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Post by scooby on Jul 24, 2013 15:56:47 GMT
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Post by scooby on Jul 24, 2013 13:27:28 GMT
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Post by scooby on Jul 19, 2013 9:41:43 GMT
Wow, doz! I'm trying to think what you can add to it to make it more noticeable... All your own work? Niiiiice. Electronic dash? How did you go about that little task?! What kind of suspension geometry issues are you having - a bit light and 'wandering' on the road? Really nice job. (I can't seem to find a 'green-with- ' smiley...)
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Post by scooby on Jul 19, 2013 8:53:20 GMT
Thanks. I've seen a few Vitaras around, and that's where I got the idea of the flat bar across. Hmm, a hard panel for the front - that could be a neat idea.
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Post by scooby on Jul 19, 2013 8:51:31 GMT
It would fill a gaping void in my lif... ohsodit, I'll manage without.
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Post by scooby on Jul 18, 2013 10:03:54 GMT
E-mail? I got no email
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Post by scooby on Jul 18, 2013 9:51:12 GMT
Plans for the RV. Thanks to this forum and AndyEx-RVMac, I’ve got myself what I was looking for; a nicely-running, ready-to-use, RV but with even more potential! My kids LOVE it, and even my wife is surprised at how comfy and roomy a kit-car can be. My medium-term plans at the moment are: 1) Replace the hardtop with a ‘sectional’ roof and ‘folding’ doors, so that the RV can be run in various stages of undress. I’m really not keen on hard-tops (my Marlin had one); I dislike the way you’re committed to being covered whenever you set off on a fairly-dodgy-weather day. The rain will invariably stop at some point, but you’ll still be trapped inside a fibreglass tub – hardly the point of these cars. My thoughts are to try and make a partly-hard and partly-soft roof; I'm thinking the rear side panels will best be solid-but-light, and can be used on their own if wanted. I think I'll also explore having a flat roof 'bar' going over the top where the roll-over bar goes across, so it'll be a bit like a Vitara. The main roof could then, perhaps, be made from two separate ‘soft-top’ panels going over the top and down the back to complete the roof when it’s really piddling. The idea is that various sections can be removed and stored in the car depending on how brave you are. Hmmm, the soft top could even be rolled back from the front in stages like on a 2CV… These are just thoughts at this stage. The new doors will be ‘solid’, hopefully very. For ease of making, I’m thinking a double layer of 18mm marine ply, with a thinner ply layer on the outside overlapping it so’s it acts as the outer skin of the door and fit nicely in the moulding recess on the outside. Marine ply is strong stuff and a 36mm thickness should look – and be – sturdily substantial. It should also allow me to cut out a large window opening, shaped like the Wrangler Jeep’s – ie: sloping frame at the front to get away from the usual ‘rectangular’ side window look. 2-part sliding windows (acrylic) can be cut to fit neatly, and the overall window width should mean that either section slid open should give a good-sized aperture. But, an idea I’m really keen on trying is to also have the whole top ‘window’ half of the door sliced horizontally like ‘barn’ doors, hinged and fold-flatable against the lower section on the outside for really warm days. A clip will hopefully stop it flapping like wings… The ‘fold’ could be at elbow-rest height! Again, just thoughts at the mo’… 2) Interior: No offence at all to Mr Mac; he’s done a very neat job of the dashboard. I am looking to do something more ‘production’-quality, tho’, so that the Cortina binnacle is fully ‘disguised’ as they were in my Marlin. At the same time, I’d like it to be truly unique to my RV, so that rules out shoe-horning in an existing production-vehicle dashboard, even tho’ I’ve seen some cracking examples of Sierra dashboards being used in RVs. Thoughts of carbon-fibre texture for the panel and ‘suede’ for a non-reflective top cover are being mulled at the mo’… An idea I used successfully in the Marlin was a way of hiding your ICE. I doubt anyone here is going to fit a high-quality stereo system in such a ‘vulnerable’ car? What I did in the Marlin was to buy a ‘power-amp’ (the type used to boost the outputs of existing stereos) which can be bought for next-to-no money 2nd-hand on t’Bay. This can be mounted anywhere, even in the engine bay, although behind the dash would be usual. Speakers can similarly be mounted pretty much out-of-sight (the sides of the foot-wells look promising in the RV), and it’s all wired up. All you then need on the dash is a single on/off switch and a 3.5mm jack socket. Plug your MP3/iPod/phone/portable CD/radio/whatever in - using a short fly-lead from the headphone socket - switch on, and you