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Mk1 Ford Escorts - share the love


Dick Longbridge

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28 minutes ago, Jenson Velcro said:

Wasn’t H1FEV a new car made by Ford to compete in the 25th anniversary run of the World Cup Rally. FEV1H won the original in 1970

That's as I recall. Was it possibly based on the shell of a tidy example that Car magazine were involved with? I remember it being a really nice, original example before it got converted to rally spec. I want to say Gavin Green ran it on a long distance event.

Edit: More about it here https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?t=722026

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On 2/16/2021 at 8:53 PM, LightBulbFun said:

Bingo! surprised it took yall this long to figure it out :mrgreen:

quite amusingly quite a few Invacar blocks coincide with various Ford vehicles (it seems Ford had its centre of operations or what have you In Essex, and Invacars where all made in Essex and registered there, aside from a small handful of private examples)

 

but as you say it sadly lead to LVX250J an Invacar Mk12 being robbed of its number plate because the above LVX-J rally escorts

its doubly a shame as LVX250J (now JBY503J) is the only Invacar Mk12 I know of in regular road use but its forced to run around on a miss leading age related plate (and also it hid the LVX201J-LVX300J block of Invacars from me during my research at that point in time)

do wonder if some day I can find the owner that escort and kindly ask them if they would be willing to return/sell the plate back to the Invacar!

 

(the extra frustrating thing, is it should not have been allowed to have been robbed of a plate in the first place, since the rules state that to transfer a plate off a vehicle the the vehicle needs to be of a type that requires an MOT, but Invacar Mk12 is MOT exempt as All invalid vehicles under 306Kg do not require an MOT

 Less a question of taking so long to figure it out, more a case of anything featured on here  with an Essex or Surrey registration and we know you'll turn up twatting on about the fucking things. 

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Called past me mates today. His engine has fallen in and the next, and only big job is wiring. Having seen it take shape I can't wait to see it in action. The owner likes to take a passenger on show off laps, so fingers crossed. 😁

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Sorry for the smeary lense. 

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Busy in the back 

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Will be campaigning in, (and probably winning 🤣,) the retro drift challenge as soon as the rona lets them play. 

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12 hours ago, scdan4 said:

Called past me mates today. His engine has fallen in and the next, and only big job is wiring. Having seen it take shape I can't wait to see it in action. The owner likes to take a passenger on show off laps, so fingers crossed. 😁

DSC_0134.thumb.JPG.29afee368c0fb6a468af311d2082f71e.JPG

Sorry for the smeary lense. 

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Busy in the back 

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Will be campaigning in, (and probably winning 🤣,) the retro drift challenge as soon as the rona lets them play. 

Not my cup of tea, but I tip my hat off to the owner for his craftsmanship.

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On 2/12/2021 at 12:33 AM, Bren said:

I paid £300 for a rusty 1300e. This was in 1991. The golden paint was flat and the twin choke carb long gone.

I had it sprayed in ultraspeed red ( THE worst spray job I've ever seen). It was sold to my cousin who set it on fire when doing some welding.

 

RIP HDJ308N

Funnily enough I bought a two door Amber Gold 1300E with RS 4 spokes, RS2000 front pews and a peco exhaust. All for about £525 I seem to recall. NNM103M

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On 2/14/2021 at 8:36 AM, Steviemillar said:

I’m a committed Capri licker so can define exactly when I first remember one clearly (May 1976, neighbours new black 2.0S) but Mk1 (and Mk2) Escorts were more common as street furniture even then so I paid less notice of them. My uncle had a purple velvet 1100XL RFS146M that he bought at 4/5 years old I think and had it for a long time, he had the engine out a couple of times, one occasion was to replace piston rings from memory, the car would have been ten years old by then maybe. Both of my cousins learned to drive in it and it went around the clock at least once. It was given away in the late 90s to a young lad as a project but that never happened.

There was a mildly customised red K reg Mk1 that was parked up on the driveway of a pensioner’s house on my paper round in the mid-80s that did pique my interest though, jacked up a little bit with front quarter bumpers, Corbeau seats, rear window louvre, road style wheels and a fair bit of rust! It was there for a few years and then disappeared, can’t say I ever saw it on the road again. EDIT  - looked incredibly like a red version of the blue one in davocano’s thread.

Living local to Crimond stock car track, there were always several Mk1s both racing and there as spectators cars. One memorable one was owned by a superstox driver, a wide arched Mk1 with a tasty pinto in it I think, sounded like a pinto on twin carbs to me. The arches were not like the usual bubble arches but were more like a works set up along the lines of the Cologne arches that you used to see on Mk1 Capris, anyway it looked fantastic.   
 

@Essex V6 had a gold 1300E, he can relay the antics he got up to in that yoke.....

 

Wow - I remember that Escort you mention. And yes had a bit of fun with that 1300E - mostly on forestry roads on the Black Isle 😉

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On 2/16/2021 at 6:05 PM, HMC said:

@Pete-M has some solid gold mk1/2 escort experience and stories IIRC

I've had something like 10 Mk2 RS2000s and probably 10 cooking Mk2s, plus a smattering of Mk1s. In fact, someone contacted me on this very forum not long ago about one of my old RS2000's as they have just restored it. 

