What was the first car you bought

Austin 1100 with a rusty subframe (did not realise), loaned the money of my chap and even had to pay interest on the £125
 
£125 austin alegro.(all agro).
what a bag of s**** .sheared a front driveshaft in the hub in about three weeks.
followed by a very nice viva hc(1256 woooooo) that i had for a couple of years. then sold it and bought anoher bike. my dad went mental.
suzuki gsx 250. was i cool. or what?
 
The first car I owned was a Vauxhall Nova 1.2 Sting which my parents got me for my 17th Birthday :woot:

The first car I bought was a Cavalier GSI Turbo :cuckoo:
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Identical to this!
 
The first car I bought (after being given an old banger which I failed to get back on the road and then being given my dad's old car) was an Austin Champ similar to this

champffr.gif


2.8 litre Rolls Royce engine (fully sealed in order to wade through deep water), 5 gears - forwards AND backwards. An amazing piece of kit!

Traded my dad's old car in for it with a value of £185 in 1973 and part-exchanged it + £100 on finance for an MGB in 1974. Oh happy days!
 
Vauxhall Viva HA something like this in 1974 can't remember the year or how much

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martynbez said:
1.1 f reg fiesta! no one said it would do over 50mph!!!!!!

how wrong where they when i had a photo of it doing 67mph! :) and 3 points! :(
Click to expand...

Must have been downhill... ;)

Couldn't break the national speed limit then :lol: :lol:
 
I had an X reg Mini Mayfair, it should have been £350, but when i tapped the front arch with my hand, my fist went straight through it, it was so rotten. So the guy knocked off 50quid, and gave me a tenner for some petrol, because i had travelled a whole 1/2 mile to his house. I'm glad my cheeky uncle was with me to see this thing, i'd have apologized for the wing, and asked if he wanted me to pay for it:lol::lol::lol::lol: I spent £1100 getting it rebuilt with all new door skins, front wings, a panel's, and boot lid welded and boot removed. Then it was sprayed Island Blue with an Antique White roof, back stripped out, roll cage, 10" GB Magnesium Wheels, awesome car, handled like it was on rails. But alas, the enigine gave up and it had to go. I actually cried when i sold it, it was my baby:'(:'(
 
Ok, I can bore you all to tears with this one! :D As part of a series we are running on another forum, we have all contributed stories of our early days of driving. Now I don't claim to be any great writer, so apologies for grammatical errors, etc, but here was part of mine! [sorry, long post]


On 27th May 1986, I sat in the drivers seat of the Vauxhall Nova, waving wildly at my Dad who was standing looking in the window of the car spares shop, conveniently located next door to the Test Centre, while the examiner wrote out my pass certificate. Dad is trying to gesticulate discreetly for me to STFU but of course I was in no mood to work out why and feigned ignorance. In 3 months and 3 days I had learnt to pass my driving test [I was, and remain for now, the only woman in my family to do so at the first attempt], now I wanted to get out there and learn to drive. [I have no doubt Mr LL will probably point out that almost exactly 22 years later I still haven’t achieved that aim, but he is just plain picky]
As soon as the examiner got out of the car I jumped out, ran round the car and started dancing on the pavement – dad sort of physically shoved me back in the car looking very embarrassed. The test centre was very quiet that hour and the only other examinee was a lady of about 35 who was driving an automatic, mainly because she had no left leg – apparently she had returned to the test centre some 10 minutes before me and by the time I arrived was in tears, which was why dad was trying to calm me down so as not to upset her even more – oops! I suppose it has to be said that I started my driving career as I meant to go on, embarrassing the poor sod in the passenger seat with gay abandon.

However, it was the school holidays and Dad had booked a few days off work, so his first task was to take us out for the day, with me driving, on a motorway. I should mention here that whilst I was still a learner dad had been a great teacher, little catch phrases like ‘read the road’ have stuck with me ever since. I remember him sitting down after my first few lessons and getting out a Haynes manual and showing me what a clutch was and what was happening each time I pressed and released the pedal, which worked wonders for my understanding and ability to operate the clutch smoothly. His oft repeated mantra was ‘treat the pedals like they are made of glass’ – a phrase he was taught when he was learning to drive. Anyway, I digress, its Wednesday and we are off to Stapeley Water gardens, which requires a journey on the motorways. Dad had decided that I needed to learn how to deal with motorways asap. Oh the wonders of driving at 60mph, the reduced steering input needed, the need for eyes in the back of your head as well as a few extra mirrors, the discovery that BMW’s live in the fast lane and old people in small cars frequent the middle of the motorway regardless of any lack of traffic in the inside lane. All was new and exciting to a newly qualified 17 year old driver with rapidly developing need for speed. We arrived at Stapely and dad muttered to my friend something along the lines of ‘please try and stop her becoming a petrolhead, she listens to YOU’ – poor Janet, talk about parental pressure, she had already been having lessons for 8 months and no test date likely yet, how the hell she was meant to stop me was anyone’s guess.

Still, I soon discovered why dad had been so keen to teach me to drive, in fact, it was the day after, Thursday – snooker at the club with his mates night. He asked me if I would I drive him over there – absolutely, even I worked out that it meant I got to drive back on my own for the first time ever!! Yeah!! It was only when we arrived he asked rather too casually if I was planning on joining him there later – Thursday was also darts night for me normally, but we actually had a ‘bye’ that week as the team we were meant to be playing had folded a few weeks previously – and THAT was when the penny dropped with a clang that could be heard 2 postcodes away – I was to be offishul chauffeur [mum had started working in a care home for the elderly so often worked nights and wasn’t there to run him round], which meant I couldn’t drink – not that I did of course, I wasn’t old enough….BUGGERATION!!

