Ford timelord

[quicksilver]

On 12/5/2019 at 3:32 PM, Pieman said:

Update - have got more pics from the Swaffham meeting.  Taken from screenshots of the meeting VHS, many thanks to Shawn Mason for these.

 

The more I look at this pic the wonkier the car looks. The door doesn't seem to be shut properly, the crease doesn't line up, there's all sorts of weird angles going on between the wing and the light housing and the C-pillar doesn't look entirely healthy either, so something must have been seriously out of whack around the back end even before the race. I guess it was utterly bollocksed by early '89 and two more years dumped at Trancentral had only made things worse.

One thing still puzzles me though. As racing rare and unusual stuff is worth so much kudos in the banger world, why did the demise of such a famous car attract so little attention that even its driver had forgotten about it, especially as the KLF were at the height of their fame in the summer of 1991? Maybe there weren't any KLF fans at that meeting so its significance went unnoticed.

[Matty]

On 12/31/2019 at 8:52 AM, Philmanns said:

I didn’t know I’d been mentioned on here a lot but I guess that’s me then! I bought a very rusty Cosmo back in 89, I hadn’t done anything with it 11 years later when Ivan advertised his, so I decided to bite the bullet!

Glad to hear you have love for the Ro. People on forums still like to rant on about how unreliable they are etc etc but it really is not the case. So it’s nice to hear some positivity. Yes I know HYW, I’ve worked on it in the past. Very nice car.

 

Assuming I've got this right, I read an article on 3 of your cars in classic and sports car recent. The Cosmo, a birotor and an ro80. What a collection you have! And off the article, about 30 other cars. Absolutely brilliant!

[warren t claim]

On 12/28/2019 at 7:17 PM, Philmanns said:

That’s proper clean, and a fair bit of money too. I’ve never seen a RHD one before. 

I think Aussie regs forbid the import of LHD cars for some reason. Apparently there's a couple of RHD Citroen SMs floating about down under too.

[Pieman]

3 hours ago, quicksilver said:

One thing still puzzles me though. As racing rare and unusual stuff is worth so much kudos in the banger world, why did the demise of such a famous car attract so little attention that even its driver had forgotten about it, especially as the KLF were at the height of their fame in the summer of 1991? Maybe there weren't any KLF fans at that meeting so its significance went unnoticed.

Maybe cos there was no internet back then?  Of course today if a car is being raced a driver will post on Facebook six months before the meeting about it before they've even started working on prepping the car, but back then no one knew what was going to be at a meeting until they turned up on the day.

 

[sheffcortinacentre]

No longer the case with older stuff.

[Philmanns]

On 1/4/2020 at 10:02 PM, Matty said:

Assuming I've got this right, I read an article on 3 of your cars in classic and sports car recent. The Cosmo, a birotor and an ro80. What a collection you have! And off the article, about 30 other cars. Absolutely brilliant!

Thanks, yeah they were mine. A mate said to me “you love your old sh1te don’t you”? I guess he’s  right!

[trigger]

On 12/29/2019 at 11:36 AM, Philmanns said:

It’s in the diary. Good old Trigger ?

Hello Phil! 

[Kowalski]

What an amazing thread! The level of research on this car is anal. And I mean that as a compliment. 

More threads about film and music video cars please!

[jmsguzzi]

26 minutes ago, Kowalski said:

More threads about film and music video cars please!

Aye, whatever happened to this one?

 

[jonathan_dyane]

Loved reading about Ford Timelord, cracking story and vids.

Now I want a knackered V8 yank

[Rod/b]

ahem

 

https://www.allcollectorcars.com/for-sale/1968-Ford-Galaxie-500/2315908/
 

 

[Pieman]

1 minute ago, Rod/b said:

ahem

 

https://www.allcollectorcars.com/for-sale/1968-Ford-Galaxie-500/2315908/
 

 

Anyone know a good import agent?

[Rod/b]

Stand down - i think thats a 69, which is different (although tbh it’d be close enough for me)

[jmsguzzi]

White room spec 

[Pieman]

So I did a thing.

(Can't remember who posted the link to Redbubble, but many thanks to whoever it was)

(The design isn't as faded as it looks there, that's just the overly bright light in my kitchen!)

[Rod/b]

Nice

[Rod/b]

Found a pic I had saved - @Philmanns mid clean-up post Cauty and Drummond’s paintjob.

 

 

[Philmanns]

4 hours ago, Rod/b said:

Found a pic I had saved - @Philmanns mid clean-up post Cauty and Drummond’s paintjob.

