cletterridge

Or even less!

Please rate your past bangers on reliability, length of MOT at time of purchase, driveability and whether or not you were able to sell it on easily, at all or even for a profit!

The reason I'm asking is I am sadly currently without wheels but since I am extremely fussy, it'll probably be months before I find a worthy replacement. Cheapo car is needed to help me get round seeing decent cars miles away. Currently thinking local auction as I've seen some very sorry looking mongrels getting sold there every week for £30 upwards!

I'll start things off with my brothers Suzuki jeep he got for £90. 3 months MOT, but banging noise from underneath turned out to be both rear leaf springs rusted away and completely detached from the body at one end!

chameleon

Once bought a Morris Ital for 100 quid with 2 weeks MOT. 50 quid later it had 12 months mot, run ok till next mot...and passed! got rid 2 months later for 150 quid!

To be fair, it was by a country mile the sh1ttiest car I have ever owned.

No use to you as hopefully they are all in the scrap heap by now but I thought I'd share it with you

[Edited by chameleon - 4/25/2003 11:09:45 PM]

Puff The Magic Wagon!

iTrader: (2)

LOL

I've had a LHD Fiat 128 for £10 & that was only 'cos it had 6 months tax. Excellent car except a pain in the backside when the clutch-cable went Clutchless gear-changes from Croydon into London Central Lasted quite a while, economical, no rust (wow!) & I eventually swapped/sold it on.

Bought a MkIII Cortina 2.0 GXL for £75. Two-tone paintwork & in VGC except for rust on the tops of the two wings. At the time, it was a tad too juicy for me but a lovely car.

Skoda 130 Fastback - swapped it for a mini with a siezed engine Lasted 6 months, totally reliable but the heating was cr@p/useless. The brake/clutch pivot broke going into a roundabout eventually & that was a bit scary. Eventually sold for scrap for £30

LHD Chrysler Avenger with LPG conversion - £20. This was back in '85 when such a thing was rare. Dutch registered IIRC. The LPG had a switch on the dash & if when running on LPG it was turned, it was like a turbo coming in as petrol fired up! £40 scrap after a few months.

Quite a few more, inc an Austin 1100, a Transit & some minis...

CC

got a rascal van early this year for nufink, smoked like a red arrow when cold but a good runner, 6 months mot. Sold the NEXT DAY for £100

needless to day i made sure it was warm when the person viewed it .

imlach

Volvo 240 4dr : £50 from auction as I needed a car between my MGF private sale and new Scooby arriving back in early 1999 (2 months gap between cars).

Auctioneer laughed as I drove it off, but did the job, and sold it for £50 with no MoT or road tax 3 months later....so aside from petrol, was cost-free.

Did have a bit of a backfire, but it became the laugh of the street as it
backfired every day as I drove it off to work....
Vroom- bang - vroom - bang - vroom - bang - we called it the comedy car.

It also came with a bee's nest in the boot - so every morning when you
got in the car, you'd bd swamped with bees....ah - great times!

Best bit was approaching merging lanes on dual carriageways - I didn't give
a **** if my Volvo was bashed, so meant I could hold my ground in the
moralistic "I am in the right" road lane arguments.....
I had nothing to lose.....

Guy who bought ti spent £250 on new exhaust, MoT, road tax, misfire repair,
etc. Silly boy.

imlach

The way I look at it, £50 is less than you'd spend on a good night out, yet for £50 at an auction, you get SO much metal.......

Bargain :-)

Reminds me of my mate, who when living in a 4-up student flat decided to go down the auction and buy an FSO Polenez.....for £50 - so, it was £12.50 each
between each flatmate.

Think they managed one trip to the supermarket before it expired, but hey, they had quite good fun for £12.50!!!

Bangers are the most fun you can have with cars. If it lasts longer than a few taxi trips, you're in the money, and you feel GOOD!

Rich and Mini

Got an F-plate Mini Mayfair for £50, it had 12 months ticket on it, and 6 months tax. Left it on my drive for 3 months, sold it for £500. As far as I know, it's still going strong. ( This was 2 years ago! )

You're not going to find a more fun and able car for £50. Easy to fix when they go wrong, and parts are cheap. Just make sure they ain't rotten right through.

Rich

BOB.T

I bought a mkI Fiesta for £80, resprayed it bright green, added XR2 interior and alloys, ran it for 6 months and sold it for £600 Last I heard the rear springs made their way into the boot one day The guy's a bouncer at the local club now, he always gives me a funny look when I go past

Ciaran

iTrader: (16)

a push bike but sold it for £1,000,000 + vat.

