Post by scooby on Jul 4, 2013 20:49:50 GMT
I don’t know if it’s of interest to peeps on here to have a wee gander at each other's car histories and interests, perhaps a little bit about their lives - y'know, the sort of stuff you'd probably talk about if you met up - and what brought them to Eagle ownership in the first place? I’d certainly love to hear other people's stories, and have a gander at any unusual cars they may have owned over the years!
Hopefully this will prompt others to reciprocate?
Here’s my tale. There are no particularly fancy cars amongst them, but it might explain why I’m about to become an Eagle RV owner. And if it’s of no interest to you, there’s a contents menu at the top of the page for you to click
The very first car I owned was actually a kit I built myself, a cute li’l Dutton Melos which had a 1.3 Ford Escort Mk2 as a donor. I was around my mid-20s at the time, and had returned to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides after having completed a 2-year engineering, followed by a 3-year BioTech, course near Edinburgh (definitely an ‘eternal-student’ theme going on in my life…). I think it's fair to say that this car preserved my sanity.
The endearing little Melos became a bit of an emotional outlet for a few of my friends too; whenever the insular (and somewhat overbearingly religious) life on the Island threatened to become too much to bear, they'd ask to borrow 'Cissie'* and take her for a good thrash around the island’s B and C roads (I doubt there was a single ‘A’ road there at the time…), returning an hour or so later completely de-stressed and at peace with the world again.
(*I thought I was being clever at the time naming it after the mythological ‘Narcissus’, as my yellow Melos was just soooo beautiful. When I continued to have zero success with the opposite sex, it dawned on me that most people probably just assumed I was gay... )
Driving Cissie one day, I came across a tatty-looking car I couldn't identify sitting on a roadside verge outside someone’s house. I 'enquired therin' and discovered it was a Triumph GT6 Mk1 needing a fair bit of work - and the guy wished to sell.
And that's how ‘Cyndi’ joined Cissie in my too-cramped garage. (Why ‘Cyndi’? I used to think that Cyndi Lauper was well cool. I still do...)
The GT6 required a complete restore, and was enjoyed for a few years before being sold to a mate - it's still being very well looked after in a small town near Inverness. I took the Melos with me to London when I moved there in the late 80’s to renovate an old terraced house my bro had just bought.
The Dutton was a surprisingly good city car being compact and nippy, but its fragile rag-top probably wasn't the best idea as we stayed firstly in the Isle of Dogs and then in Kennington. Both places were seriously rough areas at the time, and this was not long after the Brixton riots. I remember being woken one night by the sound of smashing glass; some unfortunate who’d foolishly parked his Porsche on the estate (a few yards from my own car) had had a concrete block shoved through its rear window. Having said that, the Melos didn’t receive a single mark in the 2 years I had the car on London’s streets. Yes, I’d often have to shoo a crowd of local kids from it (including from the inside…), but this was always good-natured stuff. Thinking back, I suspect they actually ‘looked after’ the car for me.
I sold the Dutton a couple of years later to a guy from Kent, and bought a Yugo 55 with half the proceeds. The Yugo was another able city vehicle and it served me well as I became a student for the third time taking a Design & Technology BEd at Thames Poly. I sold the Yug to a fellow student, and bought a Montego at a London auction. Moving swiftly on...
Then in fairly quick succession came a teaching career, marriage, 2 kiddies, and a Vauxhall Zafira. Which is still our family workhorse more than a decade later.
Even with 2 young children to look after and a complete house renovation to undertake, my astonishingly-obliging wife also allowed me to scratch my 'weird car' itch, and I was allowed to find myself a Marlin Berlinetta, a car I’d always longed after even at the time of building my Dutton. However, costing more than twice the price of the Dutton as a kit, the Berlinetta was simply unaffordable to me back then. Through the Marlin club, I found a tatty example that had been barn-stored for nearly a decade but which was still complete.
The Marlin required some careful recommissioning and a lot of work to tart up the tatty interior. As a member of the Marlin Owners' Club, I submitted a number of articles to their mag, including the 'manual choke' one I posted on here, and a 4-issue tome on rebuilding the dash. The new dashboard still uses the old Cortina instrument cluster, but the individual clocks were dismantled and re-mounted as separate instruments with home-made (CAD) dials and chrome surrounds.
From:
to:
At the same time, I came across an NG TF on eBay which required finishing, and my wife - again - allowed me to indulge myself. Crazy woman. This poor car, however, still sits, untouched, on the driveway. It should be a cracking example once finished, being a rare Sierra-based kit with a 205 block, type-9 ‘box, independent suspension all ‘round, and a much wider – and longer – body than the standard TF. One day…
I sold the Marlin a couple of years back and then fulfilled a life-long desire to own a 2CV. In short succession, I ended up with 2 of them. You couldn’t make it up; having scoured eBay for a running-but-tatty example, I had to travel 150 miles to collect the result. I then had a second 2CV thrust upon me from a distance of around 200 yards… 2 weeks after I’d bought the first one, I was working on the outside on the house when a Citroen Berlingo screeched to halt on the road outside. The driver reversed up and shouted out the window, "Oh, you've got a 2CV too?!"
He lived just up the same road as me, and had in his garage a Celeste Blue 2CV which had been used for only one year from new. It had eight and a half thousand miles on the clock. And the owner knew he would never get around to doing what was now needed to get it back on the road.
A quick call to my wife at work, and more room was miraculously found in the bulging garage.
2 years further on and the NG still hasn’t been touched, the ‘new’ 2CV still needs its front re-spraying (even tho’ it’s now fully running), the ‘old’ 2CV needs new shocks, king pins, and some work to the body, and the family badly needs a second running car as the kids attend more and more clubs.
