restoration

   The car was built in January 1972 at Dagenham, England and left the factory as a R H D 2 door saloon with a 1600cc OHV engine, 4 speed manual gearbox and a 3.89:1 back axle.

     The car was painted in Evergreen , a metallic colour introduced in 1971 and was fitted with a light tan PVC interior.

      The car has had 6 former keepers and I purchased it on 14th Febuary 1998, from a friend who had bought it, done some work on the front end and then had to move to a smaller garage and didn't have space to keep it.He was going to fit a Rover V8 , but sold the engine and bought a 3 litre Ford V6 and put that in the engine bay.

       I got the car home built a garage, then started to strip the car. The car was worse than it first looked so it was decided to work from the front (which needed very little welding) to the rear one side at a time. The engine was removed and the car lifted about 6". It was at that point I decided that it would by easer to get the car on the road if the running gear would drop straight in so a engine was sourced from a 1990 sierra injection and fitted with parts from a mk 5 cortina including the wiring loom.

       The inner sills were replaced first,I then took off 2 cover sills one side and 3 the other which revealed not a lot of the original sills were left .New wheel arches were welded in once the rotten originals were removed. The whole of the drivers floor was replaced as it had corroded too far to be patched.

        New door bottoms, rear inner and outer valances, both sides of the boot floor, in fact most of the metal from the axle back (apart from the spare wheel well) is new metal.

        Once the car was solid again it was taken to my brother-in-laws garage where he prepaired it for painting. The car took a lot of time to get the body looking good again, it wasn't helped by the fact that I wanted to keep the car black, a colour that shows every blemish.

         He gave it a guide coat of paint and I checked the car ready for MOT, the car was booked in for May 23rd and passed first time. so with free car tax , I was ready to go (the car had been insured for some months to try and spur me on to complete the restoration) it was decide to not paint it but to run it, fixing any teething problems as they cropped up.

         After using the car for the summer going to car shows ect I had a long list of jobs I wanted doing, these included rebushing the rear end (as it was wallowy) fitting a clutch (ended up fitting a gearbox a week later when the prop threw another UJ cracking the casing) the car was also starting to smoke on startup (valve stem seals) so I took the head off and went to the local FE college and decoked and gas flowed it, and it needed a coat or 10 of paint if I was going to show it. So the car was stripped and sanded back, any problems the first coat of black showed were rectified and the car primed, then painted in jet back , this was laquered over to really make it shine. it was then rubbed down with 1200grit wet and dry then 2000grit, followed by polishing with cutting compound, T-cut then wax,the result you can see.

       Special thanks go to Michael my brother-in-law .His skills, knowledge and determination made this restoration possible.

Nov 2001
        A new front sub frame has been puchaced and has underwent a rebuild and will be put on the car over the winter