owning

Buying a car back

A superb bodge, I’m sure you’ll agree

I didn’t really think whether buying the BX Mk2 back was a wise idea. I’ve never bought a car back before – plenty have gone over the years, and one have returned. In theory, it was a bloody stupid idea – and it still might be in practice…

But if you strip all of the emotion out of car ownership, it would be a very sad, boring and unfulfilling experience. For me at least. Yes, it’s stupid to feel a bond with a lump of metal and plastic but I’m incredibly attached to my 2CV – just as I have a favourite T-Shirt. And my current toothbrush is nowhere near as satisfying as the previous one, which sadly wore out. Perhaps I gave it too much love.

Anyway, the point is, buying the BX back made no sense at all but was driven by my memory of what a satisfying car it is to own. Supreme comfort, 50mph, a massive boot, self-levelling suspension and an entertaining driving experience. You might well ask why I sold it in the first place. A valid question.

Naturally, I overlooked such things as the crap single-wiper design with its equally crap washer spray bar. One wiper is half the number I normally like. The more the merrier when you live in Wales. The washer packed up so I was forced to fit a scuttle-mounted (with cable ties) washer to get an MOT. There is also no flick-wipe. This irritates me.

I also forgot that when it’s really cold, the doors freeze shut. I neglected to remember that the heater is stuck in the Hot position. I overlooked the fact that 187,000 miles is really quite a lot, especially when the car has been utterly neglected for the past 30,000 miles without any servicing at all really. Impressive that it stood up to that.

I also used my rose-tinted spectacles to ignore the fact that it’s really quite rusty in places. The rear crossmember is sufficiently soft for my MOT tester to give me an official advisory, the left hand rear wing has a great ruddy hole in it and the sills are not going to get through another test.

The first few weeks have been tough as well. The brakes have been playing up, I replaced the wrong wheel bearing (and then had to replace the correct one), the clutch feels like failure is imminent and the height controller linkage is very stiff. That means that getting the car to raise or lower is not very easy at all.

Back, but was it a good idea?

Yet this is still a special car to me and after many hours of fettling, she’s starting to come good. I can sit behind the wheel and remember driving across the south of France in the most torrential rain I’ve ever seen, or slogging up a 2000m tall mountain in horizontal snow with a coolant leak. Or helping to move our belongings from our old house to this one. Or towing my Bond Equipe (I’ll tell you about that long-departed beast one day) to a garage after it started spewing petrol everywhere. It’s a car with many memories and a car that does many things very well.

In fact, the main reason that I sold it is because I didn’t want to be the one who scrapped it. Perhaps the hardest part of having it back is that once the rust gets too much, it could be me reading the BX its rites.

Winter Blunderland

I must admit that winter is not my favourite season. Yes, occasionally it gets livened up by having to remember how to drive in ice and snow, but generally, it’s cold, miserable and a dreadful time to be working on the car. Especially when you’ve lost the use of your garage due to an ongoing heating project on your home. We should have got that finished BEFORE winter really, but we didn’t. Bother.

Cars don’t enjoy winter either. They don’t seem quite so keen to fire into life, leak water everywhere (yes, every single one of our cars is as watertight as a paper teapot) and the regular attention that they generally like to receive doesn’t happen because frankly the idea of working on cars at this time of year, when it’s dark and damp and miserable is not really what I’d call appealing.

Mix in those big yellow trucks that throw rot-causing salt at them and you can see why cars would rather snuggle up in a nice, warm garage. In fact, last winter I semi-stripped a 2CV engine and fitted to Elly my 2CV. Yes, I was cold at times but working in the garage was absolute bliss.

Not as dodgy as it looks. Working in a warm(ish) garage

This winter, the jobs have just ended up getting ignored. The 2CV really needs a service. The Mini really needs a service. The BX has a To Do list as long as several arms. The Peugeot needs a degree of fettling. Yet, having been treated to a garage, now it’s out of use I find myself not doing very many of the jobs at all. I just about forced myself to grease up the 2CV’s suspension the other day, and I encouraged myself to tackle a problem with the Peugeot’s exhaust – largely because it had fallen off and I really had to. It’s not good enough really. The 2CV has a very lumpy idle at the moment, caused most likely the exceedingly old spark plugs that are currently fitted. I’ve a feeling that one of them came with a cylinder head I fitted, so gawd knows how old that is.

What makes winter even more unbearable is that driving is no frequently not at all fun. First, you need to try and demist the thing – this winter has boasted some of that super-steam up effect that makes it look like your car has been parked in a stream for several days. The BX and Peugeot have typical French, asthmatic heater blowers. The Mini has a heater blower that just makes more noise than not having it switched on and the 2CV’s heater blower is the engine fan, so revs are needed to clear the screen. Then there’s the aforementioned leakage issue. The Mini and BX have soaking carpets. The 2CV leaks water straight into my shoes. The Peugeot prefers to dump it straight onto your head.

