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Stodge


vulgalour

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26 minutes ago, Missy Charm said:

Not sure.  Hot X-Flow, Slot-Mags, jack up, paint job and Dralon would turn that into a neat little street machine.  The small Fords will forever be associated with the rod and kustom scene and, perhaps, are a little too rock and roll to be stodge - at least these days.  

That's what I've done. Better wheels, proper suspension, tuned a series. So no longer stodgy. Still loads of cared for standard ones left in the club that couldn't pull the skin of a custard though so alls well.

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2 hours ago, lesapandre said:

These had vacuum operated pneumatic windscreen wipers 'powered' from the manifold. They slowed down the faster you went - that coupled with no demisting (heaters were optional) meant these things were pretty lethal in poor weather.

I think the 100E was spoilt by budget constraints, or just penny-pinching.   The overall design was quite competent and sensible,  and it needed a better engine although the side valve wasn't actually so bad.  What really spoilt it was the 3 speed gearbox which was a carry-over from the upright models.  It would have been a lot nicer to drive, and more flexible and economical with a 4 speed - interestingly if you look at the gearbox mountings there was provision for this in the design.   For those not familiar with 3 speed boxes, the missing gear is third, and with a small engine second has to be quite low, so there is a huge gap between second and top. 

"Foreign" manufacturers had their stodge too - Renault Fregate, a sort of French Standard Vanguard:  Simca Vedette with side valve Ford V8 (as opposed to the Aronde which was quite decent):  German Ford Taunus and Opels were all superbly dull until the 1960s.

 

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14 minutes ago, Mr Pastry said:

Yes that's a fair point, but they were very much "family cars" and not really designed with performance and handling in mind.

I don't see the problem with this they were never intended to be sports cars, very few cars are. At the time they were made, I would think they did the job they were intended to do very well.

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25 minutes ago, Dyslexic Viking said:

Not sure I agree Opel had a lot of nice design in the 50's below is a 1957 Rekord.

1130469152_Screenshot2023-03-3118_30_15.thumb.png.3bef6d4a904a4760fbad109b94ff2338.png

The models from the 40s and early 50s were a bit bland in design.

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Later in the 50s, Opel started borrowing design ideas from the American GM marques and came with tail fins, more chrome, updating the styling for every model year, etc.

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Modern stodge would be a green Fabia 1.2 on a 52 plate. Fulfills the definition of a car but almost unbearably drab and depressing. Were it a meal at work it would be one slice of wafer thin ham on some white bimbo with all the margarine in one blob in the middle wrapped extremely tightly in cling film then sat upon for four hours. Afters would be a single blue ribbon biscuit that’s wet from a leaking bottle.  Your whistle on this occasion is whet by a former Lilt bottle filled with some cordial but watered down to the point it looks like hydrated piss. It’s also leaked out of your bag and made your arse piss wet through. In addition to this someone has wasted 23 minutes of your 30 minute lunch asking you to read through the health and safety binder. 

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5 minutes ago, D.E said:

The models from the 40s and early 50s were a bit bland in design.

Z3M6Ly9hdXRvYm9vbS1pbWFnZXMvMDAwLzAwMC8x

Later in the 50s, Opel started borrowing design ideas from the American GM marques and came with tail fins, more chrome, updating the styling for every model year, etc.

Yes, the older ones were a bit more bland, but when they started borrowing design from the US, the cars became very nice.

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I have noticed that a surprising number of Hillman Minx have survived here in Norway, which is a bit strange as they were probably not best sellers in their time here. There are probably not very many but they often come up for sale like this 1958 model which looks like it came out of the 70s, does it classifies as Stodge?

Galleribilde

Galleribilde

Galleribilde

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2 hours ago, Missy Charm said:

Not sure.  Hot X-Flow, Slot-Mags, jack up, paint job and Dralon would turn that into a neat little street machine.  The small Fords will forever be associated with the rod and kustom scene and, perhaps, are a little too rock and roll to be stodge - at least these days.  

175479140_Screenshot_20230331-182922_SamsungInternet.thumb.jpg.fca6f913d545598deb0b425f62374aaa.jpg

Stodge-free zone.

