£1000 Challenge
Reliant Robin
1990 RELIANT ROBIN THE STORY SO FAR Miles driven 0 Total mileage 63,781 What’s gone wrong The brakes, the kingpin, the headlights… Thanks to Parkhill Garage, Rainford, 01744 882749
DAVID SIMISTER Our little Robin’s proven to be more of an ostrich than its ornithological namesake, because it hasn’t taken flight yet.
Instead our pet Reliant has been roosting at a sort of nature reserve for ailing classics – Parkhill Garage in Merseyside, which normally puts my MGB GT through its annual MoT and gives it the occasional spot of TLC. The three-wheeler’s there so the team can nurse it back to health – or is that so it can shelter from the very much love-it-or-loathe-it reaction it’s had?
The responses I’ve had from classic fans have ranged from the devoted (‘Brilliant. I used to have one of those!’) to the downright derisory (‘It’s one wheel short of a car’). I’ve even had at least one of you asking me when I’ll be boarding over the rear windows and painting it yellow, but even if I wanted to do that there’s quite a bit of work to do first. Cue a rather long shopping list.
By far the worst result from Parkhill’s initial once-over were its heart-stopping ( but unfortunately not Robin-stopping) brakes, which definitely needed attention before it could head back onto the road. A fault advised as possible bearing wear turned out to be a kingpin that’s definitely on the way out, and while I knew that the offside headlight was cracked, it transpired that the reflective coating inside the nearside light needed replacing, too. Oh, and the indicator stalk appeared to have given up the ghost after apparently having been wired up by primary school children.
So H362 CBA needed a fresh stash of bits before classic menders, Iain and Gareth Jackson, could get to work – and since this is supposed to be a budget challenge, I was keen to keep everything as cheap as possible. Finding a fresh set of brake cylinders, new shoes, a handbrake cable and a kingpin set didn’t take long – and the total bill came in well under £100, which is tremendous value for classic bits by any standards.
The indicator stalk was a little trickier, largely because I tried the old trick of trying to source a part for the car that originally wore it rather than the Robin itself. There are lots of borrowed bits on Reliant’s finest – the Morris Marina interior door handles, for instance, are exactly the same ones that I’ve got on the ’B – but a visit to Lancashire-based Mini Technique soon revealed that mine weren’t the Mini items I’d suspected them to be. I’d seen Robin-branded items advertised online for as much as £70, but I held my nerve and eventually managed to snap up a used one for £20 from a car breaker in Liverpool.
Ironically, the most difficult things to get hold of were what I had naively assumed would be the easiest – those Fiesta MkII headlights and indicators. What I thought would be an abundance of bargain replacements in the online classifieds turned out to be more of a trickle, and most of those – genuine and aftermarket – were either for left-hand-drive models or wearing pricetags not far short of triple figures. I don’t know whether prices have been pushed up by wealthy Blue Oval devotees finishing off XR2 restorations, but I was genuinely worried that a simple set of Fiesta front lights was going to cost me very nearly as much as all of the other bits put together.
Luckily I managed to find an offside item for £25 hours before giving up the search and coughing up – and it didn’t take long for the seller to ask if I wanted the other one to accompany it. It’s lucky that CCW doesn’t come in audio form yet, because the next thing you’d be hearing is me biting the poor seller’s arm off.
So, while the Robin is still being given a few final tweaks, it should finally be ready for its first flight, even if it’s only to the MoT station.
Watch this space…