craigowl

Not for me - I am not a young buck like all you guys - my 3 kids are probably older than many of you!

Falkland passed me down to the supplier in Herts when I asked if he could supply and fit Goodr. hoses to my car. The guy down south was a good sort who joked about the Fifer giving it a body swerve and passing me on down to him like a hot potato because It was anuther ****in' Corrado! I am in Linlithgow.

Was it you I heard about, Andrew, that had the problem when Falkland in Fife had to send a set back to be exchanged, or was that some other lucky so and so up here?!

After a saga lasting about 3 weeks I have today got the 6 ss brake hoses fitted to my 95 VR6. The first lot I got, my local garage man refused to fit - he said two of them were too long and the threaded ends were not long enuff to seal at the seat in the caliper. He is a good engineer and was told he was correct to query them and get replacements. We were told there are at least 4 varieties of fitting for the Corrado. What bugged me was that the innocent customer seeing them listed in the full page ads by aftermarket parts suppliers will normally not know there are several types available. A diy job or a less conscientious mechanic could mean you might end up with a duff system, although i do not seem to have heard of this as a problem on any forum. My hoses are numbered ZZAH-08. I am not certain, but I suspect they had to be specially made up.

My picture was taken at the Prestwick (Scotland) airshow in 1972. It shows a veteran Avro Lancaster bomber (4 Rolls Royce engines) with a gallery of cars of the time looking on. Rather poignantly a mixture of European makes are on view, ("we are all friends now")including about four Germans at the right and the original Mini at the extreme left. Our first ever new car, an Opel Manta 1.6s - is 2nd from the right. It was one of those cars you regret selling on, for years afterwards. It cost £1450 on the road, including underseal applied on request by the supplying garage. There was no good rust protection whatsoever in those days. I ended up making my own wheel arch inserts after scooping out handfuls of mud from behind the headlights. I first read about the inserts in an advert for them in Practical Motorist or Car Mechanics. Needless to say they were a Swedish product - our industry was not in favour of giving the working man a car that would not rot away as quickly as possible. Many vehicles in those days were held together by paint, plastic padding and the rustbugs holding hands. You could easily poke your finger thro the rust below the paint on the top of the wing of many 3-year old British cars. Our previous car - a 1966 Austin 1100 - even collapsed on the tyre jack in 1969 as its rotten sill disintegrated at that age! Anyway, guys, dont take the build quality of today's cars for granted (particularly our Cs) - it was a long hard and exasperating wait for ordinary drivers to get the benefits of the revolution. Indeed, on my death bed I will not be saying "I wish I had spent more time carrying out pointless and endless rust treatments on cars I have owned!", but rather "I wish I had spent more time croozing the rural roads of the UK in my Corrado!!!" "Enjoy" folks, but take care.

When i open petrol filler flap there is rust visible bubbling up at the top left hand corner of the oblong recess containing the filler cap. Also I recently hosed out the area around the filler cap after removing the rubber/plastic shroud around it - there is a lot of mud trapped there. When I was drying this out i found a brown elec. wire with a corroded terminal and no obvious place to go. I have been told that this is probably an earth for the filler cap so you dont get blown up at the filling station when a spark of static electicity jumps from the pumps nozzle to the car! Any of you other guys got knowledge on above?