Most dissapointing/gutting/soul destroying repair/purchase/experience in your shiter career

[NorfolkNWeigh]

Renault Grand Espace 2.2 DCi.

[wuvvum]

2 events that changed my opinion on vehicular mechanical work forever. Rover P6 rear brakes

You could have ended your post right there, we would have understood.

[Asimo]

Fiat 127 with sills of concrete and chicken wire. Lost a months pay equivalent on that in about a month.

(It had been done really well though, the "sills" were perfectly straight and the paint was perfectly matched)

[rantingYoof]

I've hardly had a worthy shiter's career compared to others on here, and I'm generally afraid of spanners and have never advanced beyond checking/topping up fluids and tyre pressures. I concede that making an effort to learn a bit or two about how cars work mekaniqually would have helped, but in my two most epic failures any amount of knowledge wouldn't have saved me.

 

I'll give you epic failure number one now, and go into number two another time. Settle in because I LIKE WRITING WORDZ ME! However, TL:DR - don't buy Mk1 MR2s unseen off eBay. Otherwise known as the most obvious advice ever.

 

By the end of my first year of being a motorist (I was 18) I'd got my eyes set on Mk1 MR2s, and one day I spotted a light blue '89 T-Bar on eBay. I could see it was scabby from the photos, but it was advertised honestly, with tax and a long MOT, and seemed to have reams and reams of paperwork. It had also recently had a full stainless steel exhaust system fitted with a genuine lifetime warranty. This was fitted at remarkable expense only a year or so previously.

 

I spoke to SnrYoof who said 'Put a bid on it and see what happens'. I did just that - only around £800 - and then forgot about it. The next day, after I'd returned from being a Stock Replenishment Engineer at the local supermarket, I logged into eBay and noted I had a message. 'You have won item Mk1 MR2'. Cue me tentatively approaching SnrYoof and explaining that his 'relax, it'll never happen' approach had backfired and I had now committed to purchasing a Mk1 MR2 that I'd never seen or driven.

 

I'm quite certain SnrYoof got a proper (and deserved) ear-bashing from MotherYoof that evening.

 

Anyway, the eBay seller contacts me, and I inform him that I'm committed to my win even though it was unexpected. The seller made quite a lot of noises about being considerably out of pocket, having bought the Mk1 MR2 for 'a considerable amount' and then 'getting into massive trouble with my wife as she didn't know about it'. He asked me what I was driving and whether I'd consider a straight swap. My vehicle at that time was perhaps the most perfect R8 214SEi that ever existed:

 

 

It had recently gone through a period of consuming radiators, causing me some grief, but I had it written by the friendly garage that its head-gasket was in perfect working order, and after its third radiator had been fitted the car was behaving wonderfully.

 

However, having bought it for £1000, 18-year-old me figured that swapping it for a Mk1 MR2 that I'd won for £800 seemed reasonable (because I thought I was getting a bargain). Having sent the seller a photo of my car and a description, he became very eager to make the transaction. So eager, in fact, he offered to drive the MR2 from Birmingham to Northampton to drop it off and collect the Rover. Perhaps this should have been my first warning sign. But I was eighteen and I'd just bought a freakin' two-door mid-engined rear-drive coupe with pop-up lights!

 

The MR2 is delivered, and I was in love immediately. What a colour! What an exhaust! The T-bar roof was amazing! It was November at this point but it was a cold and crisp November rather than a mild, wet and windy one.

 

 

The eBay seller, an admittedly friendly chap, took my Rover away. I had a bit of a heart-wrench when I saw it go. I had been the only one in sixth-form that had a 104hp five-door hatchback with half-leather seats and an electric sunroof. Although now I had something even more cool. That very night my Rover was on Autotrader; the seller was asking £895 for it. Warning sign number two.

 

I took the history folder into the living room and dumped its contents on the floor. I've never seen so much paperwork in my life. I found bills and receipts going back as far as 1992 (this was 2005). However, being an Mk1 MR2, all the love and servicing and receipts in the world hadn't stopped it doing what it does best - oxidising.

 

Still, I was in love and happy to ignore the very crusty arches. First step was insuring it. This took me four hours. I was nearly nineteen with one year's NCB (nearly), and initially I couldn't find a company willing to even quote me. Eventually, I think Lancaster Insurance did a pretty good deal, applying some mileage restrictions (which mattered not as I was barely driving more than ten miles from home back then). I think my quote ended up being in the region of £1500 third party fire and theft, with an excess that made the whole exercise largely pointless.

