Unsung hero: in praise of the 1994 Ford Escort 1.8D L.

[GeordieInExile]

My mam had a J reg one, black with grey plastic door bottoms and bumpers. I think it was an LX. Coming from an E reg base spec K10 Micra it felt like the height of luxury, comfort, massiveness and all round excellence. I remember we used it to move from our poky council flat into the new build my folks still live in, with my brother in the front passenger footwell. I also remember the time I accidentally bashed a door off a bollard and got a bollocking.

[Cento16v]

My Dad had a K reg 1.8 16v LX Escort in Burgundy Red with a Grey lower half.

I remember it being pretty quick compared to the Mondeo which replaced it. 

It was a nice car but overheated everytime it towed the caravan so didn't last long, it was only 2 years old when he bought it but still seemed to have a lot of visits back to Ford!

[Datsuncog]

I unexpectedly ended up with a 1996 Escort LX in 2003 - a 'surprise gift' from my parents, who weren't overly thrilled about me commuting daily across Sussex in a 1973 Viva HC with a failed head gasket and intermittent electrical problems.

It was revealed to me in my grandparents' garage when I went home to Northern Ireland for Christmas that year, and I think it set my father back £1200, which seemed like a fortune to me. I felt massively guilty.

The Escort had only two owners and had been well looked after. One of the first final-style Escorts, its history file implied it had been a hire car for the first six months of its life (originally GB registered on an N plate) before coming over to NI in early 1997 and gaining a local registration, RBZ 1510.

It was dark Touramallard Green with a cheerily Caramac-coloured interior, with a keep-fit sunroof and a towbar. It even had a jaunty little spoiler on the bootlid. Both bumpers had been not-brilliantly repainted in the body colour, leading me to wonder if it had originally been supplied with them unpainted.

I was impressed by the feeling of spaciousness and the seriously nippy Zetec engine, and felt that I'd instantly zipped up several stages of car ownership.

Rear seatbelts! Power steering! Electric windows! Five gears!

All these things were novelties to me.

Despite this, I fretted dreadfully that the car wasn't really 'me', and that I was somehow selling out by driving it rather than my usual wrecks. But then I felt the same about the Datsun Sunny and the Mk2 Fiesta that I'd also owned while the Viva was off the road...

 

I drove it back to Sussex in the New Year, and although I was never besotted by it, the little thing really did impress me with its eagerness and total reliability.

A few months later, while working at a temporary contract in Bristol, I had the rather terrifying experience of a front tyre blowout while in the outside lane of the M5, in Friday rush hour, at 70mph+.

The sudden deflation and flapping of the tyre coming to bits was both loud and frightening. Impressively, the Escort remained poised while I clapped on the hazards and steadily backed off the throttle, crossing over to the hard shoulder in a series of heart-stopping manoeuvres while traffic thundered past us.

A week or two later, I was nosing slowly out of the works' car park (blind) exit when there was a sudden bang and a man I didn't know rolling around on the Escort's bonnet.

A cyclist had ridden into the passenger wing at speed.

He wasn't injured, but he was furious - and I was abjectly apologetic. It really was impossible to see either side of the gates, and I'd been moving a sub-walking pace. It appeared he hadn't seen me start to emerge. The wing was creased and the paint was oddly 'bloomed' white above the wheelarch.

It was only after he'd left, with various insults still ringing in my ears, that I noticed the 'Cyclists: dismount' signs on either side of the gates.

 

That summer, carried away with the thought of having a car which would reliably start and not shed parts while in motion, I planned a driving holiday to France with my then-girlfriend. A few weeks before we were due to leave, we were back in Somerset (where she was from) and I decided to leave the Escort into a local garage for a general service, since all my tools and whatnot were still in NI.

On going to pick the Escort up afterwards, some muppet in a Transit had parked in the yellow-hatched zone just outside the workshop. Trying to squeeze past in reverse, I was so busy looking in the drivers' side mirror trying not to hit the Transit that it came as a total surprise to hear a terrible graunching noise, immediately followed by the car raising itself by about fifteen degrees on the passenger side.

On getting out, it was apparent that the edge of the garage building had a section of low wall protruding out just a few inches, painted the same colour. And my 'new' car had hung itself up on it, with the wing, door and sill now all pushed in and the rubbing strip half-peeled off like a giant floppy liquorice bootlace.

