So here's the story of my 1974 mk1 Escort. It's had 3 'restorations' and 3 different engines during my ownership - the current job is a full blown Cossie-powered road car, but I'll start right back at the beginning...
I got the car around 2002/2003 - I seem to remember we paid about £500 for the rolling shell, some interior bits and bobs and and the engine/box.
It started life as a basic model and quite a bit of work had been done to it before we got it. It had a few repair panels that had been done reasonably well, someone had resprayed in metallic green and partially rubbed down again from the original flat light green colour.
This is how it looked when it arrived:
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(apologies for the image quality - these were actually taken with one of the first commercial digital cameras available - a 0.8MP Samsung Digimax: http://www.dcviews.com/_samsung/0800.htm - no lcd, smartmedia cards [remember that?] and _serial_ cable to upload your images to a PC)
Good things:
Engine was a 711M block 1600 crossflow - though we later found out that the head was cracked and ended up having to take the head off a 1600 that was destined for my dads 105e Anglia at the time.
Gearbox was nice
Came with a set of 4-spoke RS/Laser type 6x13 wheels
Bodywork was actually really good - very straight (apart from a mis-aligned front wing and worn door pins) and virtually rust free... but this leads on to one of the bad points...
Way back in the mists of time, when the car would have been nearly new, someone had decided to Zeibart it - virtually every panel of the car was covered in a waxy, oily film. This had protected it really well over the almost 28 or so years since new. However, a previous owner had clearly gone to town on the rest of the car themselves.... including doing the engine bay:
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This took days and days to clean off :-(
I had bought the car to use as a track car - to replace my previous track day toy:
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... so our work (it's my dad and me working on most of these things - he's a time-served mechanic with his own garage, so comes in rather handy!) was limited to making sure the car was safe, strong, and would go, turn and stop ok - we weren't really looking to 'restore' it at this point.
We limited the modifications to:
- Minor overhaul of the 1600 crossflow
- Set of 185/60x13 intermediates for the RS 4 spokes
- Capri 2.8 struts, calipers and vented discs
- Double width kit & TC arb
- Quickshift for the 4 speed box
- Safety Devices rear bolt-in cage
- Quick respray of the exterior in red
- Serviced and MOT'd
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... and it ended up looking like this:
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Not bad for a quick turnaround really!
... and this is what I used it for:
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A rally stage practice day organised by the CSMA at the Barton Stacey army staging area - fun, fun, fun!
Of course, it didn't stop there ;-)
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