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8 minutes ago, Dyslexic Viking said:

I have noticed that a surprising number of Hillman Minx have survived here in Norway, which is a bit strange as they were probably not best sellers in their time here. There are probably not very many but they often come up for sale like this 1958 model which looks like it came out of the 70s, does it classifies as Stodge?

Galleribilde

Galleribilde

Galleribilde

Rootes group cars were durable.

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25 minutes ago, sierraman said:

Modern stodge would be a green Fabia 1.2 on a 52 plate. Fulfills the definition of a car but almost unbearably drab and depressing. Were it a meal at work it would be one slice of wafer thin ham on some white bimbo with all the margarine in one blob in the middle wrapped extremely tightly in cling film then sat upon for four hours. Afters would be a single blue ribbon biscuit that’s wet from a leaking bottle.  Your whistle on this occasion is whet by a former Lilt bottle filled with some cordial but watered down to the point it looks like hydrated piss. It’s also leaked out of your bag and made your arse piss wet through. In addition to this someone has wasted 23 minutes of your 30 minute lunch asking you to read through the health and safety binder. 

I hope for your sake you are just exercising your imagination in these flights of fancy, and not recounting personal experiences.

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2 hours ago, Missy Charm said:

Not sure.  Hot X-Flow, Slot-Mags, jack up, paint job and Dralon would turn that into a neat little street machine.  The small Fords will forever be associated with the rod and kustom scene and, perhaps, are a little too rock and roll to be stodge - at least these days.  

But A40 Devons were popular with Rodders once

tumblr_n3kss3taxu1qc2alio1_1280.pnj

and even relatives of the Minx got the treatment

tumblr_n5or0r7Hld1qc2alio1_640.jpg

but they're still as stodgey as yesterday porridge though

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On 3/29/2023 at 10:09 PM, barrett said:


We did make some good cars. Even a couple of great ones (Morris Minor, for instance), but far fewer than were built overseas. Compare almost any British car with its European equivalent and there's just no contest. Allegro, or Alfasud? Austin Westminster or Lancia Aurelia? Hillman Minx or Panhard Dyna? Standard Vanguard or Mercedes 220? Austin A30 or 

Hmmm, I don’t think Lancia or Panhard would be great examples of a successful car company, they may have had interesting engineering but basically never made any money even in the good times. Both managed to go down the financial plug hole during an unprecedented boom time for the European car industry, well before any 1970s recession. 

A Lancia Aurelia is in a totally different class to an Austin Westminster, the equivalent of the Austin would be a Fiat 1900. Same with the Dyna, the equivalent of a Minx would be a 4CV Renault or maybe a 2CV. Even in Germany a Mercedes would have been a cut well above a Standard in Britain so you are picking examples purely to make a point. Against a Rover P4 or Jaguar 2.4 for example, the Mercedes superiority is a lot less self-evident. Was a A30 any worse than some piece of low level German shit like a Goliath/Lloyd/Goggomobil? Somehow I doubt it. 

The fact is, most cars until about 1960 were built primarily with their home market in mind, with perhaps the exception of Volkswagen (although early Beetles were just as godawful as a Standard Eight). Foreign sales for Britain, France and even Italy were strongly correlated with their respective former colonies and the simpler American cars tended to dominate in ‘neutral’ markets like South America, the Middle East or somewhere like Turkey. 

Alfasud vs the Allegro, I’ll give you that one, but most Alfasuds sold in Northern European markets were fit for the scrap yard after only 4 or 5 years, and the whole sorry episode still ended with a massive bailout by the Italian government circa 1980, just like BL. 

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7 hours ago, lesapandre said:

These had vacuum operated pneumatic windscreen wipers 'powered' from the manifold. They slowed down the faster you went - that coupled with no demisting (heaters were optional) meant these things were pretty lethal in poor weather.

That was only the basic ones though - I had a Prefect which had a heater and a vacuum tank for the wipers so they kept going (for a while at least) when you floored it.  Also the wiper speed was variable from barely moving to pretty much a blur which was more than you got on most '50s cars.