In shock and disbelief, I rushed back into the garage to be met with a laconic "oh yeah, everyone hits that... we really should put like some yellow paint on it or something..."

At least it made the wing damage less noticeable. Silver linings, and all that.

A few days later in Bristol I lost a wheeltrim, and then one night some oxygen thief kicked the passenger door mirror off, scattering pieces all the way down the street. My smooth modern suddenly looked like a total fucking shed.

We did make it down to the Dordogne and back, and the little thing ran like a sewing machine the whole way. Granted, the last time I'd done that trip was in an overheating Viva with a fucked starter, so to be fair my standards weren't that high.

But it drove flawlessly, except for the realisation that it had somehow pissed out all its power steering fluid at one point, when I decided to investigate what the hell was dripping from the inner arch liner.

That resulted in having to somehow acquire a bottle of PAS fluid, eventually obtained from a car spares place in Saumur through a mixture of mime improv and a some nonsensical phrasing cobbled together from my old A-level Collins Robert French dictionary.

While I may have been able to hold a reasonable discussion in French about Sartre and Camus' use of metaphor to describe the human condition, it rapidly transpired that the school syllabus had taught me bollock-all about car maintenance in France. I believe in retrospect that I may have been asking the confused sales garcon for a bottle of his finest all-powerful directional water.

Eventually the centime dropped, and I managed to get my fluid - and weirdly, once refilled it never did it again.

One minor cosmetic complication arose at a campsite, when I decided to give the road-weary Escort a bit of a clean. Lacking proper kit, we opted to use a basin, washing-up liquid, and a dish sponge.

As it transpired, my gf thought it would be a good idea to shift the road dirt from the paintwork using the the pot-scouring side of the dish sponge... so you can imagine just how much better* the car looked when I rinsed it down and the languid Loire sunlight dried it off...

FFS.

But the Escort still made it back on to the ferry to Southampton in much better shape than I did, since I'd managed to give myself gastroenteritis - probably through gobbling a leftover lump of locally produced soft cheese that I'd left sweltering in the sun for most of the afternoon.

I can't remember much of the 400 mile drive, other than having to stop a lot due to severe gastric distress. My gf couldn't drive at the time, so I just had to soldier on. Apparently, 'to go green in the face' is not just a saying - I'm told I was the colour of a broad bean for several days.

Even now, I can't look at a caramel latte being made by one of those petrol station coffee machines. Memories, hey?

Once recovered, I considered sourcing a new door and wing from a scrappie, but that wouldn't have fixed the damaged sill and I still didn't really have any tools to do the job - or indeed money to pay someone else to do it, since this damage coincided with an unhappy post-France period of about six months where for one reason or another I had no income.

By the time I finally received a paycheque, my only concern was clearing accumulated debts and the last thing on the list was tarting up the Escort.

So the Escort became known as The Poor OId Escort, officially, and it continued to provide daily transport until we decided to spend a year in Australia, and then the Escort was packed up with a second-hand trailer from the Friday Ad, for a return voyage to Northern Ireland.

This was the point at which my long-suffering gf realised that both the Escort and the trailer were completely filled with my books, LPs and model cars, and there was now no room for tiresome boring things like clothes and kitchen stuff.

All thanks to my former flatmate for preserving this beautiful memory for all time.

The return to NI wasn't quite triumphant, but even laden to the gunwhales with ABBA's back catalogue, every colour variation of the current Cararama 1/72 range and a lot of Douglas Adams novels, it didn't miss a beat from Brighton to Nottingham, then across North Wales to Holyhead, before the final leg from Dublin back towards Belfast.

I bought the Escort a Tyvec cover, and put it away down the side of my parents' garage for its hibernation. I'd already sold the Viva on, to my great distress, and could only mourn so many cars at a time.

 

On our return from Australia, in late 2006, I was hesitant to peel back the cover and see what remained. I knew that the rear arches were already turning a bit bubbly when I'd put it away... and so I was dismayed but not shocked to find they were now actively crusty.

Having said that, it started with a fresh battery and, other than losing the radio code, everything seemed to work... I tightened the handbrake and booked it in for an MOT to see just how bad it was, and was surprised to find that it passed first time.