 

Anyway, for three weeks I was the happiest 19 year old in the world. I had a 120hp RWD sports car that sounded oh-so-very-glorious, with pop-up lights, and a removable roof. I will set the record straight right now and say that despite having 120k on it, the engine was like new, and all of the electrics worked. The leather was in good nick, the gear-change was very slick, the windows worked, it didn't leak (hardly at all, much, barely, some dribbles, okay in a car wash there would be a noticeable ingress but SHUT UP).

 

But...I was 19 and prone to being a bit of a dick, and a couple of lairy moments made me realise I needed to be so much more respectful with this sort of car than the Rover (or any other). Being a shorter wheelbase rear wheel drive car, I'm sure I don't need to describe to you the rather binary loss of grip it experienced if you did push it too much. It didn't slowly lose traction if you tanked it into a corner. You were either going to get around the corner and destroy your insides thanks to lateral Gs or you were going to swap ends within the car's own length and die instantaneously.

 

Turns out that very last part would have been more soberingly accurate than I first thought. I knew the arches were bad - there were jagged edges that would fail an MOT instantly - and I knew that other parts of the car were crusty. However, when I began driving more sedately I distinctly remember driving over some speed bumps and hearing bits fall off the car. At this point I had a moment of sensibility and thought it would be best if I asked a garage to put it up on the ramps and give it a once over.

 

I handed it over to a local garage that specialised in bodywork and modifications, who dutifully put it up on a ramp after informing me that the arches alone were shot to the point of needing full replacement. The most vivid memory I have of this procedure is a kind gentleman standing underneath the MR2, looking up with a concerned expression, poking a bit of undercarriage with a stick and having a postcard-sized amount of car fall on his head. At this point the dream began to fade and reality took its grip. The car was a wreck.

 

The kind gentleman invited me over and explained what his problem was. 'My problem is,' he said, 'is that in order to address issues such as rust, we have to find the nearest bit of good metal to which we can weld a plate to.' 'Okay!' I said, eagerly, as this sounded promising to my uneducated and ignorant brain. 'No, son, you see, there is no good metal here. We would need to replace the entire floor of the car. This stainless steel exhaust is more or less retaining the car's structural integrity. If I sat in the passenger seat and stamped, I am quite certain my foot would go through the floor.' 'Oh' I said. 'To do a proper job to get this car road-legal and safe, we'd need about £1000 worth of materials, alone.' 'Oh' I said. 'Then the labour costs would generally make it a pointless excercise as the car would not be worth anywhere near the amount that you would have spent on getting it back to road-legal status.'

 

It had become quite clear why the eBay seller was getting the hell out of it quickly. My assumption is that he knew about this rot and had simply bumped it on without obviously mentioning it in the advert. I'd like to be wrong, but unfortunately I am that person that can be seen approaching from a mile off sometimes.

 

At this point I asked him to stop talking. I thanked him for his honesty and left. I drove with immense care back home. I explained the situation to my parents. MotherYoof went distinctly pale. SnrYoof looked quite ashamed. I wrote the most honest and open Autotrader advert ever, explaining that the car had a valid MOT and was taxed for a long time but would not pass an MOT without a huge amount of work, including skilled welding, to make it legal. I took up-close and horrid photos of all the rust. I spread the masses of paperwork out and took a gratuous shot of that too.

 

I sold it for £400. I lost quite a bit of money considering the Rover was easily worth the £1000 I paid for it a year before. £600 for a month's ownership of a deathtrap.

 

But out of all the driving memories I have in my twelve year driving career, blatting up to 7000rpm in third gear onto a dual carriageway with the roof off in blazing sunshine yet with the outside temp below freezing is one of my firm favourites.

 

And you'll be pleased to know that I replaced it with some grade-A solid (quite literally) shite. It had steelies when I bought it but I found the pictured alloys on eBay for about £50 and did a two hour round trip to collect them...

 

 

[Bren]

Various SD1's. Using one as a daily means there is no faster way to bankruptcy. Indeed my current one was so fucked the new Widnes/ Runcorn bridge will be finished sooner.

 

Suzuki GSX 550. Nice bike but has electrics on a par with a Kenyan Police Station. Moved on to somebody who then moved it on after a couple of weeks.

