Jonathan's Turbo D
Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2014 6:58 pm
Hello everyone.
Some of you will remember my announcing in May that I had bought the Mandarin Turbo D that Medway had on ebay news of which has been conspicuous by it's absence. I can now reveal that the reason for this (with apologies to those on Autoshite who I have moments earlier already regaled with this sorry tail) is that after three and a half weeks of excellent motoring (in which I clocked up nearly a thousand miles, replaced a couple of spheres and got to really like the car) I crashed it
Sixteen years motoring without any loss of no claims and I had to go and ruin it all by ploughing into the back of a minicab. Oh how I wished I could have smashed up my previous Vectra instead which I could have weighed in without a guilty conscience! I confessed up to the insurance bods and confused the woman by announcing that I wouldn't be claiming; no way those sums would add up!
I reflected on the best course of action and given that I had no desire for a different car at this juncture I might as well see if I could fix her. I stripped off most of the damaged parts so I could see what the structure looked like:
Well aside from bending the inner wing most severely and ripping off the (clearly already rotten) bumper bracket things didn't seem too bad. I was particularly fortunate too in that I had access to specialist panelbeating equipment:
Thankfully Paul from Anglesey was able to come to the rescue with secondhand parts from a car he had broken in the same colour. Annoyingly as well as mashing up the obvious parts I had also bent the intercooler and smashed the corner off the (otherwise immaculate) radiator so of course I had to replace them too.
After a morning of hammering it seemed she may just see the road again:
And today I finally got her almost back to the condition she was in before I wrecked her (note the addition of correct wheel trims supplied by Lankytim which to my eye improves the look no end).
Now I can move back on to the list of XM niggles I had to work through and was ready to approach before I had the bump!
Some of you will remember my announcing in May that I had bought the Mandarin Turbo D that Medway had on ebay news of which has been conspicuous by it's absence. I can now reveal that the reason for this (with apologies to those on Autoshite who I have moments earlier already regaled with this sorry tail) is that after three and a half weeks of excellent motoring (in which I clocked up nearly a thousand miles, replaced a couple of spheres and got to really like the car) I crashed it
Sixteen years motoring without any loss of no claims and I had to go and ruin it all by ploughing into the back of a minicab. Oh how I wished I could have smashed up my previous Vectra instead which I could have weighed in without a guilty conscience! I confessed up to the insurance bods and confused the woman by announcing that I wouldn't be claiming; no way those sums would add up!
I reflected on the best course of action and given that I had no desire for a different car at this juncture I might as well see if I could fix her. I stripped off most of the damaged parts so I could see what the structure looked like:
Well aside from bending the inner wing most severely and ripping off the (clearly already rotten) bumper bracket things didn't seem too bad. I was particularly fortunate too in that I had access to specialist panelbeating equipment:
Thankfully Paul from Anglesey was able to come to the rescue with secondhand parts from a car he had broken in the same colour. Annoyingly as well as mashing up the obvious parts I had also bent the intercooler and smashed the corner off the (otherwise immaculate) radiator so of course I had to replace them too.
After a morning of hammering it seemed she may just see the road again:
And today I finally got her almost back to the condition she was in before I wrecked her (note the addition of correct wheel trims supplied by Lankytim which to my eye improves the look no end).
Now I can move back on to the list of XM niggles I had to work through and was ready to approach before I had the bump!
You wouldn't know to look at the finished results from the outside. I suppose it's so much easier knowing most of the front end just unbolts, therefore straightforward to replace things.