The Ezz continued to give decent service, and after returning to my old job at Halfords (after a five year absence), used my staff discount to treat it to new plugs and other service items. It just kept on going.

 

Its undoing came about in July 2007, or at least that's when it all started.

With my relationship pretty much on the rocks, I set out on a doomed voyage to reconnect with various chums I hadn't seen for a long while and meet up again with my quite-likely-ex, who'd gone back to Weston-Super-Mare to 'get some space' the previous month. I took the ferry over to Stranraer and stayed for a few nights with a friend in Cramond, before driving down to join her, trying and failing to find a way through for us.

Again, the little car handled it all, gobbling the motorway miles while I played Hard Fi and Maximo Park CDs at an indiscreet volume (what can I say, it was 2007) on my ex-display Blaupunkt CD player (which cost less than the £40 Lindsays Ford wanted for a reset code for the original cassette player).

Nice fone, M9.

There were a few fraught conversations in the car before I realised that I was on a hiding to nothing. I left, and drove up to stay with some friends in Ilkeston for a few days, during which time there was alarming rain followed by semi-Biblical floods, which matched my mood in sympathetic fallacy. What was less poetic was when the Escort's exhaust system came adrift while driving home through floodwater in Nottingham, resulting in much noise and bubbles.

Without much choice and a ferry booked from Holyhead in a matter of hours, I ended up having to get a whole new system fitted at Kwik Fit in Beeston - over £300, all of which had to go on the credit card.

Late that night, only a few miles from home, the brake warning light wavered red on the dash as I approached the Saintfield roundabout. Just what I needed.

 

Without proper tools or a place to work on the car outside my flat, I asked a fella I knew through Halfords if he could sort the brakes.

About two hours after he picked it up, I received a call...

"Listen, I can do the brakes ok - but both your rear shocks are hanging off..."

He advised that there was no point doing it - the car was bodily fucked and it would cost more than the car was worth to fix it. He told me a mate of his had a Fiat Punto Sporting for sale at £300, which would be a far better bet than throwing good money after bad.

All I could think of was that the exhaust system was less than a week old - and I hadn't even paid anything off the credit card.

With the sunk cost fallacy firmly entrenched, I told him just to go ahead and do the work.

As he pocketed the cheque for £250 after bringing it back he called over his shoulder, "oh, and you know your clutch is going, don't you?"

No. No I didn't, but right enough I could feel a bit of slippage, now that he mentioned it. Arse.

 

Incredibly, the Escort went through its MOT without issue in late 2007, but even then I knew the writing was on the wall for it. The arches were beginning to split, and the damaged panels were becoming very crusty-looking.

Starting my first 'proper job' around this time, I even went so far as to look at some brand new cars.

I was about 90% convinced that I wanted a Citroen C4 VTS in 3-dr flavour, but when the dealer heard that I was interested in a p/x with an Escort, he basically bucked me out the door. Either way, I'm still waiting to hear back about the promised test drive 'to be arranged'.

Early in 2008 I lost the lease on my flat, thanks to a fuckbag landlord who apparently hadn't been paying the mortgage and now wanted me out because he needed to put the place on the market.

I wound up renting a rather chilly room in East Belfast, and the Escort and trailer were once again pressed into service as a removal van. Trying to carry some 3,000 LPs through the snow and up three flights of stairs remains a bit of a low point. 

The problems continued to stack up for the car, but always very minor things.

A tyre went flat, and Kwik Fit reckoned it was unrepairable. I didn't have £45 for a replacement, so I just put the flat tyre back in the wheel well.

The central locking, always slow, became intermittent. It also developed an issue where if you locked the doors while you were driving it (generally a wise move in East Belfast) and then switched the ignition off before unlocking it, the alarm would sound - great craic at 2.a.m.

Then the windscreen washer motor packed up. Normally not that big a job, but this was squeezed away down under all the fuel injection gubbins and I couldn't get at it. So I just kept a bottle of tap water in the footwell to slosh on the screen as needed.

It still started first time, still ran beautifully (while you weren't changing gear) and still stopped, but boys it looked tired. The rear arches were by now pestilential, and the boot floor was looking none too happy either.

 

The end came when I received a moderately large (for me) tax rebate following a PAYE fuckup in the previous year.

Finally with some cash, I went a bit doo-lally and brought a Cortina 80 estate over from Glasgow.