 

 

@Rod/b Do you know where that came from? Was it you that said you’d seen some video of the cleanup taken from a window? Ta

[Rod/b]

I think i saw it on instagram during the liverpool event, but i’m buggered if i can find it now.

[Rod/b]

Every day’s a school day. 
 

If anyone’s actually looking for a 1968 Galaxie  to turn into a Timelord, also look for a 1968 Ford Custom 500, which is just a base spec Galaxie, and seem much more plentiful in sedan form.

Here’s one for sub $2k

https://classiccars.com/listings/view/1016121/1968-ford-custom-500-for-sale-in-crookston-minnesota-56716

 

 

[jonathan_dyane]

That looks tremendous

 

/\ PS I can confirm that is a Liverpool wheelie bin.

[cort16]

This just appeared on iPlayer

Quote

Bill Drummond ceased activities as part of the enormously successful pop group The KLF in 1997. Since 2014 he has been on a world tour, travelling around the world with his show The 25 Paintings, visiting a different city each year. 

In December 2016 he based himself in Kolkata, while in the spring of 2018 he was in Lexington, North Carolina. In each place he carries out his regular work, setting up a shoeshine stand in the street and building a bed in order to give it away, walks across the longest bridge he can find at dawn banging his parade drum, starts knitting circles with whoever wants to join him, and bakes cakes, offering them to people whose houses sit on a circle he has drawn on a map of the city. 

He is not rich and has deliberately designed his actions so that they can't be monetised. He has mostly been ignored by the art world. So what is he doing it all for? 

Director Paul Duane shadowed Bill Drummond for three years before starting this film in order to achieve some level of understanding about what he's at. Best Before Death is named after Drummond's belief that the world tour, scheduled to end when he is 72, is a race against his own mortality. 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000ddz4/best-before-death?fbclid=IwAR1msHVH-7xnx7gfdFFvSbSfVtSixMzTkdFBhtbIpzlcuVnQflGZxKSIOwU

[Datsuncog]

^^^ Yup, that was the event I went to in Belfast last September - a performance of Drummond's 'White Saviour Complex' play, which wrapped itself around a screening of the 'Best Before Death' film.

Well worth a watch, for sure.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Wow that looks interesting. Great find, thanks!!!

[LightBulbFun]

On 1/12/2020 at 10:09 AM, Rod/b said:

Every day’s a school day. 
 

If anyone’s actually looking for a 1968 Galaxie  to turn into a Timelord, also look for a 1968 Ford Custom 500, which is just a base spec Galaxie, and seem much more plentiful in sedan form.

Here’s one for sub $2k

https://classiccars.com/listings/view/1016121/1968-ford-custom-500-for-sale-in-crookston-minnesota-56716

 

 

I think it actually turned out the Real Ford Timelord was actually a Ford Custom if im @Datsuncog's post correctly  

https://autoshite.com/topic/33877-ford-timelord/?do=findComment&comment=1884793

 

[Rod/b]

Datsuncog makes the assumption that it was a real police car, which it wasn’t. Until it was released from the studios it was just a black sedan. The first owner after the studio painted it to look like a blues bros cop car, and drove round in it dressed as a nun. As you do.

[Datsuncog]

6 hours ago, Rod/b said:

Datsuncog makes the assumption that it was a real police car, which it wasn’t. Until it was released from the studios it was just a black sedan. The first owner after the studio painted it to look like a blues bros cop car, and drove round in it dressed as a nun. As you do.

Erm… I appreciate that there's been a bit of uncertainty over a few points during the course of this thread - but I think you've pretty much paraphrased some of the first things I jotted down about this car!

On ‎12‎/‎17‎/‎2018 at 5:30 PM, Datsuncog said:

According to scraps of information pieced together by unofficial KLF archivists, the story begins in the mid-1980s when a plain black 1968 Ford Galaxie with the registration WGU 18G was bought at auction from Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire for "a few hundred quid" by a young chap named Flinton Chalk.

Flinton and his mates appear to have maintained a somewhat puckish outlook on life, and decided to paint the Galaxie up to look like a police car, spraying the roof and front doors white and completing the effect with a Sheriff-style gold star on the door.

They then proceeded to rag the Galaxie around the fields and laneways near Godstone, Surrey, frequently with a large pirate flag attached, and often while dressed as nuns. As you do.

Not trying to be prickly, but I never assumed, or stated, that the Timelord was a real police cruiser. 

