Lancia Fulvia Coupe buying advice?

The rear end of the front subframe has an arm on each side extending outward to where it is mounted by a hard rubber bush to the body at the front of each sill/floor. This area of the body is under stress and in the line of fire of the front wheel. The body rots out and the rear mounting of the subframe becomes weak. The top face (and the rest) of these arms at the rear of the subframe also rot away. The arms have often been repaired. The rust in the body at the subframe mountings can be difficult to repair but can easily be concealed with bridging filler etc.. A result of these faults is sometimes seen as cracks in the front wings above the wheel centre line when the front subframe is no longer attached at its back end. Other areas of corrosion are: rear of bootlid, rear panel at seam with wings and lower valance, door bottoms, bonnet front, roof ! rear wheelarches. I had a 1972(?) 1600HF in the early '80s and this had already had the front of the sills/mountings bodged up. I subsequently worked on the bodies of a number of these cars and found that good ones were very rare= expensive. Panels were difficult to find then and as a result I had some made for one job. Availability may be better now.

Best of luck.

Seriously, Timo. Don't.

I've looked at them in the past as they are utterly lovely cars, but, and it's a big but, bits for them are both very rare and very expensive.

Anything being sold at something resembling sensible money is likely to need some serious work doing fairly soon - I learned my lesson with the

I'm assuming from this post that you've given up on getting the 75 sorted?

I don't doubt that it'll be a lot more than what we'd consider 'sensible money' - however, I'd be very reluctant to spend fairly serious money on any old Italian car rated as 'condition 2'.

My Spider was 'condition 2' - but ultimately needed several thousand spending on it if I were to run it for any length of time.

SteveH was seen penning the following ode to ... whatever:

Well yes. I was going by the Practical Classics definition of "condition 2", which matched the price. Unfortunately the car didn't quite match the condition....

Same here, although it's not quite as bad as I expected it to be. But I'd still be looking at getting some bodywork fixed and probably a respray. Mind you, the real expensive work had been done - both subframes are fairly new, as are the sills. The it's a nice little car but you'd still end up spending 1-2k on it.