Any Oldtimer Wheels in your Garage?

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mafioso

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Hello

Do you have any oldtimer wheels in your garage? Too sorry to sell it due to 'sentimental reasons'?

Here's my French chic(k) from 1986 and she's 24 years old now.

I bought her when she had about 90K kms on the odo and just for the hell of it, I collected new engine parts until I had new pistons, bearings, a brandnew cylinderhead complete with French sparkplugs, new Weber and Solex twinchoke carbs, hoses and heaven knows what else and re-built everything my way - which is strictly by the factory manual. Every single nut and bolt torqued strictly by the book.

When I bought the car, it was in its original ghastly puke-gold with a trashy vinyl flash along the lower body sides. The paint job was done (with much grief) by Porters new car prep place in Kuilsriver. Pre-colour change stripping was done by me and final assembly also, when the job was done.

After the paint job, it went to have the upholstery's colour changed as well - including charcoal velour rooflining and a brandnew charcoal original factory carpet - also with lotsa grief from the upholstery company.

The last touch was a set of Monroe air shocks at the back.

Since the tittivations several years ago, she has traveled only 30K km.

The worse part of re-assembly happened one day when I fitted the new, out of the box grille. As it looked a bit new-plastic dull, I decided to spray it with some plastic rejuvenator and picked-up the wrong can :(

It got one sweep of silver wheelpaint by mistake and I think I spent half a day cleaning off the screwup.

After all the work was done, I got lucky one day when I spotted a similar 1.7litre in a condition worse than a Transkei chicken coop. I bought the original factory mags off the bloke, had them refurbished and this turned out to be the best improvement made to finally end all the wheel balance problems.

mafioso

Errr...I forgot. There was another slight mistykie on my part. The dashboard's colour also had to change to charcoal. In those days, I didn't do much painting and had the job done elsewhere. On re-fitting it one cold, winter's night outside my workshop doors, I sukkeled myself silly to get the thing to clip back in position. The devil told me it would be easier to use a pickaxe handle as a lever...The result was, I cracked the windscreen so that had to be replaced the next morning.





 

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