The DVLA information on WGU 18G that I posted back on page 1 of the thread shows that it was fitted with the 3.9 litre straight six unit (240 cubic inches, the smallest engine option in the whole lineup), which was highly unlikely to have been installed in a police car.

Admittedly, the realisation that it had been dressed as a cut-price Bluesmobile replica only dawned on me a few weeks ago, after Mrs6C, Lightbulbfun, Bezzabsa and Pieman began discussing a sighting of a Dodge 'Timelord replica' which turned out to be a well-known Bluesmobile replica. Seems kinda obvious, in retrospect: wood/trees interface failure.

On ‎11‎/‎26‎/‎2019 at 1:10 PM, Datsuncog said:

I hadn't twigged that the early efforts to turn WGU from a plain black sedan into a cop car replica might have stemmed from Flinton having a crack at the 1974 Dodge Monaco that featured in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers, but that seems absolutely right based on the addition of the gold star on the front doors and the 'P1' sprayed on the rears (which I'd never noticed either, but is quite obvious on the Jon Mace pics now that Pieman's pointed it out).

And yes, back in September I ventured that Ford Timelord wasn't even a Galaxie either, despite being universally referred to as such - but rather a lowlier spec'd Ford Custom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Custom#Custom_and_Custom_500_(1964-1981)

On ‎9‎/‎30‎/‎2019 at 3:07 PM, Datsuncog said:

WGU 18G was not a Ford Galaxie. It was a Ford Custom, the trim level below the Galaxie - though using the same bodyshell. Without insignia though, it's quite hard to tell them apart.

As with UK spec police cars though, US cruisers tended to involve a basic body fitted with the biggest engine possible - and so a real-life police version would seldom have been a Galaxie, and almost always a Custom.

Kinda like The Sweeny's famous Ford Granada actually being a Ford Consul GT. But who, outside of car buff circles, would know that?

We may stick to calling Ford Timelord a Galaxie, I reckon, otherwise it'll just get confusing.

The Custom owned by Jimmy Cauty seems to have been a base model with a simple, unadorned pressed-steel panel at the back - kinda like you'd find on a MkIII Cortina base.

The base Custom seems to have mainly existed in the range to cater to taxi companies and law enforcement fleets, and the point I was making in the post from last September was that bodily, Cauty's car would have been absolutely correct as a police car - more so than an all-singing, chrome-decked luxury Galaxie.

So, rather than a Custom being an acceptable substitute for a Galaxie if building a Timelord replica, it should really be the other way around.

 

The Custom 500, the next version up in the range, came with a single pressed aluminium panel on the bootlid and a chrome side strip to differentiate it from the poverty spec models.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that WGU was a Custom 500 which at some point lost its trim, of course - but having the basic 6-cyl lump rather than the more common V8 suggests that it was a fleet spec model.

Which makes it even more odd for it to have ended up in the UK, with the blurb on the back of the 'Doctorin' The Tardis' single claiming that it was brought over by Ford in Dagenham in 1970.

 

The full-fat Galaxie at the top of the range had, amongst other things, more ornate bootlid trim plus further chrome detailing to the sills and arches - as per this Timelord replica, built using an actual 1968 Galaxie.

Not that it makes a whole heap of difference, but I've tried my very best to strive for accuracy here.

[mk2_craig]

Interesting as always DC. I wonder whether the displacement of the cars original engine was the same as that stated in the DVLA info, or perhaps it changed at the point the engine had to be replaced post-Sweden?

[LightBulbFun]

41 minutes ago, Datsuncog said:

Not that it makes a whole heap of difference, but I've tried my very best to strive for accuracy here.

im glad im not the only one!  

I know sometimes my posts and corrections can be a bit pedantic at times, but (with invacars in my case case) when there's so little info out there and what info there is out there is false

the smallest of details can make a big difference!

13 minutes ago, mk2_craig said:

Interesting as always DC. I wonder whether the displacement of the cars original engine was the same as that stated in the DVLA info, or perhaps it changed at the point the engine had to be replaced post-Sweden?

I can confirm that the Ford Timelord came with a 6 banger from the factory  

[LightBulbFun]

1 hour ago, Datsuncog said:

The Custom owned by Jimmy Cauty seems to have been a base model with a simple, unadorned pressed-steel panel at the back - kinda like you'd find on a MkIII Cortina base.

oh almost forgot

but was wondering does anyone know if the numbers 20317648 on the back there mean anything?