The new news 24 thread

[wuvvum]

That Vitesse does look quite tasty.  They're supposed to be a genuine 140mph car, and you're probably better off with the Honda V6 than the turbocharged T-series in the facelifted Vitesses.  My most recent Rover 75 came with near enough a year's test, and the NSF tyre on that was almost completely bald - I suspect it's quite a common practice to borrow a pair of wheels off a car with the same PCD for the MOT test if one is too tight / skint to fork out for new tyres.  Glad to see the Sierra's still making itself useful too.

 

The 147 and Carina E both passed their retests so both now have a year's MOT.  The Alfa was £20 for a new NSF upper wishbone and £40 to have it fitted (took longer than expected due to the absence of the locking wheel nut key - eventually resolved in time-honoured Autoshite fashion); the Carina was £2.99 for a fresh tin of gun gum paste, plus a couple of happy hours spent lying underneath the car chiselling off the old cracked paste and getting pissed off when the fresh stuff seemed more interested in sticking to my fingers than to the exhaust.  Still, got there in the end.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

I flipping love those 827 Vitesses, the one I had was awesome, I could even get mid-30's mpg out of it. MOAR INFO PLZ

[RobT]

WOW Rob! Welcome to the 800 fold!!!!!

 

I've heard about this car before and I'm glad you bought it. Although values are not exactly high on them, they are great cars to just cruise about in.

 

I can't remember if this car has any mats but I have a set somewhere you can have for free. Any other parts you might need I shall try and help you with.

 

Cheers Mo, much appreciated.  The mats look original, deep shag pile ones by the look of it (better quality than the carpets in my flat!).  I'll bung more details and pics up later on.

[RobT]

Glad to see the Sierra's still making itself useful too.

 

 

 

Certainly is. After doing some proper miles in it I've grown fond of the old thing so it'll be staying in the fleet for a while

[Sigmund Fraud]

Volvo update !

 

Drove it to the MoT testing station this morning and it failed, as expected. Five failure items and thirteen advisories, which is my personal record so far ! However, most of it is trivial stuff and should be rectified with £50 worth of parts and a few expletive-filled afternoons. So I'm actually pretty pleased.

 

And to appease the more visual types, here's a picture of the beast looking far better than a £200 car deserves to look :

 

[vulgalour]

Got my sympathies with the situation, Wat, it's no fun but it is good to have therapy.  You know what to do with all the carboard and wood getting in the way?  Have a bonfire.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

WHat engine is in this 760?

[Sigmund Fraud]

WHat engine is in this 760?

 

B280, a.k.a. even-fire PRV.

[rml2345]

That 760 looks a pleasant thing for £200. The Vitesse is fuggin ace though!

The steering on my 740 has been getting progressively heavier over the past week, so I'll have to change the pump over sooner rather than later. Bloody hope its the knackered pump and not a knackered rack instead or something...

[Mr_Bo11ox]

£200 V6 volvo 700's are for winners, i'm still looking for a complete new exhaust system for £5 if anyone knows of one knocking about

[Sigmund Fraud]

£200 V6 volvo 700's are for winners, i'm still looking for a complete new exhaust system for £5 if anyone knows of one knocking about

 

I feel your pain, parts specific to the V6 models are made of unobtainium-coated hen's teeth ! Unless, of course, one is willing to pay Volvo main dealer prices, which completely defeats the point of buying and running £200 cars.

[Pete-M]

Money + Mouth = Me buying a Mk1 Focus 2.0.

Two reasons, it looks very tidy, it was sensibly priced and the right spec, and it's got a 2.0 Zetec engine and a towbar so it'll be useful for collecting and then donating it's engine to the Mk2. 

Job done. I'm looking forward to it.

[Lankytim]

Stuck a new fuel filter in the Xantia today. I was pleasantly surprised to find it took 10 minutes and didn't need any tools to do. Primed itself and started first time too!

 

Took it on a long motorway trip yesterday and got nearly 60mpg. I love this motor!

[skattrd]

The boring is fucked. The clutch had been playing up this week and I thought it was the master cylinder, I spoke to my tame mechanic and he agreed it was a possibility. As it's my workhorse I thought sod it, lets do both slave & master and make sure it's sorted. Well both changed and afterwards we couldn't get the clutch to engage at all. We bled the system more times than I care to think but no good. It's been left at the garage for him to remove the gearbox and find out whats not connecting.