NotoriousREV

Bought an accident damaged Mk I Astra off my mates dad. A Tranny van had crumpled the back end a bit, the insurance co wrote it off (gave him £600 'cos it was mint pre-accident) and he bought it back for £50. He cut the wheel arch away from the wheel and hammered the sharp bits flat and got it MOT'd and sold it to me for £100. It only had 30,000 miles on it from new (it was about 16 years old at the time) ran like a dream but looked crap 'cos it was brown with a huge dent in it.

Worst car I bought was off the same mate, A reg Cavalier that "smoked a bit" for £50 with a few months T&T on it. You could only fill the oil up to the minimum mark or it was a James Bond smokescreen. The centre part of the dash had come lose and used to dangle over the gear lever. I once had a hot date in it, spent half my day fixing the dash and as I drove onto the girls drive, it collapsed again. Two days later, the cam seized and snapped the cam belt in rush hour traffic.

My Scoob is the first car I've privately owned that I paid over £1000 for, I like cheap cars

SCC PERFORMANCE

One of my cars is a red 205 1.9 GTi.......

I bought it at auction as a rough runner, and all the regulars were telling me not to buy it etc etc..... Only things they didn't know was my dad used to work at the auction, so knew the auctioneer etc etc.....

£95 later, one two owner Pug 205 GTi.... running rough because plug leads 3 and 4 were on the wrong way round

Bought 4 205 GTi since - all under £300 each....

RichardPON

[Edited by SCC PERFORMANCE - 4/26/2003 9:29:38 AM]

RB5#295

I haven't read the replies,but I'm giving away an Alfa 164 V6 that I did 26k in over only 4 months last year.

See here

Fen

Edited to say I've just noticed you're in Edinburgh, so possibly not a good option for you after all...

[Edited by RB5#295 - 4/26/2003 10:05:40 AM]

RB5#295

I bought an Uno at auction for £30 for the registration number.

OK, it cost £80 to get the number off and £20 in fuel, but I sold the car on for £50 afterwards. Other than getting it to storage I didn't drive it though.

Fen

Bullet Proof

Was given a battered up Nissan Micra 1.0l which I drove for several months...when I picked it up it had no oil showing on the dipstick and the rad was only 1/2 full....apparently had not been touched/looked at since the last service 10 months ago! Even so a quick top up and it was fine for the next 5k miles....however I would never drive it above 70 as I didnt fancy seeing the afterlife early!!!

Best bit was seeing the look on the salemans faces when I turned up and said I want to by a Scooby turbo!!!!! Strangely they thought I was taking the mic! 18 months on and I would not swap the scooby though!!!!

NACRO

Sierra 4X4 with an almost full tank of petrol £60 icluding buyers premium!

4 months MOT and 4 legal tyres, it got brought in at the end of the auction when everyone else had gone home on afreezing winters night. It drove faultlessly at high speed and was so good I took it on a touring holiday of Europe. Someone had poured brake fluid on the bonnet so the paint had flaked but otherwise it was in perfect condition and had a load of service history and even some road tax.

One bonnet a slightly different shade of red yto the rest of the car later and it didn't look too bad considering it was the price of half a night out!

Just before the MOT expired it was twocked and the insurance payed out £580 notes for it- result.

TurboBoost

I once bought a Capri 1.6 for £70 at auction. It was a grot box bodily, but the interior was surprisngly clean and someone had put a twin choke weber on so it went quite well for a 1.6.

One day the gearbox came loose and just dropped out of it when parked up, but it wasn't terminal, just that the bolts had come loose. Cost zilch to fix.

I had it for two fun filled weeks then PX'd it for £150 against a signal yellow Mk2 Escort 1600 Sport(doubling my money!), it remains the only car I've ever sold for more than I bought it for.

cletterridge

Update: just been out (on my bike!) round Edinburghs dodgier car forecourts and found a G-plate Volvo 340, one owner, all the history, 11 months MOT, never smoked in, great condition - all for only £190! Must be bargain of the week, shame it's still about twice what I'm hoping to spend!

planky

mk1 golf driver bought for 50 quid(noisy gearbox,no oil in it and still worked!?!)and sold the car for £800.

IWatkins

K Reg Pug 306 1.4 XL. Bought for £1.

Perfect for trips to the shops or doing a tip run.

Reffro

Crappy Capri 1.6, me and my mates bought when we were 16 yrs old and at boarding school. We clubbed together and bought it for 40 quid. It had two months tax and MOT, we used at weekends to get out and away from the school or in evenings to go to friends/girlfriends houses. The front wing was held on slamming the bonnet on to trap it on, and there was no key, we just used to ram a screwdriver into the doors or ignition. It lasted until the oil disappeared off the bottom of the dipstick and it seized, about 8 weeks after we got it. Fortunately it seized at the top of the town, well more of a village on the side of a steep hill, so we took it out of gear and rolled downhill at 50mph to get scrap yard at the bottom of the hill. We got 10 quid back for it.