have instant ICE. All controls accessed on your player. Ok, not a good idea to be fiddling with your MP3 on the move, so I think I’ll also add a volume control on the dash this time – any other adjustments can wait until I stop (in any case, mine will be permanently set to Radio 4…) 3) Heater: I’ve been looking at to how to best approach this task, and I think the simplest & cheapest way is to go ‘bespoke’. You can pick up heater matrices for a £iver (see what I did there…? sigh) and blowers for a similar amount. If space is at a premium, then the blower can be mounted under the bonnet, with an intake duct grabbing fresh air (not oily fumes…) from the under-arch if necessary. The matrix can be mounted inside a simple box made from 6mm MDF or similar (max temps are going to be well below ‘boiling’, so no hardship for that material). With an MDF case, you can shape it to fit neatly under the dash just where you want it, rather than having to try and adapt a production-car unit. What’s the worst part about fitting heaters? Yep – the controls; a nightmare. Levers and cables? Yuck. I’m hoping I have a solution here too; I’ve seen what looks like electrically-operated flow valves which are used on modern cars such as the Focus, so the hot/cold option could hopefully be controlled by a single electrical switch on the dash. One more switch for the fan, and that’s the heater controls taken care of . Except one… To get the warm/cold air to where you want it, I have an even simpler mechanical solution; just fit a couple of directionable and on-offable eyeball vents at the bottom-front of the casing where they can easily be reached - this will supply the hot or cold air to the cabin. A single hose run from the casing up to windscreen vents will provide demisting. So, with the eyeballs open, most of the air will come straight out into the cabin, but if greater windscreen demisting is required, just shut off the eyeballs! No levers, no remote controls. I’m really hoping all that’s needed is one fan switch and one hot/cold switch - as well as the two balls… Did I say these are just thoughts at the moment…?! Once all this starts, I will of course post the progress on here in case these projects are of interest.
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Post by scooby on Jul 6, 2013 22:02:15 GMT
Cool - thanks, gents. Sigh - the pedants who go for three... tsk tsk.
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Post by scooby on Jul 5, 2013 17:54:29 GMT
Sounds, on the face of it, a really nifty option. Let's face it, if your kit gets pranged, who would you rather fix it up, a bodyshop or yourself?
Ok, possibly a bodyshop! But I think, unless it's a major crash, I'd rather do the work myself, especially after the car has been done up the way you want. I just don't see a repair shop being able to replicate the work you've done yourself, especially if you've customised the interior, for example.
So, that's the way I've just gone with the insurance for my RV... I bet I'll get I disagree bit, big time!
General quotes were the best part of £50 less for the parts-only option. The 'Parts-only' quote was only £105 for fully comp, including my wife who's covered for also using it to commute to work. And legal protection. And only £50 excess.
Seems pretty good to me...
(worry)
Thoughts?
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Post by scooby on Jul 5, 2013 17:46:54 GMT
Wipers?
Chust curious.
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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... :
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Post by scooby on Jul 2, 2013 19:52:12 GMT
Cooool, much better! Thanks.
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Post by scooby on Jul 2, 2013 10:05:45 GMT
The light grey/aubergine colour scheme of the main headings and thread titles is nice, but the way these thread headings and menu titles change abruptly from the light colour to the dark just by rolling your mouse over it I find a bit jarring - I find it takes me a moment to be able to re-read the headings as text & background colours have reversed in contrast!
It looks real nice, tho', and I guess can live with it!
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Post by scooby on Jun 29, 2013 10:55:57 GMT
I had to do a body-off repair to my Dutton at one time, and that meant it was off the road for a few weeks. Darned if that clutch didn't decide to seize in that short time!
I hitched it up to a van and had a friend tow me all around the village I lived in then, me in 2nd or 3rd gear and the clutch floored all the time. Nothing. I couldn't believe it - I thought the constant drag of the engine would have been enough!
So I jacked up the whole rear, chocked the front tyres, and got it fired up. I can't remember what gear I used - 2, 3 or top - but I had it running at around '30mph' with the clutch depressed (as was I becoming...) and repeatedly and sharply snatched the handbrake up and down.
A good dozen pulls and, "clang!", it finally freed.
