Workshop Skills: Project Shoestring
With classic car values continuing their inexorable rise, we set ourselves the goal of buying a classic to be proud of and putting it on the road, all for under £1500. The car we found was a 1984 Triumph Acclaim, and now we are ready to break out the span
We start preparing our Acclaim for a return to the road, all the time keeping a strict eye on the cost of repairs.
This Acclaim is a little like the curate’s egg, but in the modern sense of being good in parts and bad in others rather than the original usage of being wholly bad but you are too polite to say so! The interior is in very good shape, as they usually are on Acclaims. It could do with a clean and a spruce up, but hopefully won’t need much in the way of expenditure. The bodywork is more of a problem, though. Fortunately it is remarkably solid and rust free, so welding repairs should not eat into the budget. There are one or two minor scabs, but all round I would have to say it is an excellent base to work from. However, the driver’s door is very clearly a different shade to the rest of the car. It is not immediately clear why this should be so and it may be possible to even things out with elbow grease and some cutting compound, but I am not holding my breath because red is a notoriously hard colour to bring back once it has started fading.
A bigger concern is the offside rear wing though, which has more of a matte finish over some filler. Luckily the skin here is only a single affair – you can see the other side of the panel inside the boot, and it is clear that this filler has been applied to repair a minor knock rather than rust or a heavy shunt. It has not been done particularly well, but equally it is not terrible and that was key to the decision to take the plunge and buy this particular car. You cannot expect perfection when shopping in the bargain basement, and my hope is that I can do all the mechanical and servicing work needed on my budget, and maybe a little tidying up of the body here and there.
That will have it looking presentable and enjoyable to drive. I can then decide if I like it enough to spend a little more
on the cosmetics. After all, it makes no sense to invest all of this up front before I know whether it is a keeper. And if you are tempted to follow a similar budget route, then it really does make sense to do the essentials first, only feeding in the nicebut-not- essential items later as time and finances allow.
The list of essential parts that may need changing on a car that has been left standing for any length of time can seem a long one, but there are generally three areas which can quickly double your initial outlay if you have bought cheaply – tyres, exhaust and battery. This Acclaim’s battery is definitely suspect, but replacing that would be a largish £50 chunk out of the modest budget right away, so I started off by putting it on trickle charge to see if it could be revived.
This sort of approach is key to working on a tight budget because the basic rule on a project like this is not to rush out and buy all the parts you think you may need, but rather to wait and see if you really do need them. It might take a little longer working this way if you have to pause and wait for parts to arrive, but you are balancing your time against the cost and so it really depends on how much that is worth. The only caveat to this is to remember that if you are paying postage, then one bigger order probably makes more sense than lots of little ones from the same supplier.
The exhaust looks sound, and the back box still has a Unipart sticker on it, so I was hopeful of saving some pennies there – exhausts are not cheap on the Acclaim, a back-box section costing up to £150 if you can find one. However, later when I was getting the car ready to take for its MoT, I could hear the exhaust blowing. Closer examination showed water was spraying from the front of the back box – clearly it had been left with water sitting inside and this had perforated the end of the can. Cleaning it back showed plenty of clean metal around the holes, so I stuck on some QuikSteel putty and hoped for the best.
There was a modicum of good news when it came to the tyres. Two of the ones that came on the car are virtually unused Firestone Multihawk 2s, and they are dated as 2015 and so still good to go. The other two are more dubious, one being from 2007 and the other a Barum Brilliantis which had no visible date, but which also looked old. I later jacked up the back of the car and looked on the inside face of the Barum, confirming my suspicions when I found that it dated from 2005.
Curiously, the two Firestones were fitted to the nearside, whereas I would have expected the matching tyres to have been fitted across an axle. Having them this way must have made the handling a little iffy, but not as much as the pressures – the book says 24psi all round for the Acclaim, but the nearside rear tyre was up at 35psi and the nearside front at a whopping 47psi. I dread to think how wobbly it would have felt running on rubber like that.
Another curiosity concerning the tyres was that the spare wheel was wearing a brand-new Firestone tyre, the same type as those on the nearside and also of 2015 vintage. Why would anybody buy three new tyres and put one on the spare, but leave two time- expired carcasses on the offside? I can only assume that the wheels have been moved around the car at some point, perhaps old-school style to even out tyre wear, but I still can’t understand how they ended up in this configuration. It is possible that a set of five was bought at one time, but there must have been some pretty uneven tyre wear to have ruined a pair while the others are still so good. I will have to use my Trakrite gauge to test both