£1000 Challenge
Reliant Robin
THE STORY SO FAR Miles driven Still 0 Total mileage 63,781 What’s gone wrong We suspect it’s injured its owner
DAVID SIMISTER I usually blame any injuries incurred in office time on James ‘marathon man’ Sadlier and Chris ‘fitness fanatic’ Hope. Between them they’ve been trying – and sometimes succeeding – to coax me into an alien world of 10k runs, stretches, and visits to someone (or something) called Jim, but I usually end up pulling muscles that I didn’t know I had before retreating to the pub.
But this time I suspect it’s our slow-but-steady Reliant resurrection that’s at fault. I’ve witnessed our Robin gradually being stripped down and its innards being carefully plucked out over the last few weeks, so that the chassis and its shockingly crusty front crossmember can be removed and replaced with components crafted from metal rather than rust.
It feels like a long time since the car’s jaw-dropping appearance at the NEC, but the other day the phone call finally came – the Robin’s body was ready to go back onto the freshly-painted replacement chassis. But I was going to need some help in order to get it there.
James Holland from the Reliant Owners’ Club had already done a tremendous job of preparing the new underpinnings and coating them with protective layers of paint and Waxoyl, and has since made sense of the mess the car’s mechanicals had been left in. Big jobs included treating the 848cc engine to a cleanup and replacement seals to cure an oil leak, and swapping the rear axle over from the tired original chassis to the rather more substantial-looking new one. As ever, the big tests were overcoming corrosion, particularly the nut and bolt securing the top of the damper. No amount of brute force or heat was going to undo things that had rusted together over 28 years, and since the chassis itself was destined for the bin anyway, James opted to remove it with a disc cutter instead.
The new chassis was sitting proudly on all three wheels with the engine and transmission intact when I arrived on the big day – and I’d brought back-up with me, in the form of staff writer, Charlie Calderwood, and news ed, Jon Burgess. With my esteemed colleagues grabbing the Robin’s wheelarches, and James and I carefully slipping our fingers between the edges of the front wings and the ground, we readied ourselves for the big moment.
One thing immediately became apparent as 28 years of Tamworth glassfibre craftsmanship eased gently upwards – I had forgotten just heavy the Robin’s bodywork actually is. Maybe I was still in mild shock at the state of the Reliant’s chassis at the NEC – or perhaps half of the Bond Bug Club had pitched in to help at the time. It might be a flyweight compared to more conventional classic bodyshells, of course, but there were still a lot of strained facial expressions and Anglo Saxon utterings even with CCW’s combined muscle power brought to bear.
It’s been worth it, though: my aching muscles suggest that H362 emerged from the experience rather better than I did. The important thing is that the hard bit of getting our car back on the road is finally over – it looks like a car again rather than a stash of bits, and it’s very unlikely that the crossmember will be as rotten as a pear in the year 2046.
Hopefully, my aching back will have recovered by then…