I soon became used to being the nominated driver, with dad, my best mate Wendy who couldn’t drive, and of course my fellow sixth formers, I was often seen carting several drunken yobs around. It did mean mum and dad needed to sort me out with transport, the Nova was still less than 2 years old and they really didn’t want me having any intimate moments with lampposts or anything else equally solid whilst driving their pride and joy. So, in the middle of June, Dad found me a car. On his walk to and from work [he let Mum have the car for her job, shopping and so on] he had to pass by a used car sales place that had all the shiny cars on the forecourt and the px wrecks out the back. It was one of those wrecks that was earmarked as ‘Yvonne’s school bus’

The chosen one was a £220 1975 ‘P’ plate Datsun 120Y estate in faded orange with complimentary and matching rust holes in all panels, black vinyl upholstery, a noisy engine and loads of boot space. Dad drove it the half mile home, and then started work on it – oil and filter change, new spark plugs, points, rotor arm and distributor cap – do we all remember the days of ‘self service’??
Next, the rust work had to be attended to, which was another opportunity to teach Yvonne some automotive DIY – I was soon to be found in old jeans and t-shirt, bashing out rust, applying kurust and getting all arty with filler. By the time I had worked my way round the entire car, I could have got a job in any F1 team as a wind tunnel model maker, so skilled was I at making filler look like the original panel shapes. Hell, I could even work out how thin the already very thin metal could get before it actually had to be removed and replaced with something more solid – like plasticine.
Anyway, eventually the car was ready to have its ‘bog’ hidden….yes, out came the paintbrush! Luckily the cornflower blue paint from a few years earlier [note, this refers to a previous article regarding hand painting cars] had run out so I was allowed some choice of colour… but it had to be red or …well…red…..due to a surplus of appropriate paint at work. So red it was, with the obligatory galloping black line to hide the bog round its flanks of course, but I didn’t care, finally I had my own wheels and I got to drive to school, park in the spot in the carpark where the repulsive geography teacher usually parked and swan into the 6th form common room swinging my keys and looking super cool….in my big baggy hand knitted jumper and scrotty old jeans, permed hair, army & navy surplus shoulder bag….you get the idea…totally uncool, but I had WHEELS – for the first time in my life I became the most popular kid in school. Well ok, most popular in the sixth form anyway, most popular of some 50 students in all.
Soon we started on the weekly pub trip – between 8 and 12 of us would each week choose a pub somewhere out of town, usually on or just off the main A6 south, and we would pile into the Datsun and head off for a gentle drinking session. I am still not sure to this day how we managed to shoehorn so many in but we had known each other for a few years which was useful as it was certainly ‘intimate’ especially if you drew the short straw and got the tailend ‘seats’. After a few months, I even got to join in with the drinking and general merriment when Daniel passed his test and his mother allowed him the use of her own clapped out Japanese estate car, so we alternated the driving duties week on week. This didn’t go down totally well with some of the guys in our group – by this time I had totally rebelled against education and had already been frequenting pubs Thursday to Sunday every week, and NO self respecting 17yr old boy can be comfortable being seen to be less able to consume alcohol than the 17yr old girl he’s sat next too, especially when she still outwits him in the A Level maths class the following morning. It occurred to me several years later that had I drunk more alcohol before every A level maths class, I might have faired better than the grade E I eventually got.

The Datsun was plodding on regardless, as they always did, consuming nearly as much oil as petrol but starting first time every time and suffering the hamfisted driving skills with the tolerant indulgence of a perennial god parent. So bomb proof was the car, that it even survived when dad told me to get the red oil container from the garage to top up the oil, only to find he had inadvertently given the wrong container colour and that instead of used engine oil from Nova, what was actually in it was a mix of very used engine oil [I think it had been through both the Nova AND and the Datsun] creosote for waterproofing fence panels. Now I was no mechanic back then but even I figured out that the plumes of black smoke billowing from the exhaust like an extinguished dragon, with that familiar pungency of fence coating, was not totally good. In fact I was so switched on, I worked out this was baaaad and even turned the engine off again, before the neighbours could think to call the fire brigade. Still, at least the much abused machine was treated to an oil and filter change that evening and blast down motorway for a couple of junctions to clear out the crap.
Sadly this was the beginning of the end for my first car, a few weeks later I was heading home up a hill from the town centre when it went all weird on me. The engine was revving but the car was getting slower. Pulled over, pulled on the handbrake, proceeded to attempt normal hill start, and all was well again, until I put it in third and once again, revs start rising, car starts falling. Dropping it into second got me to the top, just and from there it was slightly down hill and the flat – here all seemed well. Explained it to my dad and he rolled his eyes ceilingward “great, you have buggered the clutch”. I was in turn gobsmacked, then mortified, then bloody angry, my clutch usage wasn’t THAT bad…was it?? How could I argue? Didn’t really matter, either way, replacing a Japanese style clutch was beyond even my fathers ability or desire, so it was so long to my beloved and voluminous estate car. It was replaced with another Japanese model, a Toyota, the name of which escapes me but basically it was the mid 70’s Starlet predessesor and no use whatsoever for lugging more than a few friend around.
I missed the big car and I wonder if dad did too, as 4 years later when my sister passed her test at the second asking, he bought her…..


….a 120Y coupe!
 
^^^ record for the biggest post:eek:
 
an err.....1970 Hillman Imp. 2 months MOT,4 spare wheels and half a tank of petrol.....all for ten quid (in 1981). By the time I had started to do it up (and turned 17) I realised it was a "bit" :D past it, so it was replaced by a £100 1974 version. That wasn't much better , but at least I still had the first car for spares :lol::lol:
 
If there was a "what was your first motorbike" thread I would admit to it being a 1957 James Captain powered by a 197cc Villiers 2 stroke engine that was yonks ago:lol:
 
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