Eunos Chump

Returned late from London on Friday night to find Colin had already fitted the new cat to the Benz - nice work! It may have cost £775 all in but it's worth it, the car is transformed. Smoother, quieter, and considerably more rapid, I'm not sure I need 6 cylinders after all... well, OK, I still want a C280 (but not the fuel bills). Found some money down the back of the sofa so the Spit search has begun again, haven't seen anything suitable nearby though (some good stuff at the Spitfire Graveyard but it's in Sheffield).

Got a refund on the faulty Benz cat from GSF. The replacement they had was of dreadful quality, it was a mish-mash of short lengths of squashed tube, incompetently welded up (even I can weld better than that). There was no trouble though, which was nice. Now I have to pay £700+ for the genuine article, it's the only way to ensure satisfaction. So that's the Spitfire fund gone for now...

This isn't Spitfire-related, but it involved elbow grease and swearing so I'm adding it anyway. The catalytic converter on the Beirut Taxi broke up on Friday, 50-odd miles from home, which resulted in a maximum engine speed of 2500rpm. I managed to get it home (but doing 35mph up the hills of the M3 is not recommended ). This is what it looked like after I took it off, it's pretty amazing it ran at all. Spoke to the folks at GSF who supplied it some months back, a replacement is due in Monday. There may be a battle ahead to prove it was a manufacturing fault rather than being due to oil contamination/overfuelling, I shall see...

A few years back I decided it was about time I owned a Mini. To make things more interesting I thought I'd get an old broken one and fix it up, so I bought this rusty yellow £300 skip from a student who was going for the most-number-of-lies-told-during-a-financial-transaction world record. It was officially an 850 City, but there there was a far more powerful A+ living under the bonnet. With it's stumpy 10" alloys it had quite ridiculous performance and handling, certainly more than the standard drum brakes could handle. It was a rusty bodged-up deathtrap, the seller was untrustyworthy, so naturally I bought it. It's the kind of thing I do. The front floor, wings, roof edges and rear subframe were all rotten, so I bought a load of pattern panels ( tip: don't buy patterns if you want them to fit ) and drove it up to my folk's place in Norfolk. Over the next 2 weeks, it was transformed from wreck to beauty: New wing goes on; my brother Darren got lumbered with n...

I haven't found one yet, but I'm working on it. There is one for sale in town, but it's a ratty old matt black thing that's full of filler, and it's the most bodged-looking car I've seen for some time. With an asking price of £1300 the seller is either a comedian or has difficulty with decimal points. I've wanted a Spit for years now. I almost bought one some 9 years ago, but it would have become my daily driver and they're just not suited for this. They're not fast, nor economical, the handling is on a par with a shopping trolley (as is the level of comfort), and they're certainly not sturdy. Yet I like them. Oh, and there's no chance of it keeping the weather out. I've liked other rubbish cars in the past too, in fact I have a raft of damaging automotive relationships behind me. You can see some of these here (Fiat X1/9 and Mini), others are still too painful to discuss...