The roads aren’t fun either, being coated in greasy mud and horrible salt. It’s dark too much of the time as well. In short, I’m fed up and enjoying the fact that very slightly, the days are once more getting longer. With winter banished – and I’m very aware that we’ve got a good couple of months to go – I can start getting on top of the fleet once more AND start enjoying time at the wheel again.

Next winter, I just plan to hibernate from about mid-November. The big bonus there is that it’s a good way of avoiding bloody Christmas songs.

Happy New Year. Sort of.

The love that left me

Some years ago, I had more money than sense. Now I have little of either. Back then, I worked in IT Support for a large utility company, enjoying the highest earnings of my life up to that point. Then I turned 25. I decided to celebrate this momentous occasion by hiring an MG RV8 for a day. We clocked up 200 miles hurtling around The Cotswolds, enjoying the acceleration and wonderful noise as we exited every village. Other than the engine, the RV8 was nothing short of a massive disappointment. The interior was a horrible mix of controls pinched from such wonderful machines as the Rover 100 and LDV Pilot, the suspension seemed to have been forgotten completely and bends became terrifying as it skitted about like a tea tray skidding down a cobbled street. I digress.

Ah, the car that broke my heart. What a machine!

It was my first encounter with Rover’s V8 and it was soon clear that like an addict, I needed another hit. The choice of what to go for was enormous. The engine has been fitted to so many cars. Here’s a few for you. Rover P5, P6, SD1, Land Rover, Range Rover, Land Rover Discovery, Land Rover Forward Control 101″, Ginetta G32, TVR 350, Griffith and Chimaera, Freight-Rover van, MGB, MG RV8, Triumph TR8, Marcos (various), Morgan Plus 8 and even, in Australia, the Leyland Terrier truck. It’s a bit of a whore is that engine.

I rushed out and found a Rover 3500 for sale, more commonly known as the Rover P6B. It was a car I’d long had a hankering for. It mixes British engineering, but with a large dose of Gallic flare – for the base unit construction is very similar to the Citroen DS, the big giveaway being the similar treatment at the top of the windscreen. So won over was I by the wuffle of that V8 (the Rover P6 DID get the engine it deserved, unlike the Citroen), the stunning Tobacco Leaf paintwork and the fact that it was a rare pre-facelift model. I ignored the rotten sills as a mere technicality.

Driving home in my new machine was certainly quite an experience. It was the oldest car I’d ever owned and driven up to that point. It didn’t have power steering, but that seemed no great loss as the large wheel seemed to do a pretty good job of making the thing go where I wanted it to. It was also my first automatic though, and while I had driven autos before, the old Borg Warner 35 gearbox used in the P6 is a clunky old devil and it took time to work out how to get the best out of it. The brakes were superb though – all-round discs were standard on the P6 even from launch in 1963.

I think I’d utterly fallen under its spell by the time I got back home. The cosseting ride and surprisingly nimble handling just left me to savour that V8 as it effortlessly bore me along. I did discover that the kickdown didn’t work, but that would probably end up saving me a small fortune. With so much torque on offer, who needed it? I could always snick the gearlever down into 2 if I fancied a bit of full-blooded acceleration, with the V8 screaming magnificently. It turned out I did fancy this, quite often! Especially as I accelerated out of Lower Boddington in Northamptonshire. I apologise to the residents. Not my neighbour at the time though, he loved it!

I can’t imagine there were many IT professionals (I use the term very loosely in my case…) who were sauntering around in a 24-year old, petrol-slurping executive car, but I was, and I loved it. Sadly, I was becoming aware that the sills were going to need attention before too long. The car went off for some expensive surgery. The bill for £1400 almost floored me, but around this time, I got a job that paid almost twice as well, so all was well. Wasn’t it?

Not really. Despite a wonderful random trip to Wales just after Christmas (not very far from where we live now, and we passed through our current village!) there was no denying that 20mpg was getting a bit tiring, despite my new income. Maintenance bills were making me weep too. Keeping a P6 in fine fettle gets very painful very quickly if you can’t do the work yourself, and I couldn’t then. In the end, I sold her on Ebay for a few hundred pounds less than I paid for her, after throwing a LOT of money at her in the time I owned her.

I still miss that car very much now. Would I forgive TBH 249J (or Tabatha) and take her back? I suspect my wife hopes that opportunity never arises…

The fleet was certainly varied in 2003! Only the 2CV survives various fleet culls...

HubNut – celebrating the average!