[Tamworthbay]

Touch wood, I have always been ok in terms of not buying complete dogs as I check them over within an inch of their lives but did buy a non turbo Impreza in yellow on a whim from a mate, decided I fancied a turbo that he was also selling so put the rapid banana on eBay, got shafted and lost a load of cash only to find that my mate had sold the turbo the same day the auction ended. I have given up on Subaru as it's obviously not destined to happen.

[They_all_do_that_sir]

Renault Grand Espace 2.2 DCi.

Yup. 2003 Renault Espace 1.9 DCi.

 

I occasionally have nightmares where I still own the fucking thing.

 

Panoramic roof leaked

 

Dash failed

 

Radio failed and on these it's all built into the car, some of the head unit is in the boot, some of it is part of the instrument cluster etc etc

 

Water cooled alternator bit the dust. Huge job getting that out, and cost a fortune to refurb.

 

Key card broke. Key card reader broke.

 

Heater broke

 

Turbo failed

 

EGR failed

 

Doors wouldn't lock

 

Horrible horrible car. Managed to keep going for 6 months but when it started using a litre of oil every week it had to go. Lost a fortune but didn't care.

 

Sent from my D6603 using Tapatalk

[Sigmund Fraud]

All of them !!!

 

 

 

But there is one that stands out, the absolute worst car I've ever bought, a 1970s Alfetta sedan. This was in the 1990s, when I had plenty of enthusiasm for scruffy old cars but no car-fettling skills whatsoever.

 

The car looked the part, with shiny dark blue paint and a lovely velour interior. Unfortunately, it was comprehensively buggered. There wasn't a single part in that car that functioned as intended. The engine had a voracious appetite for petrol, oil and coolant. It produced plenty of smoke and noise, but little actual power. The gearbox was absolutely awful, even by transaxle Alfa standards, and its operation required a combination of skill and luck. Changing up required more of the former, changing down required more of the latter. The left-leaning tendencies of the car, whenever the brakes were applied, would make it qualify for membership of the Communist party. The suspension bushes were so worn out that driving over a bumpy road produced a cacophony that could easily rival a Stomp show. The electrics were as bad as you would expect from a 1970s Italian car that had been bodged by incompetent owners over nearly three decades. Pressing the various switches that were scattered around the dashboard would sometimes, but not always, make things start or stop working.

 

I can go on and on, but it it sufficient to say that every single journey in that car was a tragicomedy. Thankfully, it didn't live for long, and I certainly didn't mourn its demise.

[neil1971]

I've always liked Italian cars and at the age of 19, having saved up a bit of money and obtained a sensible insurance quote, I began the search for a Lancia Fulvia coupe. Obviously this was pre-internet days and so the weekly arrival of the new Exchange and Mart in the newsagents was eagerly anticipated until a reasonably priced, MoT'd Fulvia came up for sale in Croydon for around Â£1400. 

 

Viewing revealed a scruffy but solid Fulvia so a purchase was agreed, deposit left and returned on the train a few days later to drive* the car home. Things had already begun to go wrong when insuring the car, as the price I had been quoted turned out to be nowhere near the right cost and it was a lot more money. As usual with a purchased car, there wasn't much fuel in the tank, so went to fill up, after which the Lancia refused to even turn over and now smelt of petrol.

 

AA were called and towed it home, replacement alternator was needed and after that it worked OK but with the unexpectedly high insurance and realisation that it wasn't a sensible purchase meant it was sold to a professional restorer who came and trailered it away. I did get Â£1600 for it and at least covered the cost of the repair so it could have been a lot worse.

 

It's never re-appeared on the DVLA database (pretty sure the reg was NMG472L) so who knows what became of it, they were rare even then so hopefully it's survived but with a different reg or something.

[panhard65]

Many years ago when I was young and daft I fancied a Lancia Fulvia. I had found one in exchange and mart but it was in Moffat Scotland (I lived in Essex at the time) I begged and borrowed as much as I could find for the £300 asking price and got a mate to come with me in my Renault 18 to pick it up. We drove up over night and had a couple of hours kip before collecting the car. It looked rough but sounded great. So off we went and got almost as far as Gretna before it cooked up and blew the head gasket. We then had to tow it all the way home, My mate driving my 18 whilst I steered the Lancia. We broke the rope 3 times and had a blow out on the 18 but got home just as it was getting dark. The next day I had a proper look at my purchase, on trying to open the drivers door the lock stuck and I gave the handle a good tug. The door skin came off in my hand, it was a typical Lancia and held together with filler and recent paint. I broke it for spares and have been too trumatised to have another Lancia since. In more recent times I bought a '03 fat arse Megane when they were worth good money. It needed work as was a non runner but I thought it would be worth it. I fitted a recon engine, a new clutch and flywheel and a new turbo (dci) The fucker then went on to destroy turbo's every 300 miles. I finally found that the recon engine I fitted had an oil pump that just didn't supply enough oil at speed. I scrapped the bastard in the end losing over £2k.