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Apologies to @LightBulbFun, but I will make an objection to the Austin FX4 being included on this list.

For a start, it’s a taxi, and was introduced at the very end of this period, and was also very, very successful at what it was designed to do. Unlike the Checker in the USA, it was never available to private buyers, I think the aforementioned Duke of Edinburgh had one but it’s not like Mann & Overton were going to say no to him.

The late 70s limousine version is hilarious, it makes something like the Austin 3 litre look like the result of rational product planning. However - if 1970s Britain had suffered from kidnappings of wealthy people as bad as contemporary Italy did - they could well have been onto a winner, it’s an ideal Q-car for a captain of industry not brave enough to be a sitting target in a DS420.

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20 hours ago, RayMK said:

Probably regarded as Stodge now, but grandad's Vauxhall Velox seemed a cut above our Minx.  When he became too ill to drive,  Dad was asked to take the Velox out for a spin (early 1960s). I went with him.  The engine was silky smooth and it felt powerful at first but even dad was surprised when it ran out of steam at around 70mph.  Like our Minx, it was happier cruising with the masses at 40-50mph.  Dad swapped the Minx for a Riley 1.5 at around that time.  That did not seem to be at all stodgy despite it  being just a twin carb Minor in drag.  Strangely, neither Dad nor the rest of us liked the Riley.  He only kept it for a couple of years.  Photo: Grandad's Stodge.

Screenshot 2023-03-30 at 23.01.20.png

Those things were hopelessly undergeared, being essentially a pre-war car with a new front and back end tacked on.  That's also why they looked rather ungainly.

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30 minutes ago, AnthonyG said:

Apologies to @LightBulbFun, but I will make an objection to the Austin FX4 being included on this list.

Objection sustained, I'll take it off. Not that my* list is some kind of gospel, I'm just trying to apply order to a senseless broken world.

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41 minutes ago, AnthonyG said:

Apologies to @LightBulbFun, but I will make an objection to the Austin FX4 being included on this list.

For a start, it’s a taxi, and was introduced at the very end of this period, and was also very, very successful at what it was designed to do. Unlike the Checker in the USA, it was never available to private buyers, I think the aforementioned Duke of Edinburgh had one but it’s not like Mann & Overton were going to say no to him.

The late 70s limousine version is hilarious, it makes something like the Austin 3 litre look like the result of rational product planning. However - if 1970s Britain had suffered from kidnappings of wealthy people as bad as contemporary Italy did - they could well have been onto a winner, it’s an ideal Q-car for a captain of industry not brave enough to be a sitting target in a DS420.

AFAIK anyone could buy an FX4 or certainly a FL2 hire car, much the same way you could buy a Checker cab, or more specify the Checker Marathon which was the private version of the Checker Taxi (so like the FX4 and FL2 technically 2 separate vehicles, Chassis code A11 for the last of the Checker Taxies and A12 for the last of the Marathons)

theres an interesting write up on the FL2 on AROnline 

https://www.aronline.co.uk/cars/austin/fx4/fl2-development-story/

and the FX4 one while im at it https://www.aronline.co.uk/cars/austin/fx4/ado6-development-story/

but the rest of your points are exactly why I thought it might be on that would be objected to, I guess a question is, can Stodge be successful, or is one of the very definitions of stodge that it was unsuccessful? Hmmm Deep Autoshite Philosophy LOL

11 minutes ago, egg said:

Objection sustained, I'll take it off. Not that my* list is some kind of gospel, I'm just trying to apply order to a senseless broken world.

and worth reading the comments for how dare I say how stodgy they where to drive :) 

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To be fair I think stodge can be successful.

Many of the examples cited so far were pretty popular in their day, some like the 100E very much so, and some of the others probably kept their respective makers afloat - like the small 1950s Standards, a bit of a godsend for S-T when Triumph was still flailing about with the razor edge models and the first generation of Vanguards proving rather underwhelming in profitability! 

