trigger

in late 2012 I got offered this 1985 Suzuki Alto FX on Flickr, the owner, at the time saw a photo I'd took of it outside his house and said that the head gasket had gone and wondered if i wanted it for £120, obviously i said yes and he bought it round mine with a trail of smoke behind and i set about replacing the head gasket and skimming the head. but once all finished at turned out pretty well, I'm not sure why but i sold the Golf and Mrs Trigger then took the Alto as her daily driver, i think she liked it as she only worked a few miles away from home and it was easy to park at her work. I didn't really like it though, it was woefully slow and felt like a stone was enough to write the car off and when a lorry pulled out in front of her one day i decided it was probably time to sell it so i think i got about £600 to it, i ended up selling it to a friend who broke the oil pump and it spend years sitting behind a local garage until recently when i saw it on ebay for about £3000

Meanwhile early 2012 i decided i need a old Ford in my life and whilst trawling Ebay i came across this 1974 Cortina 2000 XL in Evesham, the photos we are shite as you'd expect but i decided to bid anyway and won it for £2100, the next weekend we drove down and collected it. It made it home fine apart from one seized caliper that made me pull into oncoming traffic traffic whenever i braked! I had this car for 4 years and done a LOT of work on it, It's been to a Shitefest in Wales too which was brilliant. the interior was a mess, the front seats had been replaced with Alfa 156 seats and the rear seats painted with sticky cream paint, i had the original front seats repaired and cleaned all the paint of the rears. I also bite the bullet and had the car resprayed too and a pair of front wings fitted and when all finished it looked like this. What a nice car! When my wife got pregnant in 2015 i got a wobble on and decided that i had to sell all my cars so my dad bought it off me and still owns it, but there's still a lot of cars before that happened!

Next up in 2011 was this 1984 Ford Escort 1.3L, i was at a car show in Clacton when i saw it with a sign simply saying "For Sale" in the window. I asked the owner how much he was after and he said he'd be happy with £500 for it, the car was near immaculate and only done 40000 miles, I took it for a run around the field. and decided I'd be a right plum not to buy it so the deal was done at it because car number 31 I sold the blue Escort and Mrs Trig used it for a while but realistically it wasn't as nice to drive as the blue one and after hearing Mrs T moan about the clutch a millionth time i decided to sell the car on, I think i got £800 for it and it went off to Ireland After all this fuss i felt guilty so thought I'd better treat the wife to something a bit nicer so bought her this locally registered Golf 1.8 Cabriolet for £800 It was a nice car, i fitted a set of alloys, new stereo and replaced a rotten wing and it done well for a year.

After the Passat accident i quickly went out a bought this Bora 1.9TDi Sport, again a nice car but i didn't keep it long. Bonus shit Micra included, i then sold that and bought this brilliant Mondeo ST TDCi I loved this car, it's probably been my favourite modern car I've owned and i was a complete bellend to sell it but that's another story. Now this photo brings us into the next classic, this 1972 Opel Kadett 1200, I saw this for sale on carsandclassic in 2010 for £2200, i had just sold the BMW so was looking for something different and this looks amazing so drove to Hertfordshire to take a look. This was the sight we was graced with! i remember the owner opening the barn and pulling this sheet off and the whole barn just glowed orange! This was such a nice car, 60000 miles, a genuine UK car from South Wales, I even took it to a Shitefest at the now gone Stondon Transport Museum in 2010 were Dollywobber did a magazine feature on it It was around this time that i got shot of the ungrateful piece of crap Nissan Micra and upgraded it to this 1988 Ford Escort 1.6 GL that i found through Spottedlaurel, It was £300 i believe and had one elderly owner who was giving up driving. It done 40k and drove like new, I fitted new rear arches and a battery tray and Mrs Trigger had it as a daily for about a year

That's coming! I've got her to thank for actually getting me to buy what i had been talking about doing for years! Girls like the cars but I'm sure that will fade off as they get older and more embarrassed by me!