Now somewhat surplus to requirements, I kept the Escort for a few more weeks while procrastinating over what to do with it.

The decent thing would be to just take it on a final winding drive through the golden autumnal Ulster countryside, maybe with a bit of Scott Walker playing, before dropping it off at the gates of T-Met - its life cycle now fully completed. It wasn't completely beyond repair, but why would you? They were still everywhere, and this one was absolutely hanging.

But I didn't. I stuck it on Auto Trader for £200, still with a whole 6 weeks' tax and MOT on it, possibly thinking that a window cleaner or someone might want it as a rough and ready work vehicle.

A well-spoken chap and his son turned up to view, declared it perfect, and said they'd take it. No need for a test drive.

I'd already mentioned 'needs clutch' in the ad, and I strongly recommended that he take it out for a drive to avoid any unpleasant surprises (it had got noticeably worse in the week since I'd placed the ad), but they seemed unperturbed.

They haggled me down to £180 in possibly the most embarrassing middle-class way possible, to which I acceded but said I'd want to keep the roof bars. This was fine.

As he left, blokey advised that he was waiting on a new BMW - he'd already sold its predecessor and the new one wouldn't be ready for another four weeks, so he just needed basic transport til then. Once he'd picked up his new Meistermachine, this one would be going to the metal recycler.

As he started it up with that little Zetec rasp, I did feel a lump of emotion - even though I always knew the likelihood of it being selected for a concours restoration was slim. Hell, if I wouldn't put the work in, who would?

Five years of service (ok, one of them was spent in stasis, but still). The Escort did everything I asked of it comfortably and capably, and more. It transported me and my many chattels the length and breadth of the UK and Ireland on multiple occasions, and it never let me down once.

It might have been just An Car, but this Escort was absolutely an unsung hero. I didn't love it, exactly, but I certainly respected it.

As I watched the Escort's tail lights disappear around the corner for the last time, I'm not too ashamed to say that I felt a tear course down my cheek.

Although that may have been partly because I'd just remembered that the roof bars were still in the boot.

 

Farewell, RBZ 1510. You were a hell of An Car.

[BorniteIdentity]

3 hours ago, Datsuncog said:

Farewell, RBZ 1510. You were a hell of An Car.

Write a fucking book already... ? ? 

[ProgRocker]

Nice story @Datsuncog. Deserved it's own thread though.

BTW, Thanks guys for the 34 or so reps. I think that's my record on Autoshite.

[angle]

Who's up for reliving the glory days? 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/264666104669

[bunglebus]

I had a K reg Onion Ghia that I bought off a mate. It was kinda good, and also shit in equal measure.

It was the 1.8 Zetec, a great engine. Went well, could really be hustled along at silly speeds but also made to go sideways at very low speeds in the wet without resorting to using the handbrake. It never let me down, was used by my dad for a fair while too to get him out of trouble.

However, it had the usual, and very annoying MK5 Escort faults. It often flashed main beam when using the indicators. The fusebox had been bridged in places as the tracks always melt. 

Rust. Not actual rot but just slightly tatty arches and heavy surface rust on all the suspension components, and every time I tried to work on it, a bolt would snap.

Bottom balljoints were regular service items. Replacing the front anti-roll bar bushes according to the HBOL requires dropping the subframe and getting it re-aligned. Fuck that, I found a way to do it without touching the sub frame.

I snapped the front anti-roll bar somehow and for months had a mysterious knocking from the floor area - noticed the cause when I had a flat tyre on the A12 and realised there was a bit floating around in space.

Every MK5/6 Escort I've known has been similarly mediocre, seen one just a couple of years old with rust stains on the sills.

The story as I heard it is Ford did studies and gave people what they wanted, rather than making what was good and letting the customers come to them.

I sold K24 AEW to my ex-girlfriend, it failed its next MoT and I got to drive it to the weighbridge. So far I have weighed in three, my mate's diesel and his sisters pez one. Only car that it pleases me to scrap, as it means one less inflicted on the world.

Here's my Ghia having its vital fluids drained prior to death. Picture reminded me that some knob jockey drove into the side of it on an Eastbourne roundabout after I'd agreed the sale, so it ended up with a not quite matching door

 

 

[bunglebus]

Looked alright when I got it

[Sir Snipes]

I don't have any entertaining stories of my Escort ownership, it just did the business of being a car when I was a skint mature student. The only time it let me down was when a plastic part of the clutch pedal snapped.