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10 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

or is one of the very definitions of stodge that it was unsuccessful? Hmmm Deep Autoshite Philosophy LO

I guess that's why the A30 is a bit marginal, given it sold 200k+ units not counting more successful A35 (wiki figures).

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56 minutes ago, AnthonyG said:

Hmmm, I don’t think Lancia or Panhard would be great examples of a successful car company, they may have had interesting engineering but basically never made any money even in the good times. Both managed to go down the financial plug hole during an unprecedented boom time for the European car industry, well before any 1970s recession. 

A Lancia Aurelia is in a totally different class to an Austin Westminster, the equivalent of the Austin would be a Fiat 1900. Same with the Dyna, the equivalent of a Minx would be a 4CV Renault or maybe a 2CV. Even in Germany a Mercedes would have been a cut well above a Standard in Britain so you are picking examples purely to make a point. Against a Rover P4 or Jaguar 2.4 for example, the Mercedes superiority is a lot less self-evident. Was a A30 any worse than some piece of low level German shit like a Goliath/Lloyd/Goggomobil? Somehow I doubt it. 

The fact is, most cars until about 1960 were built primarily with their home market in mind, with perhaps the exception of Volkswagen (although early Beetles were just as godawful as a Standard Eight). Foreign sales for Britain, France and even Italy were strongly correlated with their respective former colonies and the simpler American cars tended to dominate in ‘neutral’ markets like South America, the Middle East or somewhere like Turkey. 

Alfasud vs the Allegro, I’ll give you that one, but most Alfasuds sold in Northern European markets were fit for the scrap yard after only 4 or 5 years, and the whole sorry episode still ended with a massive bailout by the Italian government circa 1980, just like BL. 

You can argue the minutae of it, but I wasn't trying to put forward examples of marques which have prospered through some great car-building exercise in the dim and distant past. But equally, you can't say the continued existence of Ford, or Vauxhall, or Opel or Fiat or whatever is down to them building great cars in the 1950s, it's because they're huge global corporations with in-built protection against failure that can carefully tailor cars to individual markets (although probably less so these days, as everybody seems to want to drive the same horrible shit).

My comparisons were just based on size/engine size/ market sector - a Westminster and an Aurelia were both six-cylinder, upper-middle-class family cars pitched at the more discerning motorist. Maybe a Merc 190 is more in line with a Vanguard, but both two-litre middle-class, sensible cars for families, without any pretention and only a touch of badge snobbery (only in recent times have Mercedes become 'premium' cars). And yes, a Goliath has a lot more going for it than an A30 - fwd, fuel injection, superlative build quality. Even a cheapo Goggomobil is technically interesting and well-made - it was the inspiration for Lotus F1 cars, after all!

Plenty to like about dull old British cars, but let's not pretend they were anything other than dull and stodgy with very little to differentiate them from prewar cars other than styling. The thing is, after 60 or 70 years any car is going to have a charm and character to it compared to anything built in the last 35 years (or longer), and I'd much prefer to drive round in even the most dreadful old stodge (not the Mayflower though) than almost anything built in my lifetime.

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13 minutes ago, AnthonyG said:

What is so bad about the Mayflower? 😄

Only joking, I think I know….

Brian Sewell, bless him, wrote something about the Mayflower once which included the line 'The Triumph Mayflower is proof that proportions are everything' (or something along those lines) and I'll never not be able to think about that when I see one.

This, on the other hand, is my dream stodge

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I would sack almost everything off for a nice one of these, but the couple of times I've tried to buy one It's always fallen through. Did make quite a lot of money selling my NOS set of rear lamps (bought in preparation of owning one some day) to a Lancia restorer for use on a Flaminia Zagato

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They're such good lookers! The estates are even better I reckon

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Has to be an early one with the big wheels/small windscreen and round tail lamps. Oh mama. Pure sexstodge

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Loving the blue saloon, like the Corgi RAF staff car model. Imagine having access to both a Vanguard and a Vulcan, living the Cold War dream! 

OK, the dream probably faded a bit when hanging around a freezing East Anglia airbase in December waiting for a grumpy National Serviceman to finish fucking about with the air start generator…

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