Biggest shed you've owned

[rml2345]

 

Only 6x4. It's not the size of a man's shed, it's what he does with it that counts...

 

Surprisingly the Rover 75 diesel of utter fail is not the biggest shed I've ever owned, merely the most expensive. 

Biggest shed was this;

 

 

Christened "Loki" by Andy cms206 of around here quite often. I bought it from Jim Volvo of field of Volvos fame for £350 and an 850 I had got fed up of trying to mend. He did the brakes, sorted the poor running (ish) and put it through an MOT, where Britain's least discerning tester passed it without advisory. The fuel gauge,odometer and sunroof didn't work. The tracking was out to an astonishing degree and it really needed four new tyres. So I taxed it for six months and drove it to York where the wipers joined the list of dead accessories. To his credit, Jim supplied a replacement linkage and all was well until it ran out of electricity one November morning. That was fun... It was the same day I learned that the range of a knackered B230E and ZF Auto is not 315 miles (mended the odometer as well). 

It cost me four tyres, an alternator and sundry bits and bobs but was generally actually quite reliable considering how it appeared. I thought it was excellent as it lowered the value of every house I drew up at by about 20% and was quite fun to whirl about in. Sold it after six months and probably 3000 miles as it was eating me out of house and home and I didn't have the time or finances to dedicate to it's rejuvenation. It was sold as a going concern to Andy where it promptly shit itself and was discovered to be an absolutely rotten minger of the highest order. 

You know that 850? The bastard is still running...

[oman5]

A 1979 ford capri 2.0s. I paid 50 quid for it in 1994, with 8 months MOT and no hope of ever getting another. the front wings were not attached to anything along their top edge because the inner wings had rotted. both rear arches were made out of filler and 3rd gear howled like a banshee. I ran it for 8 months and broke it for bits, the pinto engine was great.

I wish I'd kept the fishnet recaros.

[Junkman]

 

 

 

Shed he said. Not outhouse.

[Tetleysmooth]

Allegro. 'Nuff said.

[Partridge]

My newest addition-the E-Class. Nuff said.

[phil_lihp]

Probably the 1998 Renault Kangoo van I bought unseen off ebay 3 years ago for £600, it was quite loveable but also a foul-smelling moneypit.  The previous owner had a smallholding and had clearly been using it to transport animals, the seats were disgusting and the interior stank of farmyard.  The "fine for another couple of thousand miles" front tyres turned out to be bald (and blimey but van tyres are expensive...) and the exhaust fell off going over a speed bump but it never broke down and the brakes were superb as they had been freshly rebuilt front and rear.  It was a bitch to start when cold (I enjoyed watching my housemate try to get it going one morning to move it out of the way) and drank oil.  Being a 90's Renault it also had odd electrical problems which someone had 'fixed' by unplugging the control unit for the central locking, immobilisor and interior light.

 

There was no service history and the previous owner had owned it for 18 months but had no idea when/if the cambelt had been changed as he'd never serviced it.  At 156k it may well have been on its original belt but I never got around to doing any maintenance on it at all.  When the short MOT came up I booked it in with my friendly mechanic and got a phone call to say it needed £120 worth of welding to the sills and chassis which I agreed to.  A couple of days later I got a call to say he was struggling to find any good metal to weld to and it ended up costing over £300.  With freshly tidemarked sills to complement the weird greeny colour of the paintwork, I polished it up and slapped some new hubcaps on it to make it look slightly less horrible and sold it for...£600.  3 months, over £500 spent on repairs and nothing to show for it.  It was useful but I should never have spent so much on it.  

 

I am astonished to find it's still on the road as well!  Taxed until next year.

[Sigmund Fraud]

Quite a few years back, I was in my first year at uni and had a rather shitty part-time job that paid peanuts. Instead of spending my income on drugs and drink, like most of my peers, I decided to invest* in a classic Alfa !

 

The car in question was an early Alfetta, in 1.6 litre sedan flavour. It was originally white, but a blind man with Parkinson's disease had sprayed it navy blue using poundshop rattlecans on a windy day. The same gentleman had repaired* the notorious 1970s Alfa rust using the well established 'trowel and bucket of isopon' method. Amusingly*, he hadn't even bothered to cover up those repairs*, so there were suspicious, white lumps of wob on the inner wings, chassis rails and floorpan !

 

The interior had been modernised* with a late Alfetta dashboard, Alfa 75 doors and mis-matched seats of uncertain origin. This meant that I had access to a full complement of instruments, '80s Blaupunkt radio and four electric windows ! Sadly, it also meant that the wiring loom consisted of mis-matched bits of two different Alfa looms, so the electrics were rather temperamental : One night, I was driving back from work along a fairly bumpy road. I hit a pothole and the headlamps went out ! I panicked and tried to pull over, then I hit another pothole and the headlamps came back on !