[Barry Cade]

I haven't learned a thing, nearly 600 cars in 25 years, and on a rare day off I'm still out in the freezing cold surrounded by tools and usually wet and bleeding.Worked all my life but still skint.

 

Still enjoy it tho!

 

Clutch on a cavalier Sri at -18, camchain on an aprillia pegaso in a German autohof with a set of 6 euro spanners, belts and turbo on a delta integrale evo overnight for a mate, getting trapped under an xm setting up height correctors.. there have been moments...

[bigfella2]

I bought an accident damaged VW Caddy van that had sustained front end damage, managed to repair it all myself and had took it to the body shop to be painted. Collected it a few days later, on the way home drove it straight back into a rental car!!!!! Smashing all the front up again ARGHHHHHH!!! Then got bummed by insurance as the caddy was a temporary vehicle added to my policy so the excess was mental. Insurance repaired it, no questions asked, even though previously written off, which was a result. 

[BavarianRetro]

Two VW Karmann Ghia coupes. There was only meant to be one.

 

Series three Land Rover with Marcos modified chassis - plywood.

 

Astra van that had totally rust free bodywork - but every single bolt on panel was a different colour. Volkswagen later stole my idea and made it a limited edition.

 

Baur TC2 - that we still have and is on its fourth engine in our possession.

 

Jensen Intercepter 111. Overheated. Fixed. Brake master cylinder went. Fixed. Torque convertor. Fixed. Overheated again. Fixed again. PAS pump. Fixed. Overheated. Fixed again. Front wheel bearings and ball joints. Fixed. Sold at catastrophic loss.

[crapcarcollector]

Come and see me with a trailer and £40 CASH and you can rescue it if you like!

Where is said Panda......

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Kiltox]

Cheltenham

[Rocket88]

Bitter coupe.........won on ebay, collected from Birmingham on a cold, rainy night. None of the dash electrics worked..."just needs a new fuse m8"      broke down 7 times in 200 miles, finally shitting it's oil cooler on the M5............Oh how I larfed.............

Managed to offload the hatefull pile of shite to some unsuspecting Norwegian via a classic car auction.

[crapcarcollector]

Cheltenham

Thank god for that.

 

Unless anyone has any ideas on getting it closer to Stoke On Trent (I'd pay) I'm afraid (?) I'm ooout....

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[strangeangel]

Two mates and I once spent an entire weekend fitting a replacement engine/box to my Mini 1000 auto. By way of a reward at the end of day one - we had successfully removed the old motor after all - we went on the piss.

 

Sunday arrived, and we fitted the new* engine in very bad cheer indeed, nursing spectacular hangovers as we were. Manfully we struggled on, though, and by tea time we had it running. I took it out for a test run, only to discover that the auto box was even more comprehensively fucked than the one we had replaced.

 

The car was bridged the same week.

[strangeangel]

And much worse that the Mini was another quality British product - a 1976 SIII Land Rover 109" SW. It would be quicker to make a list of what didn't fail, seize, collapse, rot or fall off this heap of shit during my ownership.

 

I owned it for a total of seven years, and when I mention this people inevitably say "Ah, you must have liked it to have kept it that long". The reality is that it was usually too broken to sell.

[xtriple]

Do tales of stupidity count?

 

I bought a cheap Mini 1000 (about £125) back in the late 80s 'cos my XJ6 had eaten its water pump and Jaguar couldn't supply a new one for a few weeks and no factor had them (it was a rather new S3) so I bought the Mini to keep mobile with the intention of throwing it away/flogging it on at the end of the episode.

 

Of course, by the time the XJ was repaired I had fallen in love with the 'orrible little rot box and restored it! I started ripping it apart on Christmas day, which went down well...

