Fed up with my car!

[Nick]

Ahhh. Hilman Imps...

I hated those cars. Aluminium engine in the back - just nasty.

One of my mates at university had one - turning left once, the driver's door fell off. The windscreen wiper motor regularly failed such that in inclement weather, the passenger had to put their arm out through their quarter-light and wobble the blades about by hand. During an MOT test, the garage bloke pulled on the handbrake and the whole thing came out of the floor in his hand, exposing the linkage from the gearstick back to the box - it was two Jubilee Clips with a bit of hosepipe between. Every few miles, the back of the car filled with scalding steam which required the passenger to leap out with one of the many litre bottles we had to carry in order to re-fill the coolant least the block melt... Once, in the middle of the night, four of us picked up the car and dumped it between two trees, leaving about 2cm between the front & rear bumpers and the respective trees. Took him over a week to get the car out.... He tried to re-build the engine (because of the failed head gasket which caused all the steam) - dragged the engine up three flights of stairs to his newly painted room and started to rebuild it - what he hadn't realised is that every time one of his friends visited, we'd remove one or two bits and add several, unrelated, other bits....

Ahhh. Them was the days!

[pwdrive]

Dragged the engine from my old Frogeye up two flights of stairs to the one room flat we were living in, cleaned up the bits in the communal bathroom, banging valve guides out at 1 in the morning...we were asked to leave.

Lawrence.

[Skywave]

The Hillman 'Imp / Californian': an attempt to make a 'sporty' version from the standard model - but it didn't work: a total design failure. More bits 'n' pieces are coming back to me now from a long distant memory.

Part the trouble with this car was lack of ventilation for the engine and an inefficient cooling system. Radiator at the front of the car; engine at the rear. I seem to recall that the piping, radiator to engine, was situated in the sills. And then there was the aluminium engine, so you had to have anti-freeze in the engine all year round to combat corrosion. But I do believe that the manufacturer's manual didn't mention that. Then there was the near impossible task of removing & re-fitting the spark plugs: rear engine, hardly any room to get in there, let alone see what you were doing. And then there were the damn awful 'doughnuts'. You always knew when another one had failed 'cause of the racket: bang-bang-bang! And, just to cap it all, above about 60 m.p.h., the handling was a bit unnerving and the ride wasn't exactly comfortable either.

Al.

[Skywave]

Anyway, I think everything that can be said about the Hillman 'Imp' has now been said. So, change of car: anyone recall / had owned / had driven a Ford 'Classic'? A smart looking car, yes, but it justifiably earnt the nick-name as the Dagenham Disaster.

Al.

[Tedzed1]

The Ford classic, used to love the style of these Al, not seen one for many a year now.
Also from the same era I love the ford consul 375, it was the car my father had when I was born,
then he went and traded it in for a brand new morris minor 1000, if I remember correctly he told me it cost him £420 including purchase tax.

It would be interesting to find out what car the members of the forum learnt to drive in, for me it was an Austin A40 farina
in a lovely shade of grey (not), then I progressed to a Vauxall Victor 101 estate which virtually fell apart at the seams being a typical vauxall
of the time, I even got it through an MOT with one of the sills filled with paper mache, before progressing up to a Rover P6 2200tc being my first automatic.

The hillman Imp/Calafornian/Sunbeam, notorious for blowing their head gaskets, it was also recomended that the head was skimmed at the same time as they
had a habit of warping.

[Bushbaby]

I bought a Vauxhall Viva HA which never made it onto the road as such as it was so rusty the floor pans fell out of it!!
My first 'proper' car (one the could legally drive on the road) was a Ford Zephyr 4 mk 3 that I bought around my 19th birthday and drove for a couple of years. It was a 1965 model which a bench seat and 4 speed column change. It was awful but with a bench seat at the front it was great fun too.
Like this

   

[Refugee]

My father had one of those when I was very young. It was a company car so they used to change it every couple of years.

[Nick]

...Dagenham Disaster.

I always thought that they were called "Dagenham Dustbins"...

Polo is at the Electrical Doctors now - won't get it back for another week

[Skywave]

One of the nicest cars I ever owned was a Peugeot 405 GL 4-door saloon 1.6 litre. The ride and handing were excellent.

As a company-provided car, I used to drive a Ford 'Orion' 1.6 injection. The torque from stationary was simply staggering: very reminiscent of my days of riding a Triumph 750 cc. motorbike. Ahh! Those were the days!
But there were two annoying 'issues' with the 'Orion': the reversing lights switch in the gearbox would fail and put the reversing lights 'on' when you were going forwards (!) . . . . . and the spark plugs. At service time, the Ford main dealer would fit Ford-manufactured plugs. But these would misfire in the wet. The cure was simple: replace them with Bosch plugs.

Al.