Hopefully these aren't too boring! I'll get to the more interesting stuff soon, i promise!. I had this Audi A4 1.8 SE for a about a year in 2006, It was up privately for £2000 which was a utter bargain as it really was a nice car, at the time probably the best all round car i had. That got traded in for £2600 against a 2004 Focus 1.8 TDCi Ghia, i won't bore you with that, it was a unreliable turd, this was 2007, I can't remember why i sold it but i ended up with this 1999 Mondeo ST24, i bought it from a garage in Southend in 2008 for £2000, it was immaculate, I'd have another nice one tomorrow. God that was pretty! I also bought my wife this 1999 Puma 1.4 at the same time, this was a nice car, handled well and was nippy for a 1.4 but i kept banging my head on the A post and the boot would fill with water when i opened it in the wet. Once the novelty of a 2.5 V6 that does 25 mpg wore off i sold that for this Passat 1.9 TDi Sport which was a brilliant car Unfortunately things didn't end well for it in 2010 (older members of the forum might remember this) but i was going to view a Mitsubishi Celeste In Nottingham and ended up in a 4 car pile up on the M11, bollocks, again. Devastated! We also had a 2004 Nissan Micra 1,5 DCi at the same time but that's a very forgetful car and doesn't warrant photos. Now just before this in 2009 i actually bought my first proper classic car toy thing, Mrs Trigger had saved £1600 up for me as a 30th birthday present and i found what looked like a very nice 1975 BMW 1602 Lux for sale up on Brigg, so we took the gamble and went and took a look. This was the sight when i arrived, the old boy was a bit of BMW fan, money was paid and the car drove home perfectly. I look awful there! I done a lot of little jobs on the car, kept it a year and then decided that i wanted to experience other classic cars so sold it for about £2000, bit silly of me looking back now! #

Whilst my Escort went through a huge saga with the insurance company one of the guys in the garage next door who did banger racing said i could have a old Sierra he was going to race for £100, it even had a long mot on it for me so i bought it. I fitted the original alloys off my Escort on it and the stereo and 6x9s from it and smoked it, now this car is were my love for cheap old cars comes from, it was bloody fantastic, It started life as a 1.6 GL but I'm convinced it had a 2.0 fitted as it flew and skidded everywhere!, I had some great laughs with it, the 6x9s were held in with 6" screws and i went clubbing in it 7 up with a mate in the boot who got stabbed by the screws, oh how we laughed, him not so much! I can't remember why but my dad bought it off me and i bought this really tidy Fiesta 1.1 L for £150 instead this was a fab little car and i had it for months until a boy racer ploughed into the back of it writing it off, by this point my insurance money had come through from the Escort so i this 1996 Escort 1.6 LX instead. Those are the alloys of the green one, it was ok but it wasn't the same as the last one, it was a bit disappointing really so that got sold, I can't remember what i had after it but cars got a bit boring for a while and there aren't many photos. I bought a brand new Renault Clio 1,2 Dynamique in 2004 on finance that i sold a year later to buy a house, i had my first ebay car purchase a 1993 Peugeot 306 XLD for £800, there was a K reg Astra 1.4 Si for £350, a mint H reg Fiesta 1.0 Bonus for £400, this Mondeo 1.8 Verona for £250 which had been of the road for two years that i done up. This Corsa 1.2 Arizona that was about £500 and this 306 1.8 Meridian that was as quick a hell, incredibly good looking i thought but a the build quality was a bit shit.

