RS's Adventures in Small Renaults

[Junkman]

Although having said that the early models apparently drive quite differently.

They drive the same. They just sound differently and you shift up later.

[Renault Sierra]

And so we continue.

The first issues were all cooling related, the radiator was knackered and the cooling system full of sludge which one day started projectiling out of the expansion tank. A new Hella radiator was acquired for a mere £28 and the sludge eventually cleared out for fresh coolant (I assume you all know what a radiator looks like so I won't attach pictures). More problematic was the cooling fan which no longer seemed to work, probably due to the ridiculous wiring spaghetti previous owners installed to operate it. I chickened out of doing anything with this and paid a man to do it instead.

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I then replaced the faulty condensor with a new Der Franzose item which promptly killed most of my consumable ignition components, necessitating a full ignition service.

It became clear as MoT time approached that some welding was going to be needed as there were some clearly obvious holes in the chassis side crossmembers.

Luckily my Morris Minor owning friend runs a fabrication and welding business and one of his long term projects is creating a full stainless steel floorpan for his Traveller (that can then serve as a template for either stainless or galvanised mild steel floorpans for customers' cars). In return for help removing the remains of the body from the chassis of the donor/project car he offered to do my welding.

Angle grinders were thus wielded and this...

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...turned into this.

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With that out of the way the R4 was brought in and welding began.

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The knackered track rod ends were replaced at the same time.

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Unfortunately the MoT man's hammer turned my front chassis leg into this.

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So it was back to the workshop.

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And a clean pass was acheived.

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[The Reverend Bluejeans]

It's worth remembering that in real terms, the French built the best everyday cars you could buy in the 60's and 70s and arguably the eighties. By that I mean ride comfort, general pleasantness and ease of use although Citroens are just a bit too weird and needy. When I say everyday I mean run of the mill get you to work, a car as a servant to do its job. However, folk have their own prejudices - by rights, demand for the Mini should have evaporated in the UK when the R5 arrived, the 104, original Polo etc. Bizarrely, the cynically nasty Fiesta Mark 1 was more popular here than all of those. British car buying habits are strange.

Can't trust this foreign stuff when the sills have fallen off a Mini after 4 years or you're wobbling down the road in some Cortina whilst the rear axle is doing its best to fall out.

[mercrocker]

I actually believe that the Mini should have evaporated upon arrival of the R4.....It should certainly have seen off the ADO16.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

The 1100 was a good car though - compare it to the Anglia, Viva HA etc. They were a deserved success imo.

[Junkman]

The ADO16 wasn't only good, it was brilliant. It consistently outsold its competitors in its home market, sold in the hundreds of thousands abroad, was built in 12 countries and spawned a plethora of derivative cars in various markets. It was a rousing success by any standard.

[mercrocker]

Never really understood their appeal but there you go, can't argue with popularity.....

[Forddeliveryboy]

It's worth remembering that in real terms, the French built the best everyday cars you could buy in the 60's and 70s and arguably the eighties. By that I mean ride comfort, general pleasantness and ease of use although Citroens are just a bit too weird and needy. When I say everyday I mean run of the mill get you to work, a car as a servant to do its job. However, folk have their own prejudices - by rights, demand for the Mini should have evaporated in the UK when the R5 arrived, the 104, original Polo etc. Bizarrely, the cynically nasty Fiesta Mark 1 was more popular here than all of those. British car buying habits are strange.

Can't trust this foreign stuff when the sills have fallen off a Mini after 4 years or you're wobbling down the road in some Cortina whilst the rear axle is doing its best to fall out.

French stuff was usually the toughest, also - even now many properly rural communities have a large number of Renaults chugging about for that very reason. Thing was, finding a good mechanic who appreciated either French or German stuff must have been a difficult task back then - even now there's a form of vehicle racism in that breed which surfaces every now and then, generally against the French stuff. Perhaps German cars escaped because they cost so much (so often had better heeled owners) and provided cheap thrills with fast engines. As a kid, the local garage was run by a family from Oxfordshire and were openly hostile about anything from the Land of the Rising Sun.

A lot of people back then trusted their mechanic's opinion of what was a good car, it was usually a Ford because by the seventies they were still simple to work on. I've seen the damage inflicted on relatively inexpensive but beautifully designed French cars by those who'd rarely tightened anything into alloy let alone understood a structure designed by good engineers using slide rules. The French had fine machinery whether you were spending very little or quite a lot, unlike our then class-bound society, something which suggested they clearly weren't to be trusted.

Before 1972 there was also an import tax on that funny foreign stuff, making our own cars look better value at the point of purchase.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

A Pug 504 had a certain level of strength and reliability, and Mercedes made basically the same thing (W123) and charged a shitload more money for it. That sort of reliability and lifespan should be the norm and it showed how crap most cars were back then.

French workers could be bolshy fuckers though. I'm reading a 1974 CAR and their long term 504 that had a strange knock when it went around corners. It could not be found until the car was involved in a heavy crash - upon stripping it for repair, the bodyshop found a big metal weight suspended by a bit of fishing wire and a hand written note saying 'you found it at last'.

[mercrocker]

No worse than jam sandwiches (the polite kind) in Marina door panels, I suppose.....