[Edited by Reffro - 4/26/2003 7:57:40 PM]

MR2 Rob

Bought my first car, a Citroen Visa 11RE (wow) for £60 plus an old bike so the guy could get to work, kept it for 10 months and sold it for £475 to a guy who came to see it with a cheque already written out for it. We bit his arm off!!!

imlach

cletteridge - go to the auction at Longstone (down from Sighthill/Wester Hailes) on a Mon & Thu at 6.30pm. Goes on until 9-10pm and is full of shady looking characters, but good fun. Just watch out for the carbon monoxide poisoning! It gets quite noxious in the hall. Go outside and see the cars you're interested in being started up before their run through the hall....target 3-4 cars - keep it to simple stuff - Polos, Micras, etc, but don't discount anything big or unusual.

You WILL pick up a banger for £50 - I bought the Volvo 240 there, and mates have all successfully bought VW Polos etc there - one of which ran for over a year, the other is still going strong 3 years later - both were under £100 and have since had practically only several £10s of pounds spent on them (ie, all been cheap to keep running).

The first few cars ALWAYS go through for < £100 - takes a bit of nerve, but you can't lose much if it all goes **** up. Of ALL the cars me & my mates have bought from auction, only one was a dog that only worked for a day or two - that's 1 out of maybe 10-15 cars....

DON'T buy from these shady looking 2nd hand dealers, as their cars usually come from the same auction but for 2-3 times the price!!

imlach

PS Cletteridge - don't be fussy at the £50 level. Just get a set of wheels, get out there, and enjoy the fun of the banger....

You're always on edge for first few days wondering if you've bought a shed on wheels, and you'll forever wonder at what unexpected point it is going to expire, but that's have the fun - it makes it a challenge.

Love 'em. You drive around knowing you've spent less than 1 night on the tiles on a car, whereas the people in the BMWs, Mercs, Scoobys, etc have all spent £20k+ on theirs - does make you drive more aggresively though as you know you have nowt to lose in city-centre scrapes.....

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Salvage Pug 308 "Look", bought for 140 2 years ago, I had it a while, my dad uses it to go to work until he gets a proper car but noe carnt be bothered and bought another bike !

its a really nice little car, tidy body once it had a new grille and the engine just keepos going in a rattly manner, juswt got a new MOT.

Pug 309's are bombproof !

Turbo_Nutter

Best bargain I had was free. It was a ****reon Visa. A guy bought a Montego off me that I bought from an auction. He gave me what I was asking then asked me if I wanted the Visa. At first I said no but then he mentioned it was still taxed so I took it. It had 3/4 tank of fuel in it. I found a brand new haynes manual in the back, so kept that. Took the tax disc out and got a £30 refund on it. Sold the car to my brother for £15 who ran it out of fuel and dumped it.

cletterridge

Imlach, you ever been to the Waverly car auction? Now THAT'S shady! Every Sunday at 3 in the Waverly station indoor carpark (just after the car boot sale finishes). I've never seen a car go for more than about £1,500 there, and the vast majority of them go for under £300. It's basically where people who can't afford to scrap their wrecks go to offload their heaps on unsuspecting punters.

I'll be there tomorrow!

imlach

The Waverley car auction is BAD!

You see, the problem is, is that it is private punters trying to sell their REALLY bad bangers onto unsuspecting public.

The Longstone one at least is mostly trade, and most of the cars are just trade-ins given to franchised dealers....who just want shot of them...

You can spot the "private" sales at the Longstone auction a mile off (esp since it doesn't say "main dealer direct" on the sticker!). I tend to be more wary of private sales at auction, as almost guaranteed to be dodgy. Main dealer direct ones sometimes prove to be the best bargains esp with granny cars - nice and simple Polos, Micras etc.

fastka

mitsubishi colt mirage 1500cc with a 4 speed box and an overdrive.

cost £70 and was absolutely brilliant, really wish that i had never sold it!

last i heard it was being used as a grass track racer up in lancashire somewhere...

no tax or mot, needed a whole new front end, ( wings, bonnet ) and cost about £200 to get legal
engine was sound and quite impressive performance, only looked a bit tatty
sold it on a year later for £120

[Edited by fastka - 4/27/2003 4:57:35 PM]

Glenn_R

My father once bought a Morris Marina for a tenner and sold it on a couple of months later for £75 - result

He saw the bloke who bought it a few weeks later and asked him how the car was going. "Not very well" he replied "Couple of days after I bought it off you I was driving down a steep hill, went for the brakes and nothing happended"!! The Marina was was written off and the guy was lucky to get out with only minor injuries!!!

Flat 4x4

I had a Burago model of a red Alfa Romeo Montreal that was pretty cool (well I was 10) - it had folding seats and wheels that turned...