 

It had a complete new front (wings, bonnet, slam panel, valance etc) new doors, 'A' post and the outer covers, sills (naturally) rear subframe, boot floor, rear quarter panels in fact, the only bit original was the roof. I spent many many pounds on panels, many more on a new MIG to weld it together, bought a new grinder and a compressor and spraygun, then another decent spraygun, loads of mechanical bits (because Mini) spent many coins on good paint and then even more when the first lot reacted with something on the passenger side rear wing (which as stated above was new so no idea what) bought new, fancy wheels and a stereo and seats and new carpets and... you get the idea.

 

All done and it was a little cracker though I didn't like it half as much as I had when it was a nail, but, hey ho, such is life. Anyway, FiL needed to borrow a car as his was broken and so lent him the Mini. It didn't survive the experience as the old fella  hit some oil or diesel and then a lampost that the council had carelessly left laying around at the side of the road lighting up stuff which seriously re-arranged the geometry somewhat. Oh, and the side, the passenger door and the engine which had a big 'ole in it that made it leak... no amount of Radweld was going to cure that!

 

Even before the accident, I reckon it was worth 5-600 quid and I had spent about 1000 on bits and pieces for the sod.

[Shep Shepherd]

Saab 9-5 2.2 TiD Linear estate. Nice car, shame about the engine.

[strangeangel]

Do tales of stupidity count?

 

Did you not see the post above in which I bought a Land Rover??

[SiC]

Saab 9-5 2.2 TiD Linear estate. Nice car, shame about the engine.

Not a Saab engine though! There's the problem

[Bobthebeard]

MG ZT KV6....

Work done so far is £crippling. Still love it though. Does that count?

[Pete-M]

Jensen Intercepter 111. Overheated. Fixed. Brake master cylinder went. Fixed. Torque convertor. Fixed. Overheated again. Fixed again. PAS pump. Fixed. Overheated. Fixed again. Front wheel bearings and ball joints. Fixed. Sold at catastrophic loss.

The brake master cylinder on them is a bugger to remove. Looks easy, turns out to be bloody awkward.

 

You appear to have missed the Interceptor's other two party pieces, did yours not shit its auto box and starter motor? Getting the box out is a challenge.

[carlo]

Bitter coupe.........won on ebay, collected from Birmingham on a cold, rainy night. None of the dash electrics worked..."just needs a new fuse m8"      broke down 7 times in 200 miles, finally shitting it's oil cooler on the M5............Oh how I larfed.............

Managed to offload the hatefull pile of shite to some unsuspecting Norwegian via a classic car auction.

 

probably as well built as most of those low volume 70s/80s exotica.  Nice and rare though.

[mercrocker]

Minis.  Just fucking Minis. 

  

No.1 - 1964 model.  Tweed Grey, red interior.  Looked lovely, MG1100 motor too.   Lasted two weekends before the fucking timing chain (which was rattling, admittedly) locked up.  Couldn't afford/didn't know how to repair.   Got a running 850 lump for £5 and managed to fit that with a mate's help in my grandfather's garage.   All sorts of bollocks, no lifting gear so cut out the bonnet shut and manhandled lumps in and out with rope and wood.   Some old fella down the road brazed it all back together.   Back on the road and two days later I punched it up the arse of a Mk2 Cortina on a pussy hunt across the Forest.   Walked eight miles home for a replacement dizzy, went back (by bus and Shank's) next day, fitted it and got home (thank God for side mounted rad).   I wanted to fit a fibre-fab front but Dad knew a bloke who had a Mini for sale..... 

 

No.2 - Another Mk1 was procured from this bloke Dad knew.  Â£30 plus mine.   Metallic pink with a red fur interior.   Great.   Comedy moments including thrashing the bollocks of it and watching a heater hose and the oil pressure gauge feed blow simultaneously all over my mate's best ice-blue drainpipe jeans as he held on for grim death in the front Corbeau seat.   Later on he got his own back by grabbing the wheel for a laugh* when he was pissed, it almost dis-located my thumb on the stupidly little Mountney wheel and I immediately crashed into a bus shelter.   Six weeks and two fucked Minis. 

No.2 laughed its guts out after I scrapped it and the log book finally came through - 1959 model.  I wondered why it had little courtesy lights in the rear bins.  Even in 1978 that was of more than moderate historic importance. 

