That Felicia was so great. With some love it could have easily still been going for a long time, Shame it got really mouldy...
I had one, it was my baby, it was my baby that in a moment of fucking stupendously retarded idiocy I scrapped. Facelifted 1.3 MPi. £400. Ran beautifully, while I had it I only had 2 garage trips at first. It went in for MOT which it passed (we'll gloss over the list of advisories so large it ran onto a 2nd sheet of paper and I am not joking it was seriously that long) and then it went in to have new front tyres and a front alignment done as the MOT had bought that up as an advisory. Then came dominos pizza. 2 months I did pizza delivery for. 5 shifts a week usually doing 30 deliveries a shift (although once I did over 50). Call it 8 weeks at 5 shifts a week and 30 trips. Each trip requires starting the engine at dominos, turning it off and locking the car at the address (seriously in my town you lock the car, another driver had their car nicked while they were making a delivery in a block of flats) before coming back and starting the engine to drive back to dominos so that is the key being used to start the car twice per delivery. 30*2 = 60. 60 times in one day turning that key? 2400 in 2 months. While on the job I wore the switch out. Then like a complete fucktard I didnt invest even nearly enough time in finding the replacement part and didnt think of the facepalmingly obvious approach of soldering another push switch in parallel. A garage actually had the car for 2 weeks to look at and diagnose, they tried billing us £500 to replace every fuse, the starter relay, starter solenoid, starter motor, flywheel and battery which would have been great if not for the fact that they were not the problem, then they tried to charge us £80 to undo their needless work. Not only was it needless work but it was booked in for diagnosis only, we gave absolutely zero permission for them to replace parts, they never asked us before replacing parts, we certainly wouldnt have authorised £500 worth of shit. Trading standards were involved over that and yet they still hold a 5 star best of St Neots rating. Hell, I'm going to name and shame them. Tackwood MOT And Service Centre of Foundry Way, Little End Road Industrial Estate, Eaton Socon, St Neots, Cambs, PE198TR. Avoid at all costs, I have idiotically used them on other occasions and been absolutely appalled by them. Additionally when collecting car from them (which btw bump started fine and the electrics came on when the key was turned, it literally just wasnt recognising you turning the key the whole way to start the engine) it came back full of rubbish, boot full of scrap metal, with the plastics under the steering column removed and also the fusebox it turns out can be unclipped from its position in the top of the passenger footwell (they claimed the rubbish was not theres, I certainly don't carry rusty catalytic converters and metal braces with FORD stamped into them in my car, I don't shop at Sainsburys, I don't eat KFC and I don't drink Costa, I now take photographs of my vehicles before leaving them with garages to prove what state they were left in and in a future incident with this garage again had to use them). They also insisted it was impossible to be the starter switch, however once I got the car back from the garage a guy from a skoda forum that had seen a post I made about the issue came over with a multimeter and confirmed on the spot that the switch was buggered within 5 minutes. So there we go. 5 minutes with a multimeter to do 1 little check vs 2 weeks of such appallingly bad service from Tackwood that it almost makes a man want to cry. Then of course I failed to track down the replacement part. I failed to think of the idea of soldering a switch in parallel with the worn one. I scrapped the car for £150. I seriously regret it. In just about every way it was superior to my current car.
That is a huge shame. The only problem i had in the year which i utterly abused it, was one of the front spring cups corroded though, so the spring was resting on the tyre. Drove for like a week like that without noticing, and it had rubbed through to the metal part of the tyre. Apparently this was a common problem, and when replacing the strut i checked the other side and it was fairly new, so obviously had happened before. It nice to see one on the roads, there kind of rare nowadays.
I am planning on getting another one. I keep an eye on auto trader, the skoda forums sale section and ebay from time to time, waiting for things to line up financially which they would do if not for work reducing my hours, if they hadnt done that then I found a car I could go to look at and buy on pay day even but now I work less hours and thats going to leave me with a smaller paycheck this month :/
£400. Taxed, MOT'ed (although both expired while I owned it). Think it had done about 100k miles at time of death. Only thing actually wrong with it besides its huge list of advisories and the faulty switch was that the radio turned itself on all the time and would drain the battery. I pulled the radio out and used it as another storage cubby, although it could have just been replaced instead.
Sounds good, i looked on autotrader and there going for around £500 now. My cousin purchased a VW Golf Mk1 1.3 for around £500 off of an elderly couple last year. He said he could sell it for around £1000 this year which is a nice profit haha but I think he likes it a bit too much.
