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1994 Lada Samara 1.5 GL Saloon


howe

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15 minutes ago, bezzabsa said:

Rare old bird these days...looking to be rust free too!!

Somehow it is! there's been some welding that I can see on the boot floor and a couple dots I need to rub back and paint over to stop them spreading, but it's in ridiculous condition for a Samara bodywork wise

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42 minutes ago, eddyramrod said:

Cumbria, hey?  Me too (the other end: Barrow).  Have you considered bringing it to the Lakeland Motor Museum for the monthly meet?  First Saturday every month, all year, and you can't miss the big brown Cadillac... ;)

I have, but I'm away for the next one. It'd be good to bring it down for one of them, maybe December ?

12 minutes ago, HMC said:

Please can we have a closeup of the number plates.

#perv

I've broken my phone I took the pictures of the lada on, so I'm using a backup nokia with a crap camera but here you go:
IMG_20191029_165319.thumb.jpg.8570b26cd6df11cb0b5741cb0e30f444.jpgIMG_20191029_165456.thumb.jpg.f8cf0ecf224d32b2910541550d1ac61e.jpg

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Save yourself a large amount of frustration and just solder the wires directly to the PCB the tail lights are fed from...the slide connector they used to connect to the clusters is beyond useless.

I must have spent hours cleaning, retensioning, sanding, cleaning more etc to try to get it so the indicators didn't go mental 50% of the time you touched the brake pedal... eventually did away with the connectors and just soldered it together...never played up again!

 

Mine was a pretty nice driving car, though in several respects did always feel like it was imminently about to fly apart in ways the Riva and Niva never did...guess it felt a bit faceless in comparison too...but that was about 15 years ago when they were still relatively modern and not *that* unusual to see.

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DSCI0002.JPG.f5df864fa96ea139852b76cebf5a4d58.JPG

This would be mine from around 2004 just after I got it, so before I'd cleaned it up. 

Drove far better than you'd expect, and was one of the few cars I've had which (on a private test track of course) would max out the speedometer. 

At the time though it felt a bit boring and faceless compared to the other motors I'd had so I didn't hold onto it all that long.

The main issues I had with it were minor but annoying QC issues...the gearknob came off in my hand more than once, the self park function on the wipers had a mind of its own, and the connectors between the tail lights and the loom were a continual source of dodgy brake lights or indicators.  The interior always felt like it was in imminent danger of falling apart too...just never instilled any real confidence, unlike the Riva and Niva which feel like they'd be good candidates for transport after the apocalypse wipes out civilization as we know it.

Heater on mine was barely warm too which surprised me, though I think that was probably more an issue with my car than the model.

Oh...and the windscreen wipers used to lift completely off the windscreen above 70mph...or 40 if you had a strong headwind...which happens quite a lot in northern Scotland!

Was sold back to a couple of Russians who came over to drive it back home apparently...

I guess the Samara to me has a whiff of 70s BMC about it in that it was so nearly a really decent little car... it's fundamentally sound... it's roomy, performance was reasonable for the class, it handled well...but they just needed to put a little more effort into the fine detail...rather than it felt like saying "right, that's a working car now...get it on sale."

The exposed screws all over the cabin, hand painted heater controls and structural sticky tape made it feel more like a roadworthy prototype than a production car.

I do have a few better photos on my main PC, I'll try to get hold of them later.

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9 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

The injection is definitely something this car should have had pretty much from the outset I reckon...the electronic carb performed "adequately" at the best of times...

...Hence why I sacked it off my Riva!

From my experience with my Samara 1.5 GXi, the injection system wasn't exactly sophisticated either...

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6 hours ago, wuvvum said:

From my experience with my Samara 1.5 GXi, the injection system wasn't exactly sophisticated either...

No idea what system they used on the Samara, but the injection system used on the Niva is a really simple off-the-shelf unit bought in from GM.  Despite being really simple it actually works very well and rarely gave trouble. 

We had a few 1.7i Nivas through the garage and never had any running issues with any of them...the last of the 1.6 carbed ones on the other hand...they were almost invariably a nuisance in some way (not least requiring luck and patience at every MOT emission test).

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