 

Whilst we were shuffling cars about the Galant Sapporo burst the top rad hose and spat all it's coolant out ... It was full of oil. I removed the filler cap, that had mayo on it too ... Double bollocks.

 

I am now going to be using the HPE for work next week, not what I wanted to do as I've got a busy week including a trip to Taunton & Cardiff.

[cobblers]

Well I'm a vw scene nobber who's cutting holes in a "rare" panel van to make it a camper, but at least I'm doing it proper and welding OE window recesses in and putting flush fitting glass in, instead of the usual old shite bodged in with mini windscreen seals.

Went down the A1 today with my pal to cut the side out of some blokes van (incidentally the A1 is brilliant and people stay out of your way even though there are only 2 lanes)

 

Here's the side what I cut out:

 

 

 

 

I split the inner and outer bits to make fitting them easier (and possible without hacking massive great chunks out of random bits of the van)

 

Covered all the sides of the van in MEGA RICK WALLER SPEC MASKING TAPE so I didn't make a total bollocks of the primer and stuff.

 

Then cut a huge hole in an unbummed 28 year old vehicle. I did feel a bit bad at this point:

 

 

Got the hole prepped up and fitted nice with some fancy intergrip clamps that are dead good:as soon as I started tacking it in place my welder started fucking me about with the wire feed and welding the wire into the tip every 3 seconds and generally being an absolute nightmare, I got fairly pissed off at this point so I packed up in a huff. I'm fairly laid back but a malfunctioning welder is probably the only thing that can make me properly angry.

 

 

I'll try a new liner in it tomorrow if 'frauds have got one in stock like they claim. If not I'll try and borrow my mates fancy mig set.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

I love these cobblers news reports, keep em up

[drum]

The wife ran the disco empty of fuel then ran the battery flat trying to start it. In doing so she drew lots of air into the system. She did this in a busy one way street which made positioning the old audi for a jump start very interesting. It didn't start of course so I had to drag it home.

[vulgalour]

This is one of those cars that I hadn't considered, but at the price and being on my doorstep it would be daft not to.  With a small amount of routine maintenance and some fresh tyres there's no apparent reason it shouldn't go straight through an MoT even though it does look a bit tatty around the edges.  It's sat on gravel and the greenery has sprung up over the course of the last week but it has been off the road for 2 years.  Just like my old Mk2 Polo, it started up with a bit of fresh petrol and a battery and no other coercion and runs smoothly and seems okay.

 

I'm not sure I would even call this a project, the car appears to be so solid and in such good order that it should really need a bit of effort to get it back on the road and very little by way of money, which is good because effort on a tight budget I can do.  The black interior I don't like is getting swapped for a grey interior I do like which keeps the seller happy and the price down.  It has the luxury of headlight washers and an automatic choke, it's practically modern!

 

So there we go, my new daily driver is going to be a 1984 Mk1 Golf Cabrio with a tatty roof and horrible alloys.  Oh how the mighty have fallen... maybe.

[cort16]

I see there's a new series of top gear starting tonight at 8. Not the that the BBC's bothered their arse advertising it they're too distracted pulling their collective selves off over Glastonbury. And don't pretend you don't watch it I know you do!

[Wilko220]

Unless they've brought back Chris Goffey to do some Woollarding on a J-reg Proton, I don't give a toss.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

i've enjoyed the few Glasto bits i've seen/heard

[Richard]

Even my wife has stopped watching Top Gear.

[dollywobbler]

It's been a weekend of the wrong vehicle for me. Spent most of it at a 2CV meet in Cambridgeshire, then dropped in at a huge Rover rally on the way home. Sadly pics are out of bounds at the moment. The car? Citroen BX. Had to carry two 2CV front wings, a 2CV gearbox and our camping gear. BX wins.

 

Happily, I was allowed to park in 'other classics' at the Rover meet, which was nice. Less nice is the fact that the BX is just going to have to go. It needs fettling that I can no longer afford/be arsed with. There's nowt seriously wrong with it, but I can't stump up the cash at the moment and my love for it has just entirely evaporated. I'm still hopeful that I can get £600 for it. Then I need to sell the Merc, then I need to find something utterly boring and completely Shite. But, knowing me, also a bit quirky. An early Daihatsu Sirion is getting much consideration at the moment. (it was a bloody long drive home - I had a lot of time for considering the above!)

