Leaderboard

I have had three cars vandalized in my time and its a horrible feeling.The first was my Mk1 RS200, it was spotless. I was followed home one night by an old heap of a mk 1. the next morning it hd paint stripper onto the roof and boot. I used to get lots of greif with it other boy racers and old bill. 2 A Opel Monza was broken into and an attempt was made to remove the radio. As this was not possible a Stanley knife was take to every seat and door panel. This was outside my parents house. 3 My Supra Turbo was parked in B&Q and it was just in the wrong spot as mine and three others were badly keyed. On the plus side the insurance paid for a full pukka respray. So when the time came to buy a Esprit I was a bit worried. Not that Im public enemy no1 but not had much luck with cars that are a bit different. Overall though the reaction has been great. Neighbours have been pictured in it and it has been the conservastion at petrol stations many times. I wil admit I am still paranoid where I park it. But it always makes me smile when little boys come running over to look at it. Just as my two do every time its out.

I'm with Johnny on that and I would think your estimates on prices for respray and interior trim are very light. If you want to do an Essex replica then I think it would be better to start with a car that actually needs a respray and interior surely? Trevor.

It's worth checking out the bushes. The dampers will (hopefully) dampen movement along the line of those pistons but the bushes will allow the car to move relative to the wheels by means of rocking the components. On the '83 the front wheels are secured by the pivot bushes and the ARB, on the rear it's the link arms and the front pivot bush on the arm.

I think that what people do, come back to them in due time in some form. Being mocked, shot, robbed, becoming very ill etc. When people do something bad, it all comes back to them. Poor bastards, they'll toast soon enough. Very sorry to hear about the vandalism, and hope you have it repaired to your satisfaction soon. Things like this really test us and we have tonot let ourselves go down on their simple-minded criminal level, even though it's tempting; you are way too good a human being for that I reckon. If there's any light in this, at least it was not stolen, or set on fire. The times we live in these days I see more and more people hiding behind fences to be free of these kind of things. Understandable. Unfortunately I also think it just makes it worse as the scumbags get's even more angry at themselves and the rest of the community. Envy doesn't create anything good as we've seen. Best thing is to keep it out of sight. In my country we say: " out of sight - out of mind". Good protection. That's what everyone I know do. I am surprised that you actually could have it openly parked on the street for a few days without being stolen. In my town, it would have been stolen by xxxx's in ½ hour. The police? Never there. Don't let the bitterness take over. Enjoy the possibility that you have, to get to drive your very nice and rare Esprit Darren: That woman belongs in a mental hospital. Kind regards, Jacques.

A decent vinyl company will be able to do them perfectly from pictures. One of our members had a JPS done from scratch and it was perfect!

Great timing John! So another update Trial fitted the compressor and alternator Should clear the water pump outlet ok. As I'm ending up with just two belts I was concerned about the belt wrap on the compressor, so I put in a belt tensioner. This also means I don't have to worry about a traditional tensioner for the alternator. As you can see there's no cambelt tensioner in at the moment. I decided to change the threaded spring tensioner to the hex head version for aircon cars. I've just got a couple of spacers in there instead so I could mount the bracket for testing purposes. Here are the compressor fittings in the engine bay waiting for the re fit Aircon hoses run across the subframe then in to the condenser I found some high temperature foam to seal up the ducting. The aircon hoses I had planned to run through the tunnel, and I think that there is enough space to do that but I was worried about fouling the gearchange. Instead I ran them alongside the backbone box frame. One on each side, they ride up over the body/chassis mounts, then through convenient holes in the front and rear subframes. The front end is now all put together, including the new hoses to the radiator. The sierra radiator has the inlet/outlet the other way up to the orignal radiator. It made sense to run the hoses in the original orientation at the front, and I'll cross them over at the engine end. It has taken a while digging through some radiator hose bins to find the correct angles. As you can see in the pictures above I've used a small length of alloy pipe on the drivers side. A couple of weekends and the motor will go back in. Cheers, Simon