 

I will draw a veil over No.3 Mk 1 as most of what occurred in that was illegal but it ended up being trailered away from my house under a tarpaulin in the dead of night.   Nobody got hurt or anything like that but I still worry when I get DVLA letters 38 years on.  

 

After those three little excitements I packed in Minis before I really started and got a job with a firm's van for a few years.   

 

Many years later, buoyed by the steady improvement to my Zephyr and Zodiac I itched after another Mk1 Mini to put the record straight. 

 

An aunt kindly gave me her MOT failure Mk1 and I set about a "restoration".   This involved parking it in an expensive Council garage for 12 years, buying loads of parts, getting new subframes powder coated and generally spending money like it was going out of fashion.   Every bit of welding I had done on it revealed another hidden horror (it had about eight sills on it, I think) until I finally had enough and sold the whole garage full for about £150 almost precisely 18 minutes before Mk1 Mini Tax was announced. 

 

Oh, there was a Mayfair too which merely beset with me with self-dampening electrics and remains one of the few cars I ever made a profit on.

[Supernaut]

I sold a lovely 306 HDi estate (which was also running a lovely stage 1 remap) in order to buy a lardy, underpowered, money-eating pile of German toss. But hey, it was bright green!

 

I spent so much money keeping that German pile of toss on the road that I felt obliged to keep it for ages. After two years I'd had enough, and sold it. The replacement was the Omega I owned for 3 months in early 2016. I thought it would be ace, a 2.6 V6 and an auto box, and it looked the tits in black on the 17" alloys.

 

I fucking hated it. I could never get comfortable in it, the interior plastics made me cringe every time I sat in it, and the autobox was so amazingly dim-witted. I sold it for £50 less than I paid for it 3 months later. However! I had also spent £300 getting the timing belt done while I had it. FML.

 

 

I'm now back in a shonky PSA hatchback with an HDi engine (and some more interesting suspension) and I'm happy again. Let's see if the Civic Aerodeck I have my eye on will be a mistake or not. It's only been off the road for 2 and a bit years...

 

 

 

 

 

I also know what RantingYoof's other tale of woe will be. It's so, so perfect for Autoshite!

[sierraman]

Paid for a full exhaust on a car once, garage did it then dropped it on me that the downpipe was fucked as I went to pay the bill and that'd be another £300 if I wanted it doing. Could have told me that before! Flogged it off after that.

[Supernaut]

Now that I am home and in my comfy chair and have big warm mug of tea in front of me, I shall elaborate.

 

 

In April 2014, I was driving about in a lovely little Y reg Peugeot 306 HDi LX estate, which was also running a stage 1 (120hp) remap. It was an absolute hoot to drive, and ran seemingly on thin air. Perfect for the 15 mile each way commute I had been doing up until November 2013. At this stage I had got a job at a university less than a mile from my house (I still work there to this day) so thought I should get something silly, because why not?

 

Here's the 306, which I still miss. Its last MOT ran out sometime in late 2015 and was never renewed.

 

 

I should never have sold that car. I bought it for about £800 in August 2013, then sold it in April 2014 for £600 after replacing the front driver's side wing with a better-painted one, replacing the passenger-side foglight (I suspect these two things are due to it potentially hitting a badger at some point before I bought it), getting the alloys for it, and replacing the alternator, the battery, and the crank pulley and aux belt (stupid damped crank pulley shat itself and the aux belt, so I got a solid crank pulley for it instead).

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway... one fine Saturday morning in April 2014, me and a colleague from work got the train from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, we met up with my car salesman friend to continue to South Lanarkshire to look at a 1999 Audi A4 1.8T Quattro Sport... in Java Green!

We arrived at a strange little second-hand car sales lot in the middle of nowhere, and looked over the Audi. It was very nice. Black half-leather interior, Bose 10-speaker sound system, and structurally solid. No rot anywhere.

Not so good was the fact it had ZERO paperwork with it, and only one key. We took it for a test drive anyway. It seemed ok. When I stomped it in first gear, the revs surged a bit. We thought it had a viscous centre diff and that was just doing its thing. I bought it for £1250 because look at it! A lovely, quiet uneventful drive home followed, and about a month of uneventful (but fairly quick) driving after that.

 

 

The sticker on the front wing is because there was quite a deep scratch there when I bought it.

The first things I did to the car after a few weeks were to get new front tyres as they were worn on the inner edges, and a new track rod end (which turned out to be a bastard to fit). This was only the start of the money pit.