[Lord Sterling]

Kin 'ell! Nearly had a head-on collision with the lad who lives across the road from me, he swung around trying to avoid a car that stopped on his side of the road just as I was coming up the road, I slammed on my brakes as he realised a big Rover was coming towards him, he slammed on and fell off his bike. I got out and made sure he was Ok, the lads in the car by the side if the road thought it was funny, wankers.

 

Oh yeah, and whenever someone on here mentions 'Wollarding' I have this compulsion to listen to the ending track of the old Top Gear, namely Elton Johns 'Out of the Blue'.

[cort16]

I've been enjoying watching bits of Glastonbury too it's their blanket plugging of it on all mediums and my subsequent whingeing about it on here that's annoying me.

[Pete-M]

After leaving the house at 7.30 this morning and getting a couple of trains to darkest Leeds I collected my Focus estate this morning.

It's a nice thing, but I bought it on 99.500 miles.. they need a cam belt at 100k. So that's a little job I'd forgotten about. Hey ho. Spanner time one day this week.

Otherwise, it's ace. 42 mpg isn't bad for a 2.0 Focus. It's a world away from the MPG my stuff normally manages. Drives well, too. Handbrake is bollocks though, probably a sticky caliper - there seems to be recurring theme with this on this particular car. It seems to have had rear discs and calipers every year for the last four or five. 

Needs a thorough valet, last owner appears to have been a vet.

[Cavcraft]

+1 on the reports, Cobblers, make great reading. I wouldn't feel bad about modifying that van either, if you didn't then somebody else would and would probably spaz it all up as you suggested. 

Plus it's probably worth shit loads more once done, and there's nowt wrong with getting a few more quid of the job.

[Angrydicky]

Feeling a bit sad about missing the ACCC rally today, so decided to take the Atlantic out for a spin to cheer myself up. I got my sister to come with me and make a short video from inside the car, hope you like it!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFXoHqV7LO4&feature=youtu.be

[Wilko220]

Feeling a bit sad about missing the ACCC rally today, so decided to take the Atlantic out for a spin to cheer myself up. I got my sister to come with me and make a short video from inside the car, hope you like it!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFXoHqV7LO4&feature=youtu.be

 

Great stuff. The sound of the engine combined with all the little rattles is just wonderful!

 

Glad to see you kept pace with that Golf as well...

[cobblers]

Yeah, as much as it pained me to cut up a panel van, it'll make it a lot nicer to drive, and when I do eventually sell it, it'll have a lot wider audience.

So yeah, wasted some hours trying to make my welder weld panels to panels rather than MIG wire into the end of the torch. I bought a SIP liner for my SIP welder but obviously it was 2 foot too short, so I took it back and fed it up the arse of the bloke at halfords (lucky for him it was too short to cause any real harm) and instead left with 3 metres of bike brake cable outer, which was a perfect replacement, and teflon lined too.

Of course, it made sod all difference so I got a bit creative and did a bit of a mod on the welder cos thee run the wire feed motor off the main transformer, so the wire feed speed is choppy and wank at the best of times:

 

 

That voltage switch is now my wire feed selector. 12v turned out to be a bit more than "medium" so I banged a few diodes in line to lose 4 volts, now it's absolutely spot on! Unfortunately the welder still didn't work right, I reckon theres a problem with the rectifier since I've had it on 150A full power just to weld car body panels.

 

 

Anyway I managed to borrow an actual proper 150A welder off my mate, a clarke 161thing which is 3x as big and a proper bit of kit.

 

With the middle window blebbed in with the shit welder (it jammed and I had to pull a 3m of mig wire out of the thing about a 15 times just to get that tacked in) I decided to get grindering and cut another whacking great hole in the side:

 

 

When I was digging about I found this wedged down the back of the panel:

 

 

 

I flipping love finding stuff like this. 1988 dates them to when the van was new, I reckon they must have been stuffed down there by the bloke who initially lined it out before it was first used. They still smelled of chicken too!

 

So once I'd got over that, I fitted and removed and refitted and removed the window recess about 9000 times, marking and trimming bits off alll over the place, then finally got the lot welded in:

 

 

 

 

Even with the POS welder issue costing me 4 or 5 hours, things seem to be going OK. I've got tomorrow off work which will be mostly spent grinding all those welds back, and perhaps fitting the other window hole if I can get hold of the bloke who's selling it to me.