Mine was looked after really well too. Came with haynes manual. Previous owner rebuilt the gearbox and diff aswell as giving the engine a once over (dont know if he went total rebuild on that), not because it needed doing but because it was meant for his daughter and he wanted to make sure it was in perfect running order first, and it was. Even got a new clutch. Daughter of course had run about in it a bit, but she did under 1000 miles on it. Was a real bargain. First 3 things I noticed when I got my corsa. Did they stick the power steering from a truck in this thing? Christ there is no torque from this engine (1 litre). Then traffic lights came up, fuck these brakes are weedy.
I reckon you may want to spend a little more to get a car that'll stay roadlegal for a while. sure, Jeremys car was roadlegal... But it probably would've failed its MOT the next year. There's always a reason people sell their cars. You can get some pretty decent hatchbacks for 275GBP. That's what I bought my first car for, and I rode around in it for 3 years before I found a hole in the floor that could've been fixed 2 years earlier if I wasn't too lazy to do it back then..
Speaking of Felicias... My dad bought a brand new Skoda Felicia combi with the GLXi package, it was a 1.3 MPI, and it was used ever since, driven pretty often, it was everything from a daily driver to a familly hauler, driving in winter, through snow, through muddy roads and tiny creeks, and now we have to pay the toll. It is rusting BAD, and we had to do lots of home hacking to make it do the inspection (front foglights were smashed, we had to cover them with electric tape, the tailgate was rusted badly, had to be changed for a aftermarket plastic piece of junk), and i am afraid that it won't be worth doing the next isnspection, as the overall undercarriage and everything rust is real bad, it will have to go. Dad lets me drive the thing when we get to a cottage of ours, on old dirty tarmac roads where is no traffic, and it cruises fine. no bad shaking, no extensive noise, engine is good, but the rest of the car isn't, it has about 300k on the odo, so the rust could be expected. The thing i want to scrap from the car though is a set of very very rare (possibly dealer option) 5 spoke alloy skoda wheels, and they are so rare that i could not even find any pictures of them, and i have seen them like 2 times somewhere except our car. They are not in as bad shape as the rest of the car is, so they definitley will be worth something. When hit 18, i will probably want to buy a used Felicia, preferably with as little rust as possible, so that i won't buy a car for 2 years. It will probably be a fun driver. I have many ideas about how i will customize it, but things might change, so these are just ideas. Pic of the car i just took, its standing there in the rain, waiting for somebody to take it for it ride (yeah, the car in my signature). fyi the ford standing on the right is my dad's new ride, a 08' Galaxy 2.0 TDCi. And sorry for the bad quality, it was taken from the 3rd floor with my phone.
Well i only have the two Ford Escorts now, the rest have been scrapped! Most were found in the local buying/selling newspaper, but nowadays they seem to be much less popular. I highly recommend checking Gumtree, there are a lot of really cheap cars, some road legal, some not. And honestly id be happy to sell the Escort hatchback, but its located in Aberdeenshire, so its probably too far away.
Want batshit mental. VW 1.4AFH 16v headers on a VW 1.6AVY bottom end. That gives a decently specced engine which can then be installed onto the factory gearbox. The stock 1.4AFH engine is meant to be a decent swap already though. Fuel economy not far off the stock 1.3mpi yet more powerful than the 1.6mpi. Fits onto one of the stock gearbox housings too (cant remember if its the 1.3 or 1.6 housing as they are different). Fitting bike carbs onto a 1.4AFH engine is also a popular mod on the VWs, I should think its possible on the skoda too. You don't have to worry about the gearbox and clutch being upto it, turns out skoda massively overbuilt them, work fine. The fact you can use a stock gearbox really simplifies things though, there are even more potent engine swaps available but fitting an alternate front gearbox that sits in a different location on a front wheel drive vehicle is quite complicated, got to make custom driveshafts that fit correctly without binding the suspension or steering or being under too much stress themselves. http://www.briskoda.net/forums/forum/178-classic-technical-guides/ may offer some reading.
Thats seems like a really low sum of money to get anything. I dont even think you can get a old motorcycle for that kind of money! haha. One car that I scored with was a 1999 mercedes c280 sport for $1000 but the master cylinder was damaged so I replaced that for $90. That would be around 601 pounds.
Depends what your looking for. A road legal car thats not on its last legs, youre probably looking at £400-500 minimum. But a car thats got no MOT and needs a lot of work to pass another one, you can get cars for £100, sometimes lower.