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Post by scooby on Jun 28, 2013 21:49:03 GMT
That's excellent news about the V5, John. You have yourself a worthwhile project!
Does the engine run now? When did you last try? If it does run, there are things we can try to free the clutch.
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Post by scooby on Jun 28, 2013 8:56:57 GMT
The thread headed 'Register of cars' says not to post on there, but to use the 'original' thread. I'm knew to this forum and don't know where to find this In my recent hunt for an RV (hopefully come to a good conclusion...), it was reassuring to find a further 2 road-worthy RVs which don't seem to appear in your list (nor the one on the Eagle Web Site). Perhaps there's a lot more cars than we think out there and still running around? ;D Anyways, they are: RV 1.6L Manual Q682 *** (can't make it out in the photo) Yellow T&T'd Somerset and RV 2.0L Manual Q476 EGV 'Camouflage' Currently SORN (but fully road-worthy) Suffolk
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Post by scooby on Jun 27, 2013 8:43:23 GMT
Hi John. to hear of your situation. If the car was a 'runner' before you bought it, it could very well be worth you continuing with it: the actual parts are cheap - it's the time it takes that's the killer! And hopefully you do still have the time even tho' the recession may have swallowed some of your hard-earned. The absolutely first thing to take into account is, what is the car referred to in the V5 document? If it's 'correctly' registered as an 'Eagle' (or something similar which clearly shows that it's a kit car), then great. Sadly, if it's still recorded as a Ford Cortina or similar, it might very well not be worth continuing with as to get it through the current IVA (?) tests could be prohibitively hard (read: expensive). Perhaps others on here could advise on just how hard it is to IVA an SS? Other than a seized clutch, was the engine running fine, with no rattles or smoke? If so, it doesn't really need a rebuild. If it's running at the moment, there are a few tricks you can try to release the clutch without dismantling anything - tho' it doesn't work in every case. Let me know if it's running, and I'll suggest a few things you can try If you post some photos and the reg number, the car might even be known to some members on here. Good luck.
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Post by scooby on Jun 22, 2013 9:53:09 GMT
That camper is lush...
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Post by scooby on Jun 20, 2013 23:04:44 GMT
I never realised that Bideford was the place to go for a tracker fit...
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Post by scooby on Jun 20, 2013 17:48:39 GMT
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Post by scooby on Jun 19, 2013 18:44:07 GMT
Thanks for that.
Wow - that's very reasonable. Good info to know!
Unfortunately, the RV up north is a fixed-head (I didn't know they made them like that), which kind of defeats the purpose of these cars in many ways.
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Post by scooby on Jun 19, 2013 18:08:27 GMT
Hi Peter. Yes, I've read that "So you want to..." thread - and it all rings very true! Yeah - one more non-runner on my drive and I'll be scrapped. Although that is a nice RV up north, the 600 mile journey would only be t'half of it - I've just checked train ticket prices to Arbroath; £230... Jeeeez. Also, it's a fixed hard-top (hmmm), and even tho' the spare engines and 'boxes he's throwing in look a better bet than what's already fitted, there's no way I could transport it all back. So, that one's not a contender, unfortunately. Andy, I like It seem to have a nice stance - some Eagles I've seen pics of do, and others don't so much. Yours does... Is that sprayed satin black or is it a black 'wrap'? I'll PM you lots more Qs Thanks, gents.
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Post by scooby on Jun 18, 2013 21:00:56 GMT
Hello, all. I have always liked the styling of the Eagle RV and I've been trying to persuade t'other 'alf that it would be a 'good idea' to get one. She's now said "Ok", which is astonishing as I already have two non-running 2CVs and an even less road-worthy NG TF (a kit based on the Sierra). The only reason she's agreeing to this is that she likes the RV's styling too... I'm happy for it to require some work, although it does need to be road-worthy (or as close to as possible). Cosmetic work is not a problem - in fact it's preferable as 'she' would like it painted a dark purple... Similarly, interior trim requiring work is fine as I have a full set of Vitara seats, and really fancy updating things like the dash myself as well. If anyone has a good runner, but one that also needs tidying (tho' I won't complain if it's smart ;D), then please let me know. (I'm no stranger to kits as my very first car - at the age of 18 - was a Dutton Melos I built myself. I loved that car ... I've been attracted to quirky cars ever since, hence the 2CVs and the NG, and a recently-departed Marlin.) Many thanks.
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