A year after buying the Nova i decided it was time to upgrade and buy a real pussymagnet as the Nova wasn't working for me so i spend £2500 on this 1990 Escort 1.3 Eclipse I already had the clear indicators in preparation for it so fitted them, as i was working at the bodyshop i also primed and painted the bumpers, took the Eclipse badges off and fitted a set of Orion Ghia alloys i bought of a friend as well as fitting some 6x9s in the parcel shelf. I loved that car, i was going around town every night in it, picking up girls, doing loads of finger blasting, good times. We then had this late Nova 1.2 SX come into work for some paint as a trade in and for some god unknown reason that even to this day i can't explain i sold the Escort and bought it... The only reasoning i can give is that i was desperate for a Nova 1.4 SRi at the time and the insurance was too much and i got offered it at a good trade in cash price so i thought this would be the best second option, i was wrong. I soon sold that back on again and bought myself a L reg Fiesta 1.3 Ghia, sadly no photos but whilst that was a improvement on the Nova it was still no Escort so a year or so later that got sold and io bought this 1994 Escort 1.6 Si for £2500, around 2001 time. Again i loved this car, i went to Halfords and spent £500 on a set of alloys and tyres for it and bought a nice new stereo for it too. I met the now Mrs Trigger whilst had it and really had fond memories with the car until one shit day, By this point i had just got a job working for a motor factors and the manager told me to do a delivery in the car as the vans were all out, i said no, he then threatened me with the sack if i didn't do it so i did it and inviable happened... bollocks! someone pulled out in front of me and hit them, all shit went off at work, the manager and deputy manager had a scrap, 3 computers ended up on the office floor, the area manager had to come down from Ipswich to split them up and i got given one of the works vans to use as a private car instead, with free fuel for a while.

Now i know this is a little bit self indulgent of me but i thought it be interesting (and hopefully not too boring) to share as i haven't posted much in recent times and newer shitters would have missed my project threads in the past. I've been into cars as long as i can remember, my childhood mostly involved me playing with my matchbox cars on floor mats (as I'm sure many of you also did) and collecting old car magazines, my dad and his brothers were also into cars so weekends were spent fixing old Cortinas or Maxis on the drive, this is me in 1983 helping dad fit some Rostyles to his VX2300 The Marina van was his works van at the time, the back axle fell of that apparently in 1985 when it got stuck in some mud and promptly got chopped in for a B reg Transit, and here's one of my uncles old Cortina, god knows what year it was though but you can see the Transit in front of it. The years went by and i got a job at a local bodyshop when i left school in 1996 which is were my love for cars got even better, there was only me and my boss there and we covered several garages in Colchester so i was incredibly lucky to be able to collect the cars to work on them giving me the opportunity to drive many 100's of different cars, brand new Subaru Impreza Turbos, Mitsubishi 3000 GT's Honda NSX's and Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbos being a few that stick in mind at the age of 17-21! although most the stuff really was just mundane stuff like Montegos and Honda Civics. It was in 1997 that i passed my test first time and bought my first car, a 1984 Vauxhall Nova 1.2 Swing is shit brown, affectionally known as the flying turd. Notice had the reg plates were different, i didn't even notice until after i sold it and was looking at these photos! I paid £500 for it off a family friend and absolutely ragged the arse out of it, the wheel arch got pulled off at college so i replaced that but at 120000 miles the valve stem seals were knackered and the car was on it's last legs, i still miss it!

Dolly looks a bit salty! Swapping the 2.0 16v for something a bit more reliable?

Yes they should be body coloured. My mum had a N reg 1.25 LX, non power steering model and I remember how woefully heavy the steering was on it but by god it was nippy, would wheel spin in 2nd easily!

I got my Dolomite back from the barn at the weekend after not seeing it for months, amazingly it fired straight up, even the battery was full charged and it drove back home perfectly. I can't get over how good condition this 1850 is, everything works other than the speedo under reading which is a worry as i think i have have sped through a average speed camera on the A12 on the way home, (doing 60mph instead of a indicated 50mph 😒) There's no rust anywhere apart from the chassis that i stupidly crushed with a axle stand and there's no rattles or squeaks, amazing for a mid 70s BL car! Again as i had the camera out i thought I'd take a load of photos!

I'm not very good at keeping up to date on this but there's not much to say really, I've done about 250 miles now and apart from that condenser FTP incident back in December it's been perfect, today a garage i use set the tracking up for me and it was miles out, both front wheels were massively towing out which would explain why it felt shite to drive the transformation is unbelievable, the wheel is now straight and it just feels so much more planted. Anyway i haven't took any nice photos since i finished it so it felt a good opportunity to take some as the sun was out.

I am also a vanity plate wanker, it was bought for me as a surprise by my family for my 30th 12 years ago and has been on a number of cars since, T is for Trigger, 80 for the year I was born and the last 3 being my initials.

