Did you go to the classic ford show at Santa Pod at the weekend? I was down there with the OldSkoolFord crew, and you may have seen the van on the stand. It was the biggest at the event with over 100 cars on it!
Well, the week before an ad had come up on OldSkoolFord. Someone local was selling his Anglia project. I’ve got an Anglia in the garage, which is taking an age to do, and his project was tempting. And he only wanted peanuts for it. AND he could deliver!!
So, it’s now mine. I met up with him on the way home from the CF show, and he followed me home.
It doesn’t look pretty, but it’s very solid. It’s a 1967 Super and it’s still on its original sills and front wings. The front panel is shot, but there is no rot anywhere. A previous owner had started stripping the paint and repairing some rust, but then just left it.
I got worried when I saw a load of expandable builders foam over the door posts behind the wings. I scraped some off and found this:
Solid!
It also has classic capri struts and cortina brakes, and a spax telescopic shock kit on the back. According to the DVLA website it was last taxed in 1999.
So the plan is to move the super I have out of the garage, put this on the spit, strip it back, red lead and protect the underneath, perhaps re-do a couple of the previous repairs (I’ve counted five repair patches). The outer bodywork is going to be satin black, although I do love the Ermine White and Dragoon Red scheme it should have. I’m doing this for speed. I will transplant the vans engine and box into it, get it MOT’d then strip the van back and give it the mother of all paint jobs….!
I go quiet for a few months. Well, yes. Sorry. Won’t happen again. Until the next time.
So what’s been happening? Well, I’m on with “Project Rotbox”, my ‘67 Anglia Super that I’ve owned since 1990. The car has been under restoration since about 1995. Then I moved house. Got married. Had children. Restored a couple of other cars in the mean time. But now, it’s Rotboxes turn.
I’ve been out and bought an engine. It’s not a Ford engine either. And it’s supposedly easily tunable to about 200bhp. More of that later.
What else? I had the van rolling roaded at Northampton Motorsport. It hit 152.2bhp @ 6233rpm and 138.5lb/foot @ 4630rpm.
I’m planning on running in the Old Skool Ford Drag Championship. I’ve got a spare set of halfshafts just in case. I’ve only done drag racing before once at York, in a run what you brung. I was in my old 205GTi which did the standing quarter in 17.1 seconds. My van, when it was raced by the previous owner, did it in 14.6. That was with a 137bhp crossflow with a 50 shot of nitrous.
And very soon, I’ll be doing down to Brunters for a thrash with the OSF crew, courtesy of Retro Ford magazine.
The October issue of Retro Ford mag is out on Thurdsday. You’d better run out and buy it because the van is being featured. Chris from the mag came up a few weeks ago for the shoot. The day was pissing it down and we couldn’t use the original location I’d found near the centre of Leeds.
After a bit of head scratching, we came up with a place on the Leeds ring road that used to be a second hand car dealers. It was called Route 2 near to the JCT600 Porsche dealers. The place is run down, and there was a canopy that we could use. As soon as we’d parked up a security guard came out to see what we were doing. After we’d explained everything he was quite happy to let us continue.
After a couple of hours there we drove into the centre of Leeds on the A58M to block traffic while Chris drove next to me and the photographer hung out of the window to take pictures. The only ‘beep’ we got was on the final run when the person behind Chris got a bit frustrated, so we both dropped it down a gear and floored it!!
Every month or two Capri owner Andy Ellis organises a meet at the Scotch Corner hotel. These have usually been on a Saturday and I’ve not been able to get to them, but the latest was on a Sunday so I managed it.
It took about an hour to get up there, and it was a glorious day, so enjoyed the 70 mile blast up the A1. At the meet was Dave and Tom (Mk14Dr and Pyeman from OldSkoolFord.co.uk). I’d not seen Pyeman since the Classic Ford show in June so it was good to catch up. He was a bit surprised at the cost of soft drinks in the hotel bar though. Two pints of Coke cost £6!
Most of the cars there were Capris, but there were some interesting ones, including a couple that had been in Classic Ford mag.
..but I’m not classing it as a breakdown because I was on my drive. The engine seems to have a habit of shaking bolts loose. It has happened with a couple of bolts that hold the bellhousing to the engine.
But twice now, the starter motor bolts have been shaken loose so the starter pops out of its hole. You can usually tell when it’s happening because the starter gets progressively louder over a period of days before it pops out completely. But this time it did it just the once. I’d been up to Toys R Us with my daughter to get a birthday present for someone and it got louder. Came home. Then later I was going out in it, and it popped out, and I was left with a loud grinding sound.
I need to get under there to tighten them up again, but it’s raining…
This is amazing. Clarence Cleveland Curtiss bought his first car, a 1929 Ford Model A in 1938 for $10. It now has 200,000 miles on it, it’s unrestored and it still runs.
It has an amazing history. He bought it from a guy during the depression who was out of work and hungry. This was when he was 15. He drove it for a year without a licence.
When he was 17 he met his wife, Dorothy in the car. “She was the first and only girl I ever kissed in the car,”he said. “It’s priceless because of that as far as I’m concerned”
In 1940 he replaced the engine with a Hudson Terraplane lump which allowed him to go 80mph+ instead of the usual 55. They drove the the New York Worlds Fair in 1940, and to six army camps from Massachusetts to Georgia when he served during World War II.
He plans on passing the car to his family when he passes away.
Over on OldSkoolFord a guy named Fleet is secretly going back in time to the 70s and buying second hand Cortinas. He owns a couple of Mk2s with very low mileage, plus this lovely Mk3 with only 12,800 miles from new. It’s the only way he can keep coming up with these gems. That’s around 500 miles per year.
ClassicFords.net is currently undergoing some changes. If you've come looking for technical articles and a gallery, don't worry, they will return. The forum won't be though, as there are plenty of good Ford forums on the net.
ClassicFords.net is currently undergoing some changes. If you've come looking for technical articles and a gallery, don't worry, they will return. The forum won't be though, as there are plenty of good Ford forums on the net.