 

The running gear was as fucked as the rest of the car : The engine had a rumbly bottom end and the oil light would flicker at anything under 1500rpm. There was a hairline crack in the head, which slowly wept coolant into one of the spark plug wells. It drank a huge amount of oil, a good couple of litres between petrol fill-ups. When I asked the previous caring* owner when the oil was last changed, he told me that he had never changed it in his two years of ownership ! His exact words were 'The engine burns it long before it has done the required mileage so why bother ?' !

 

The transaxle had shat all its synchros, so I tried to learn how to double-declutch - with limited success. In an attempt to improve things, I changed the gear oil : what came out had the consistency of bitumen !

 

Suspension was equally neglected : there was more oil outside the shock absorbers than inside, all the bushes were bone-dry and had chunks missing. After the first week of ownership, during which I drove the thing like I had stolen it, I took it to my friendly local garage, complaining that the steering was 'vague'. I was scared shitless when I discovered that the track rods were not even finger tight !

 

Brakes were strong but grossly imbalanced : the car pulled to the left so strongly that I used to joke about it's communist tensions to unsuspecting passengers.

 

Overall, the car was a real deathtrap - any modern MoT tester would have sent it straight to the frag machine. It only lasted a few weeks before it expired in a spectacular way, but it was immense fun and -despite my best efforts- somehow failed to kill me.

 

I would absolutely love to have another one - a good specimen must be a cracking car. Sadly, they never turn up for less than £5K nowadays, so I'll probably never be able to afford another one.

[mouseflakes]

I'll just leave this here...

 

[mouseflakes]

Two for one!

 

 

Oooof!!!

[RobT]

Mk2 Golf GTi.  It looked great being a 3-door in Oak Green with big bumpers and BBS alloys, but was a capricious bastard that suffered enless electric faults and was always letting me down or annoying the fuck out of me with trim rattles in the rear passenger area that I could never sort out.  I spent 2k on it in the one year I owned it and replaced it with a £50 mk4 Escrote (that proved more reliable and needed nothing bar oil and water).

[Des]

Diesel Nissan sunny van, Bought as a non runner that had stood a while, battery was totally dead so popped in a new one then found what had killed the old one, overcharging like a utility company, replaced the alternator, then bypassed the fried glowplug relay with a pushbutton, replaced all the spazzed bulbs, and the burnt out radiator fan which was the probable cause of the blown headgasket that I had to do as well. Used it for a little while but never really got on with it, horrid skittish ride, then when the starter failed I'd had enough and put it on ebay as a non runner, sold to a paddy who expected me to pick him up from Luton Airport, tried again and had some wanker rock up with a truck, then whine about it having the 'wrong' engine and try to haggle, he took exception to being called a wanker, tried again and yet another wanker, this one gets dropped off by his mate and proposes that I push start the heap of shit for him, I locked it, walked away from them both and phoned the scrappy to come and take it.

[AndyW201]

This,

 

Bought (admittedly blind) from an egay advert that proclaimed 'excellent condition for the year'. That year must have been 1792...

 

The collection wasn't promising. The car had been kept in the local pub car park for the last couple of weeks and when I arrived, the owner wasn't there. Which at least gave me the chance to give it a quick look over. (it wasn't locked...). The front arches were scabby, the sunroof aperture had started to go at the front, been sprayed and was starting to bubble again. The rear jacking points had been welded, strong enough for an MOT but not exactly attractively done. The Signal red paint was several shades ranging from 'still reasonably vivid' to 'pogweasel pink' and a mixture of original and blow ins. There was no radio. There was a hole in the driver's bolster. Most worrying was when I checked the rear shelf panel/rear screen lower surround and found it to be constructed of cornflakes and brandy snaps. Which led to this sight when I later got the rear screen out,

 

 

That was where the corner of the rear screen lip used to be.  And there was once metal around the boot hinge as well....

 

There was an awful grinding sound when moving the steering from lock to lock. Turned out the steering damper was totally bollocksed, which was a relief because it sounded like the ball joints had had it.

 

However I persevered and got it to some sort of decent state. It was quite a desirable model, being the 2.6 straight six which went well and sounded fantastic, together with the sportline chassis pack (a £1300 option when new), full black leather, and new sportline spec front wishbones and exhaust just before I bought it. 10 months ticket (issued by Ray Charles) and private reg thrown in. For £550 it wasnt bad for a 2.6 sportline. 