I'm debating on fitting electronic on the Capri but there's so many horror stories about crap ones on the market now, the Accuspark kits are meant to be toilet, i certainly had a lot of issues when i fitted one to my old Rover SD1, apparently the Lumenition Magnetronic kits are meant to be good though but they are quite expensive at £100.

I've been a bit crap at updating this but stuff has been going on with it, a dropped the car off with the welder i use who kindly patched in a new strut top plate i bought from the Capri club, my dad took the photos with his potato cam. It's hard to tell from the photos but he done a really neat job of it and charged me £50 which i thought was very fair, I didn't take many photos of the finishing but i needed the smallest bit of filler on the welds and with a lick of paint it looks much more presentable, and stronger! Compare before and after and it's much better! Unfortunately the drive home from the garage didn't go without fault, it was missing and spluttering all the way down the A12 until i got to a slight incline and struggled to get above 50mph up it so i pulled into a garage about 2 minutes from my house where it just died and wouldn't start. 😒 I just couldn't get it to idle without dying straight away again, so good old dad got a call for a tow home, we was certain it was fuel related so checked all the obvious things like pump, flow, pipes and then stripped the new carb down finding a load of brass filings inside thinking they had blocked it. but it was to no avail, the guy who welded it said to try the condenser as that can give the same symptoms and though i'd already replaced it with a brand new one i ordered another intermotor one for £7 and would you believe it, it only fixed it straight away! 2nd times this year i've broken down on the A12 with a cheap ignition part! It was also featured in this months Retro Ford magazine, although they got the colour wrong!

Radwood is also £27 but it certainly sounds more appealing, those prices are just a joke now and will put alot of people off I feel.

Don't fear, it will be cut out and stitched in properly, the idea of removing the plate in the first place was to fix it correctly.

Today I pulled the diff cover off, the old one was a nice pin hole though it. And got that back together, afterwards me and my dad tackled the ugly strut plate under the bonnet. 😕 Ekk... So that looks like a winter job for my tamed welder then...

I timed it too 8 BTDC as recommended in the Haynes book of lies in the supplement section for post 1979 engines, it possibly needs backing off a bit? I need to get some more miles on it ideally really but can't do anything until I've replaced this axle cover.

Cheers, it's running a brand new Weber 32/36 with a auto choke and we did set up the timing with the gun but who's to say it's right? I'm currently running some cheap 20w50 oil as I want to get about 50 miles on it and then I'm going to drop it out and run some Castrol 15w40, is suspect that's probably part of the issue really, the oil is a bit thick really. Once I've fixed this axle plate and done a few miles in it I'm hoping it will liven up a bit!

It's hard to say really but I like it, it just feels like a Cortina but with a longer bonnet really! One thing I do think is that it's not very quick, it doesn't pull very hard, my old Mk3 Cortina with the same engine, Type 9 box and Atlas axle felt much quicker? I'm hoping a bit more use will start to free it up a bit maybe? Even my Dolly 1850 feels more responsive?

I've still been pretty busy on this, last weekend dad came over and helped me change the valve stem seals, they were absolutely shot, it took most the day using the compressor route with the head on but it worked and now there's no smoke at all. I also fitted a new electric aerial which was a faff as a fuse had blown behind the ignition column that I didn't know about, eventually sussed it out and now works, the rear orginial speakers were rotted out too so swapped them out for some new ones. Then today it was MOT day! I won't lie, I was proper anxious about this as I hadn't even driven it before! I need not have worried though. It was a new garage about 10 miles away down the A12 but they were a great pair of lads who own old Fords and were very understandable with the old cars which is what I like, it flew threw though, just a verbal to sort the welding probably on the strut top. The only fatality was the rear axle cover sprung a big leak which is apparent common with them, £65 for a new one with a gasket and bolts so not the end of the world. So all in all a pretty good result I'd say!

Beautiful work!

Yeah there's still quite a few jobs to do, the bolster is one, ideally I'd like to find a better seat but I don't think that will happen and I need to get the welding on the strut top sorted plus a few dents and scrapes on the wheel arches to sort so plenty to do still. Everyone thought that washer jet was a hole!