit

One of the many times it was on the ramps last summer. Lucky for me the son of garage owner speaks perfect English. And despite everyone's warning I find them to be honest and reasonable. People are nervous when I try do things for myself here cause its usual to think English are rich and thus hike up prices.

Riding round the village with choke on (or cruise control if you like)

Snow

Buzludzha Monument

Recently picked up this A8 4.2 can’t say I remember seeing another in the wild , will be documenting how it goes. So far have some squeaky brakes to attend to

well i bought a "go pro" obviously not a real one but an amazon version and i have to say it's really rather good!

Glad to report i look like an absolute idiot! which is excellent.
I've been trying it out today and did one of those "trendy pov drives" and the results well they are really rather good, good enough that i'm currently uploading it to youtube.
stay tuned for some shite video content, i will post the link here once it's uploaded

Absolutely!  It may seem a bit foggy when you're trying to explain to a 50-year-old man how to drive an automatic for the first time, but yes, for the most part!!
Dude, I still owe you massively for finding me this.  Can't wait to get around to reviewing this properly on the channel

 
Sometimes when I wake up in the night, if I listen closely, I can still hear the distant thrum of an XC90 wheel bearing.
 
Thank you, really appreciate the kind comments.
Today was a typical Manic Monday.  It usually consists of moving a lot of cars to where they need to be for getting worked on (various mechanics, bodywork, electrical.... the logistics of it all can be quite tiring).  But late this afternoon I had a really enthusiastic woman come to view my Xsara Picasso, and she turned up.... in a Xsara Picasso.  "This will be my fifth, I just love them".  Mine was a rather posh Exclusive model so once she heard about the automatic wipers and electrically folding mirrors, she was sold.  She nearly had kittens when she saw the old shopping trolley still in the boot.



As she bounced in to drive it home she said "I look forward to getting to know this one.  They always have a quirk.  With my current one, the rear wiper swipes once when I unlock it.  With the one before that, the radio turned off if I used the passenger electric window."  You, my dear, are just the perfect French car customer - Embrace it, it's not a fault, it's character!!

'Ey up,
Belfast Luke here, thought it was about time I started documenting the life of a poor sod whose innocent love of chod has now become a full time actual grown up career.
I started LMC Cars after leaving uni back in 2013 when I was a regular on here, immersing myself in this wonderful community where driving a Renault Vel Satis was acceptable.  Made some cracking friends, who will already be familiar with my shenanigans through Facebook etc, but I really want to start documenting things properly as I do have some pretty unusual stuff passing through my hands.  The business has amazingly gone from strength to strength, particularly over the last year, where I've been one of the lucky ones in this unpredictable world we currently live in.  Forging a business out of my love for chod is honestly a dream come true, despite having to deal with the public on a daily basis.  For example, yesterday I sold a 2008 Volvo V70 3.2 petrol and had a 2004 V70 2.0T Auto traded in by a fellow diesel hater.  It's deals like this that make every "last price plz" tosspot almost tolerable 

 
Obviously, I can't trade full time in Protons and 90s Renaults (I actually have to give a warranty now!!!), but my stocking profile is very much "future shite".
Exhibit A:

 
I can tell myself "it's business, you're working" when I buy a Peugeot 407 3.0 V6 with a manual box on a salvage auction site and have it delivered to Belfast from Aberdeen 😇
I even try to follow the rule of shite with more modern "in demand" stuff.  I have this C30 in stock at the moment. Why would I buy a smart looking R-Design when I can have some poverty magnificence to drive for a while!?


That's the kind of Volvo we'll be all be pocket shuffling over in 20 years time, right!?
Of course, having more space and more funds that can be psychologically justified as "business" has allowed my own collection of chod to be sustained and cultivated.  I finally own that Mk1 BX I've stalked around Belfast since my uni days....

And I have a shoddy old stable full of completely unwanted shite.



Every now and then I get something unusual traded in, like a Mitsubishi Colt with leather, and it just goes straight in the shed until it is shoved out again by something a little more unique....."shite gentrification", if you will.
 
 
 
Click on that and you'll find more thrilling* content from when the monotony of lockdown drove me to buying a GoPro.  I plan to maintain this as a shite documentary as and when I get time.  
I've missed this place and I look forward to sharing my dull tales of days jam-packed with MOTs, servicing, auctions, trade-ins and my, at times, very eccentric customer base.  And just in case you wondered how glamorous the car sales business life is, this picture should tell you everything - A few months ago, I had not one, but TWO Chevrolet Lacettis in stock at once.  GOD IS GOOD 😂

Left this morning, hopefully he'll make it back OK and we'll be kept up to date with the progress.
 
It's not gonna be scrapped.

Think we may have found a home for this now, and it'll be staying in the AS family if so.
 
SMILEYFACE