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Adventures in wrenching – An admission of ineptitude
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I’d much rather be driving my cars than working on them. To be brutally honest, I only own my own tools and twirl them at my car in order to avoid forking out bundles of cash which I could be spending on fuel. Or old car brochures, probably. In recent times, though, I’ve become increasingly…
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The Carchive: The 1973 Vauxhall Magnum
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The 2018 World Cup is now in full swing, so I’ve decided to mark it in my own special style by pretending it’s not happening. Perhaps you’ll join me? “Magnum” is an astoundingly popular name in the automotive world. We’ve seen it before in car form with the Dodge Magnum, we’ve encountered it in articulated…
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When toys are wasted on kids.
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Kids, eh? Today’s young’uns have no idea that we used to sit around boxes with curved-glass fronts, which flickered away at less than 50hz and provided us with fewer than a hundred channels. If there was something we wanted to watch, we had to either wait for it to be broadcast, or we had to…
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The Carchive: The SEAT Marbella
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It’s been a while since we last held our collective noses and descended into our dark cavern of decay to peer beneath the boulders of history in search of yesterday’s mouldering, whiffy treasure. Welcome back to The Carchive. Last time it was the Mitsubishi Tredia that came under scrutiny. Today we’re sticking with the ‘eighties…
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Gonna get myself armrested
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Rear wheel drive. A close ratio, six speed manual gearbox. A flat-plane crank V8, twin turbocharged but with so little lag you’d swear it was normally aspirated. Direct-acting rack and pinion steering, with power assistance that gives you no clue it’s there. Grippy tyres with just enough sidewall flex to warn that you’re nearing the…
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A taste of the future, in a car from the past
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The last time I travelled in a Citroen 2CV, it was right at the beginning of my driving career. I was seventeen, and the venue was a stubble field in a nearby farm, where a group of my schoolfriends had gathered. We were all there in our first cars, and those with the least mechanical…
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Nostalgia Express: The Plaxton Viewmaster
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Almost five years ago, I posted about one of the buses that tool me to and fro of high school every day in the early 1990s. Its registration number was KJD58p and it had a pretty eventful life, reputedly ending its life as a spare parts donor for one of the open-top Daimler Fleetline sightseeing…
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Woodall Nicholson Kirklees: The fat end of the wedge
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Have you ever beheld a piece of obsolete technology and thought that time ought to have been kinder to it? Perhaps when you slide your favourite, home-recorded Minidisc into your still-functioning deck, or when you pass a once magnificent Sony WEGA CRT television as it sits, screen down, outside somebody’s house – it’s sheer weight…
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Felixstowe to Ipswich run 2018: Jolly good show
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So, it’s Saturday night in the UK, and while families nationwide wallow in the festival of charged socio-political fireworks that is the Eurovision Song Contest, I thought I’d post what I meant to last night – before I spilled most of a can of cider over my laptop. 24hrs and a session in the airing…
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The Carchive: The Colt (Mitsubishi) Tredia
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I’ve looked into the psychology behind the hoarding that has lead to The Carchive being created. If it was information I sought, there are infinite alternative sources I could have turned to. The Internet, for one – books, for another. I turn to the latter whenever I seek a fresh perspective on things: In many…