 

I scraped the bubbling from the front arches, masked around the arch line and gave them a quick blow in, managed to cut the paint back to something resembling shiny red all over, and had all the rear shelf metalwork rebuilt, sealed and painted. In the first photo, it doesnt look too bad, a testament to how good rain can make a shonky car look. The photo was taken with the car on a Mercedes Club stand. Yes I did enter it for a laugh. 

 

Amazingly I got about a year and a half's motoring out of it, and it was totally reliable mechanically. It's now in the hands of a 190 club member awaiting a full resto.

[Bucketeer]

All my cars have been sheds of varying magnitude (or quickly reduced to shed status due to my extensive* maintenance regime).

The sheddiest of the lot had to be a pez Citroen ZX Volcane that was drunkenly purchased for £100.

It had three alloys, the only form of braking was the handbrake, it wouldn't idle, the passenger door wouldn't open, the paintwork was more shades of black than I had previously thought existed, it took five minutes of wiggling the key in the ignition before it would (sometimes) start, it had four slow punctures, fuel leaked out if you filled it up more than halfway or cornered vigorously and it generally wobbled, knocked and crunched it's way down the road like the only place it wanted to visit was the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to commit caricide.

I didn't dare look underneath it or inspect anything closely, if you ignore a potential problem then it doesn't exist.

I still had some GR9 fun* in it for a few months though and even lived in it for a fortnight when the girlfriend at the time suddenly decided I was Pol Pot, Peter Sutcliffe, Idi Amin, Robespierre and Harold Shipman all rolled in to one.

I managed to sell* it in the end for only £100 less than I paid for it.

[Largactil]

This bad boy...

 

 

Bought when I was 19 from a mate - Always wanted one, had my student grant in hand, and virtually begged him to flog it to me for £450.

 

Was suffering from OMFGHGF, and I managed to convince the world's shadiest mechanic to do a homer the day I bought it, for the princely sum of £80.

 

Chucked a new gasket in, and immediately set off for the 150 mile drive back to Aberdeen with no breakdown cover... Surprisingly it made it, and I parked it up for a fortnight before deciding to drive back down to visit my folks.

 

It got to Dundee, before it decided to die with lack of power. I limped it round the stupidly busy Kingsway roundabout system, and stuttered down the A90 / A9 back to Stirling at 30-40mph with my foot on the boards in 3rd gear.

 

Couldn't afford to fix the second OMFGHGF (plus I'd wrecked the head with my 'rough love') - Sold it through the local paper for £250 to a geezer who wanted to fit an Uno Turbo engine to it.

 

Purchase price + mechanic + admin charge for cancelling insurance = £560....Minus £250 sale price = £310 in the hole

 

(I earned £330 a month at the time).

 

Annoying the body was solid for one of these... But it's long gone now.

 

Second biggest shed...

 

 

Paid £4250 in 2006, with 44k on the clock.

 

Needed bushes, x2 dampers, x2 springs, rear wiper motor, front wiper motor, ABS sensors, x2 rear window motors - Ate front tyres, despite the geo being checked often.

 

Final straw was when the clutch went futt in Dundee (plenty of friction material left, but snapped all the fingers) - Garage quoted £1k + to repair. Brother in law took pity and did it for me for free, but the clutch kit was £240 on its own.

 

(Pig of a job, too - Had to pull the gearbox out the NSF wheel arch to gain access).

 

Cost about £1200 in maintenance over the 2 years I had it, so owed me around £5.5k - Was offered £800 trade in, and sold privately for £1.2k with 65k on the clock.

 

Not sure I'd ever want another Alfa...(!)

[garycox]

Sheddiest car? Hmmm... my first Allegro (AS 2012 calendar STAR) looked the sheddiest, as the panels were a mixture of the original Denim Blue (roof, one door), and various shades of different primers. It was solid though, and only let me down 'properly' once when the clutch slave cylinder went. Sold to Torsten who MOTd it and sold it on again. It was on SORN but that expired at the end of September and hasn't been renewed

 

The absolute worst was a  '90 Metro Clubman 5dr, last of the A series. G886XME I think. Bought for £195, EVERYTHING went on it. Rear suspension, fixed, Clutch, fixed. Oil pump went causing engine to seize, paid £450 for an engine and gearbox to be fitted at a Mini specialist. Also loads of other stuff.

 

Someone tried to steal it, bent the door and smashed up the ignition. After that, someone did steal it, I had to pay £200 to get it back off the Police when it was found. Door lock was prised out, so a square with a circular hole in it was pop riveted around it to hold it in. Not long after, I had a puncture near a friend's house and left it nearby for a week or two. Came back and it had been vandalised with both offside doors caved in and a dent on the roof. Sold for £20 to a Mini breaker. Still drove and was MOTd, just couldn't be arsed any more.

 

I really liked that car!