 

Remember me mentioning the revs surging on the test drive? It didn't have a viscous centre diff or any of that bollocks. It had a full-time permanent AWD system. This meant only one thing, that the clutch was on the way out. "Oh well" I thought, I budgeted £2.5k for a car at the time and had only spent half of that budget on the actual car, so I spent £1k at a garage getting the clutch, flywheel and timing belt done. I even got the DMF replaced with a lovely solid flywheel while they were at it.

 

The car was spot-on after this work though. I gritted my teeth and grinned, and put the thought of all the money pouring down the toilet to the back of my mind. In the two years I owned it, it ate its way through THREE suspension springs. These were over £90 each from Audi, and nobody else stocked them because they were the sport springs that sat 20mm lower than the standard ones. I also decided, in early 2015, to get it remapped from 180hp to 210hp. I ended up spending £400 getting this done, and it sat at a garage for a week while they physically sent the ECU away to a company to get a chip soldered on. I got a courtesy car though. That Mini One was surprisingly nippy, and a lot of fun. When I got into the Audi again it felt like a huge (but slightly quicker) bus in comparison. I even treated it to the exhaust system from a contemporary Audi S4. That cost £100 second hand from the Audi forums and a few afternoons of fannying about to get it to seal properly. It sounded lovely afterwards though, with a subtle but purposeful burble.

 

I kept going with it for a while longer, then it ate another suspension spring, and a handbrake cable, and developed an ABS fault I could never completely track down. I decided to sell it in early 2016. I got £850 for it... from 17-Coffees' dad! He then used it to commute from Ellon to Altens every day (about 20 miles or so each way) until late 2016, when it got written off by an HGV changing lane. The HGV driver claimed he "didn't see it". IN THAT COLOUR?! Jog on.

 

Snr-Coffees is still on the search for another car sub-£1k in a similar size (hint hint shiters!) but he seems quite taken with Lexus GS300s at the moment.

 

 

 

 

 

Now we move onto the OMGa.

 

 

RantingYoof saw the OMGa for sale near him, and it was the perfect spec. 2.6 V6 auto, in black, on 17" alloys and fitted with a lairy stainless steel exhaust system (it even popped and crackled on the over-run). It had just over 100k on the clocks and was £900. It even had a full year of MOT, stacks of paperwork, various little spare bits of trim and switches, and was in utterly spotless condition bar a spot of lacquer peel on the front bumper. He viewed it on my behalf, and bought it on my behalf. A week and a half later, I flew to Birmingham in order to collect it from his driveway in Northampton. Between him buying it and me picking it up, we discovered how stupidly short the timing belt interval was on these engines, and this particular car was due one imminently. We thought it sensible to get it done before I drove it back up to Aberdeen. RantingYoof then booked it into a garage and got it done, while I transferred him the necessary £300 for this work.

 

That collection thread was epic in itself. My flight was cancelled, and I ended up getting a bus up to Inverness to get another flight 8 hours later than originally planned. The first time I saw the car in person was in the dark. I just gave it a brief look-over then shrugged and fell asleep in RantingYoof's spare room. The next morning I gave it a proper drive and all seemed well. I then drove it up to Edinburgh that afternoon.

 

The tracking seemed a bit funny, it tram-lined REALLY BADLY. Also, the climate control was a heap of shit. The windows would mist up in the rain no matter what setting you had the climate control on. I drove it several hundred miles with the left-rear window open a crack, because it was February, so of course it was bloody raining!

 

I took it to a couple of places to get the tracking done but it still never quite felt right, although it was better. I drove around in it in spring feeling like a fucking boss, listening to drum n bass and rap music and making a racket from the exhaust. It even felt much punchier and more responsive than the Audi. That's the difference you get with a large N/A engine as opposed to a small peaky turbo engine.

 

However, I never felt truly at home in it. The auto box annoyed me, and the quality* of the interior plastics (after the Audi) made me cringe. I sold it for £850 in May 2016. I'd still consider another OMGa at some point, but it would need to be another 6 cylinder and a manual.

 

 

I now have the Xantia, which is nowhere near as fast as either of those cars, but it JUST. WORKS.

It's got the same 2.0 HDi 8v engine as the 306 at the top of the post, and I've even put the identical 120hp remap on it. It's not as quick as the 306 though, obviously, as it's a somewhat bigger car. Still exceedingly wafty though.