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On 2/16/2021 at 5:36 PM, sierraman said:

Something that always fascinated me was the Mk2 RS1800. Was it a commonly available model or was it one of those you could only get hold of if you were ‘in the know’?

They built 108 RS1800s IIRC. 101 base models and seven Customs. 

I drove one of the Custom ones shortly before it was exported to NZ.

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I got to go for a spin in this a few years ago. XOO243F which I believe was the first works Borehamwood prepared Escort Twin Cam. 

It is the best prepared Escort I've ever been in, and bloody quick. 

I know the owner was offered £120k for it and turned it down flat. 

I was considering building my Sport into a fairly handy fast road car - I'd bought a Focus ST170 for the engine - but after going for a spin in XOO I realised that to build something that could even get close to the performance of XOO would cost huge amounts of money. The dampers on XOO alone would cost more than my entire Sport had.

Incredible thing, XOO. At high speed on a very bad road the thing just dealt with the potholes etc incredibly. Made a great noise as well. 

20200425_182345.jpg

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I also had a Mk1 Mexico fitted with a Guy Croft Fiat 2.0 TC and a five speed (Fiat) box. 

It was very quick as it had around 180 bhp and the TC engine is a fair bit lighter than a Pinto, and probably lighter than the Kent it was originally built with. 

It was Tawny Bronze (brown) when I owned it back around 1989. I swapped a Mk2 RS2000 on a Q plate for it, so the Mex owed me around £800. 

Google shows that it is now white, bubble arched and has a Vauxhall engine. 

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q4ZhY5C.jpg

A couple of Mk1s in this Crayford 1969 pic.  They may have been 1600GT conversions but with the bonnet bulge I'd guess they had the Essex V6.  The Pinto wasn't due for another year.

Did Crayford try Essex V4 transplants for the Escort?  Have never heard of such a thing but who knows?  Was always surprised Ford didn't do a 2.0 V4 Mk2 Cortina, say a 2000GT or 2000E.  It would have been a straight bolt-in job using standard Corsair bits.

I wonder what Crayford did with all those engineless Zephyr and Zodiac Mk4s - maybe they did a sideline in 1300GT and 1600GT 'economy versions'.

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Just as you say.  The FD model was new in 1967.

 Some Cortinas with rectangular lights too.

Odd dark coloured Cortina 2-door in the middle with bonnet scoop but it still has the full chrome wheelcovers like on Anglias and some early Capris.  Street sleeper?

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When I passed my test, my mum let me use her maroon Escort 1.3L (SHK 672K) for a few weeks until I got my own car (Consul Cortina 1200, with the all important optional extra of a heater).

She had it from new and cared for it, but good grief, any stone chip rusted to a big blister very quickly. 

My brother had just started his bodyshop apprenticeship with a British Leyland garage (Bradford Street Motors in Braintree) in 1976. His boss saw how keen he was, and let him use the facilities at the weekends to complete a bare metal respray on mums Escort. He thought it better my brother got experience on cars that didnt belong to their customers. 

Had to have rotten sections of the floor and inner wings cut out and new Ford parts welded in (not just plated) This on a well cared for car, and under 5 years old. Still, not as bad as the Rover SD1's that my brother was for ever respraying under warranty, due to the terrible factory applied paintwork.

Mum traded the Escort in, sometime 1977, for a brand new Fiesta 1.1S in yellow. Never saw the Escort again.

SHK 672K has not been taxed since 1986, so I hope that the work my brother had given it gave it a few more years of life.

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22 hours ago, Pete-M said:

I've had something like 10 Mk2 RS2000s and probably 10 cooking Mk2s, plus a smattering of Mk1s. In fact, someone contacted me on this very forum not long ago about one of my old RS2000's as they have just restored it. 

Fantastic.  Interesting car history.  Any more pics?  If you don't want to put Mk2s in this thread then you could put them in the general pics thread.  Period street pics of folk's cars are ace.

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I saw this issue of Street Machine at the motorway services on the way to/from a school trip to Wales and the Escort stuck in my mind. I didn't buy a copy at the time, as I was just 12 and didn't have 70p to throw around, but I was pleased to eventually end up with a copy.

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I had that issue, long gone but I remember 'Rover V8 instead of screaming a 1600GT to death'.  It was all a bit green.  Well quite a lot green. 

Imaginative though, like cut and paste but for real.  'Of it's time'.

DVLA says no trace it ever existed.  Owner went to all the effort of registering it on a X-plate, so, who knows?  

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On 2/19/2021 at 10:04 PM, Pete-M said:

They built 108 RS1800s IIRC. 101 base models and seven Customs. 

I drove one of the Custom ones shortly before it was exported to NZ.

Assuming that it's the same RS1800 that was exported to NZ I'm thinking of then it didn't end well for it. I believe it was stolen and stripped in mysterious circumstances.

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3 hours ago, Spottedlaurel said:

I saw this issue of Street Machine at the motorway services on the way to/from a school trip to Wales and the Escort stuck in my mind. I didn't buy a copy at the time, as I was just 12 and didn't have 70p to throw around, but I was pleased to eventually end up with a copy.

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Mk1 with a mk3 registration? Something really weird going on there. No trace of it anywhere, so long gone I assume, despite the huge work involved. 

My eyes still hurt, so here's a rather lovely Dutch more door to restore the balance. 

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