What was your first car?

The message from Paul Giverin contains these words:

Fiat 127. Rusted away to nothing quite rapidly.

The message from Ian Stirling contains these words:

Sphincter tightness is another good method. I suspect modern drivers don't drive such decrepit old bangers so they don't learn the seat-of-the-pants driving we did.

The message from petermcmillan snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com contains these words:

But does it pink?

In early 1963 I bought a 1952 3442cc Jaguar Mk VII for £100. (~1/10 of my then engineer's salary) I'd passed my test on a Ford Anglia a year or so earlier. The Jaguar, with 140,000 miles on the clock, had lacked some TLC, and its fuel consumption was around 11mpg. Driving it home, there was a distinct smell of burning clutch - but hey! I owned and was driving a Jag. Changing the brake master cylinder to the correct type (so that it drove without the brakes binding), giving the SU carbs a makeover, and washing the air filter element (several times until the rinse water ran clean) raised the mpg to

21mpg. In 1965 with 3 friends, I set out to drive to Greece and return via Italy, and we crossed the Alps from Austria to northern Yugoslavia without incident, but south of Belgrade the old engine with its low oil pressure didn't like the hot Yugoslavian air temperatures, and the big ends failed south of Nis. Had to give it away to Yugo customs, as otherwise I would have had to pay the import duty as levied on a new car. Ouch! Repairing the big ends would have taken too long for our pre-booked sea passages. Sea transport then wasn't as free and easy as now.

I was allowed to retain the mascot, and I still have the Vehicle Log Book and inscrutable documentation neatly typed in Serbo-Croat.

FIAT 1100D 1964

gear stick -- very smooth gear change! -- was on the Lt. of the steeringcolumn, and the indicator level on the Rt. like most of the taxis, usuallydiesel, in those days.

In news:oEN7jaCYPlJEFwXz@10.0.0.3, Paul Giverin wrote something quite bizarre, possibly in an effort to confuddle the world. It went like so;

Easier for me to just post a link to most of my old sheds.

"Pete M" wrote in message news:4426b3fb$ snipped-for-privacy@usenet.zapto.org...

nice selection of cars there Pete!

=====================

1936 Morris 8

Cic.

Citroen BX. Loved it for its comfort AND handling, and general weirdness, single spoke steering wheel, barrel speedo. A few times I raised the suspension up to get through floods which was nice. Once the hydraulic pipes started to go though, it was downhill from there, nothing as bad as being stuck in the middle of nowhere with no brakes, the car scraping along the ground and the engine still running fine!

Z

Renault 10 SRU845H. 1300 engine and surprisingly quick for an old car. I then got a LHD Renault 12 with the same sort of engine in it.

Diesel BX was my second car...

From the day of my test, I drove a Renault 25 Monaco for 12,000 miles!

in

Where is the picture of the bumped cossie... It looks very familiar... Bolton/Bury area?

Please put me out of my misery..

Tom

The message from snipped-for-privacy@spam.vlaad.co.uk (Paul Cummins) contains these words:

Didn't you even stop for a slash?

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Malcolm Stewart" saying something like:

And for the next 20 years, some senior official ran around in an nice old Jag that somebody repaired for peanuts.

Wouldn't have surprised me at all. (What I didn't mention was that later on the same holiday, I discovered that not only had I lost my car, but my wife of 16 months as well. In the long term I think I mourned the loss of my one and probably only Jag more...)

1982 Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6 in beige/underseal (4 speed manual). With seized front brakes and leaky rear ones. And a shagged starter motor. It did 15mpg and featured James Bond-style smoke effects after idling. How it'd passed its MOT 3 months earlier I've no idea. Still drove it round of course, being an indestructible 18 year old at the time. Fixed everything (to a fashion...) and kept it for a couple of years or so, then sold it for more than I'd paid for it. Lovely old shed it was.

In news:27DVf.30484$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe2-win.ntli.net, Tom Burton wrote something quite bizarre, possibly in an effort to confuddle the world. It went like so;

Wigan, just off Poolstock.

Ahhh that's it!

I was delivering down there a few weeks back!

Tom - Out of his Misery

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Malcolm Stewart" saying something like:

You can always replace a wife, a classic is much more difficult.