So, should I get a reliable-but-battered old Focus, or perhaps an ageing Astra? Yes, of course I should.
But what’s the fun in that?
It has to be another of the kits I first eyed up dreamily some 30+ years ago…
(Ok, peeps, over to you... )
Hopefully this will prompt others to reciprocate?
Here’s my tale. There are no particularly fancy cars amongst them, but it might explain why I’m about to become an Eagle RV owner. And if it’s of no interest to you, there’s a contents menu at the top of the page for you to click
The very first car I owned was actually a kit I built myself, a cute li’l Dutton Melos which had a 1.3 Ford Escort Mk2 as a donor. I was around my mid-20s at the time, and had returned to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides after having completed a 2-year engineering, followed by a 3-year BioTech, course near Edinburgh (definitely an ‘eternal-student’ theme going on in my life…). I think it's fair to say that this car preserved my sanity.
The endearing little Melos became a bit of an emotional outlet for a few of my friends too; whenever the insular (and somewhat overbearingly religious) life on the Island threatened to become too much to bear, they'd ask to borrow 'Cissie'* and take her for a good thrash around the island’s B and C roads (I doubt there was a single ‘A’ road there at the time…), returning an hour or so later completely de-stressed and at peace with the world again.
(*I thought I was being clever at the time naming it after the mythological ‘Narcissus’, as my yellow Melos was just soooo beautiful. When I continued to have zero success with the opposite sex, it dawned on me that most people probably just assumed I was gay... )
Driving Cissie one day, I came across a tatty-looking car I couldn't identify sitting on a roadside verge outside someone’s house. I 'enquired therin' and discovered it was a Triumph GT6 Mk1 needing a fair bit of work - and the guy wished to sell.
And that's how ‘Cyndi’ joined Cissie in my too-cramped garage. (Why ‘Cyndi’? I used to think that Cyndi Lauper was well cool. I still do...)
The GT6 required a complete restore, and was enjoyed for a few years before being sold to a mate - it's still being very well looked after in a small town near Inverness. I took the Melos with me to London when I moved there in the late 80’s to renovate an old terraced house my bro had just bought.
The Dutton was a surprisingly good city car being compact and nippy, but its fragile rag-top probably wasn't the best idea as we stayed firstly in the Isle of Dogs and then in Kennington. Both places were seriously rough areas at the time, and this was not long after the Brixton riots. I remember being woken one night by the sound of smashing glass; some unfortunate who’d foolishly parked his Porsche on the estate (a few yards from my own car) had had a concrete block shoved through its rear window. Having said that, the Melos didn’t receive a single mark in the 2 years I had the car on London’s streets. Yes, I’d often have to shoo a crowd of local kids from it (including from the inside…), but this was always good-natured stuff. Thinking back, I suspect they actually ‘looked after’ the car for me.
I sold the Dutton a couple of years later to a guy from Kent, and bought a Yugo 55 with half the proceeds. The Yugo was another able city vehicle and it served me well as I became a student for the third time taking a Design & Technology BEd at Thames Poly. I sold the Yug to a fellow student, and bought a Montego at a London auction. Moving swiftly on...
Then in fairly quick succession came a teaching career, marriage, 2 kiddies, and a Vauxhall Zafira. Which is still our family workhorse more than a decade later.
Even with 2 young children to look after and a complete house renovation to undertake, my astonishingly-obliging wife also allowed me to scratch my 'weird car' itch, and I was allowed to find myself a Marlin Berlinetta, a car I’d always longed after even at the time of building my Dutton. However, costing more than twice the price of the Dutton as a kit, the Berlinetta was simply unaffordable to me back then. Through the Marlin club, I found a tatty example that had been barn-stored for nearly a decade but which was still complete.
The Marlin required some careful recommissioning and a lot of work to tart up the tatty interior. As a member of the Marlin Owners' Club, I submitted a number of articles to their mag, including the 'manual choke' one I posted on here, and a 4-issue tome on rebuilding the dash. The new dashboard still uses the old Cortina instrument cluster, but the individual clocks were dismantled and re-mounted as separate instruments with home-made (CAD) dials and chrome surrounds.
From:
to:
At the same time, I came across an NG TF on eBay which required finishing, and my wife - again - allowed me to indulge myself. Crazy woman. This poor car, however, still sits, untouched, on the driveway. It should be a cracking example once finished, being a rare Sierra-based kit with a 205 block, type-9 ‘box, independent suspension all ‘round, and a much wider – and longer – body than the standard TF. One day…
I sold the Marlin a couple of years back and then fulfilled a life-long desire to own a 2CV. In short succession, I ended up with 2 of them. You couldn’t make it up; having scoured eBay for a running-but-tatty example, I had to travel 150 miles to collect the result. I then had a second 2CV thrust upon me from a distance of around 200 yards… 2 weeks after I’d bought the first one, I was working on the outside on the house when a Citroen Berlingo screeched to halt on the road outside. The driver reversed up and shouted out the window, "Oh, you've got a 2CV too?!"
He lived just up the same road as me, and had in his garage a Celeste Blue 2CV which had been used for only one year from new. It had eight and a half thousand miles on the clock. And the owner knew he would never get around to doing what was now needed to get it back on the road.
A quick call to my wife at work, and more room was miraculously found in the bulging garage.
2 years further on and the NG still hasn’t been touched, the ‘new’ 2CV still needs its front re-spraying (even tho’ it’s now fully running), the ‘old’ 2CV needs new shocks, king pins, and some work to the body, and the family badly needs a second running car as the kids attend more and more clubs.
So, should I get a reliable-but-battered old Focus, or perhaps an ageing Astra? Yes, of course I should.
But what’s the fun in that?
It has to be another of the kits I first eyed up dreamily some 30+ years ago…
(Ok, peeps, over to you... )