The car cost me about £400 IIRC and needed almost nothing in that time. Objectively, it's probably the best car I've had.

[ProgRocker]

1 hour ago, angle said:

Who's up for reliving the glory days? 

1.8i Ghia. Such decadence! ?

[bunglebus]

18 minutes ago, Sir Snipes said:

I don't have any entertaining stories of my Escort ownership, it just did the business of being a car when I was a skint mature student. The only time it let me down was when a plastic part of the clutch pedal snapped.

I'd forgotten how many of those plastic self adjusters we used to fit to 90s Fords when I was at Halfords!

[Zelandeth]

We had an Escort van (on an 02 plate I believe)...fleet no 3982 I believe...which had a massively annoying habit of unhooking its clutch cable at random times - the more I helpfully timed the better.

Drove okay, but goodness it was slow.

[martybabes]

I bought an Orion Ghia Si brand new from Oxford Road Garage (Manchester) in 1991 simply because they were prepared to go to the effort of getting a dealer transfer for one of the two remaining models of that specification left in the country.  One (the one I ended up with) was in Durham and I can't recall where the other one was.  Naturally, when it was firmly in our ownership, she was christened Judith.  Judith had to have a total re-spray before she was delivered to us on account of her being stored in the open and having some paint damaging residue on her.

The Ghia Si had the "new" 16 valve 1.8 engine and the lovely MTX gearbox, with synchro even on reverse.  130 PS gave the car a sprightly performance envelope, and she pulled well even at high revs altho it was getting rather noisy by that time.  The rev limiter cut in at about 6500.  Discs all round helped her to stop in short order.  I asked the garage to de-badge her prior to delivery but I can't now think why I insisted on that.  I also had Judith's successor de-badged (a Mondeo II Si V6).

The then Mrs Martybabes and I took the car on holiday to France on several annual summer holidays covering about 3k miles each time.  It was an enjoyable car to own and drive, but the build quality did leave a little to be desired. After five years I got rid of her (and the then Mrs Martybabes) - she had covered 105,000 miles and, I have to say, I enjoyed pretty much all of them.  

[Sir Snipes]

If they ever came into work they always, and I mean always, wanted front brakes and suspension arms. Somehow mine didn't. I think I treated it to one service in 3 years, oh and a set of mk2 Mondeo wheel trims when one of the originals disappeared. Eventually scrapped it but I didn't ever bother to try for another MOT - it had advisories for rear suspension rot for years, I had been playing cambelt roulette for about 3 years and my g/f never trusted it after that clutch pedal failure. She insists I keep spending money on this damn c4 though, even after it suffered an actual clutch failure last year......

[motorpunk]

On 3/11/2020 at 7:29 PM, I_am_Diesel said:

If you thought the 1.8D was slow, you should have tried it’s 1.6D predecessor.

We had a mk3 estate 1.6d, two doors if I recall correctly, as a work hack. First time I used it I put c.300kg of metal in the back and tried to pull out of the carpark directly into a busy main road. How I didn’t kill lots of people is still a mystery to me. Never have I been in a slower, shitter, more horrible car than that. I hate these with a passion.

[Tenmil Socket]

This is a lovely looking escort...

[PhilA]

Synchro in reverse? Never knew that.

If they'd spent a bit more time developing the rest of the car it would have been well spent. Friend of mine bought a burgundy mk6 Si from That There London for a fairly decent price. He drove it for 3 months and parked it up because he hated it.

It made everybody car sick.

 

Phil

[Eyersey1234]

Nice story @Datsuncog it's good the old Escort served you well. 

[Bren]

The firm I worked for at the time bought a P reg 1.6 pez estate brand new in '96. 

I did many miles travelling to various ford and jaguar plants.

It did a job but was completely unremarkable in the same way you would'nt get excited about a freezer.

At no point did I consider one for myself - I have never been a fan of FWD escorts but would have a mk 1 or 2.

Interestingly, the firm had the car so long it was scrapped at the end of its life.

[Bren]

It was actually 1997 when the car was purchased - the last MOT was 2006 - already failure on corrosion. RIP P376SLG.