Why would anyone want a Classic car?

Well, there are dodgy restorers all right, but equally one does hear of engines which work fine on the bench but not in the car....I've had 2 starter motors that worked sometimes in the car and not at all once taken out. My Stag set me back about £26k in the end because I wanted leather and because I made them do the doors twice: the panel fit was better on one side than the other and natch I wanted it identical. Better than new but to a different extent on either side wasn't good enough.

It's a shedload to spend on a car worth maybe 2/3 of that in a fire sale, but then again I plan to keep it 15 to 20 years at least. Buy a £13k in superficially similar condition and the chances are you'll be be spending more on it over the same period, so I reckon it all comes out in the wash.

If one wants to avoid losing lotsa dosh on a car I think you either have to spend nothing to begin with, or spend wisely and sell it on quickly, or keep the thing for ever. We just binned the wife's Hyundai after 13 years and quite frankly it was so cheap to begin with it worked out quite reasonably. I still enjoyed binning it though....

My brother's Stag has stripped the waterpump drive twice - since he's had it. On the first occasion we replaced it - with a new pump and jack shaft from Rimmers, following the factory w/shop manual. It only lasted a few thousand miles - although over about three years as the car isn't used much. Something is always wrong with it. ;-)

He's just replaced it again. I'm holding my breath. ;-)

Chrysler Airflow

Airstream was a caravan; also a rather strange shape - for a caravan in those days anyway. Wouldn't be surprised if they were still making them though, they had quite a following. Thinking of the West Country at this time of year, I'd better rephrase that - they were very popular among caravanners in the USA.

Ron Robinson

R.N. Robinson ( snipped-for-privacy@frumiousbandersnatch.freeserve.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

They are.

Up to $85,000 for a caravan... Even the basic, entry level 16ft "Bambi" is $30,000...

Or $260,000 for a motorhome.

There's a handful of tidy Rover V8 conversions around for 1/3 of the price above..... one of those would be my choice.

before going

something

uk.car.modification is that away ===>>> :~)

There was nothing wrong with the Stag engine, as long as the owner is not a cheap-skate or the person maintaining it is not an ignorant grease monkey...

I'd prefer the Rover engine, it's simple, reliable, more powerful, cheaper to fix, more tuneable, and there are loads of them about.

I put one in a Land Rover 90 for a friend a few months ago, took the nasty diesel lump out and put a secondhand Rover V8 in. The V8 hadn't been run for over 12 years, drop of oil down each bore, primed the oil pump, fresh oil in it, fired it up. Sweet as a nut. Didn't even check inside the motor, just bought it for £150, bolted it in and started it. I'd not try that with a Stag engine, that's for sure.

There was an interesting one in a magazine the other month.

Stag with a Triumph 2500 engine. Surely that's the car Triumph should have launched?

should

Hmm, IIRC the PI engine caused almost as much trouble as the Stage engine, albeit in a different way...

No! The Triumph straight sixes are grotesquely heavy lumps of cast iron: it might have made a nice noise, but a 2500 Stag would have handled almost as badly as a Vitesse. Yeugh.

Ian

Wouldn't have blown up every 5 minutes, though.

Who said anything about PI......

Erm, yes it did.

That's because they bodged a couple of slant-4s together in a quick fix rather than swallow their pride and use the off-the-shelf Rover V8.

ignorant

Well, at the time that would have been the only engine that the marketing people would have wanted in the car, even then there would have the marketing would have become blurred between the Stage and the

2000 range (although if the PI engine had not been fitted to the 2000 range things would have been a bit clearer).

The Stage engine didn't 'blow up' every 5 minutes unless the owner was a total cretin!

Care to point to some evidence of this, as I've read in several reputable places that it was a bodge of 2 of the Ricardo 4-pots welded together.

Only to anoraks.

Sensible people would pick a Rover conversion over an original Triumph engined car every time.

":::Jerry::::" wrote

OTOH if you want to tune a Stag for silly bhp, the original engine is the wrong place to start. You are better off with a Rover-engined car for that, though these days you'll struggle to sell it.

"SteveH" wrote

It's the one it was designed around, but they couldn't get the injection right and it was though to be a bit short of torque.