£1000 Challenge
Reliant Robin
THE STORY SO FAR
Miles driven None this year Total mileage 63,781 What’s gone wrong The fuel tank’s decided to break at the final hurdle There are, according to Wheeler
Dealers duo Mike Brewer and Ant Anstead, two types of classic resto. There’s the one where the car offers itself up willingly and everything comes off and goes back on happily – and the one where it does everything in its power to fight back.
This week I’m definitely suspecting that H362 CBA is the latter, after throwing a last-minute spanner in the work to get it back on the road. Since its last £1k Challenge outing a lot of fairly important jobs have been completed on it, including plumbing in the brakes, making sure the cooling system works, and refitting the handbrake and gear lever. The Fordbranded radio cassette player has also been removed from its makeshift accommodation beneath the dashboard, and no longer threatens to slice the passenger’s knees open in the event of an emergency stop.
So in the space of a few short months the chassis, brakes, suspension, engine, radiator and a host of other fairly crucial bits have all been extracted from our mischievous Robin, either tidied up or replaced altogether, and then reinstated in the way Tamworth originally intended.
The car’s fuel tank, on the other hand, was having none of it.
The one that came with our car was coated in a fairly thick layer of surface rust but was in otherwise solid condition – or at least it was, until the one area where the metal’s thinner and more susceptible to fatigue finally gave up the struggle mid-repair, with the breather pipe snapping off altogether. Not good.
Having got this far into the repairs we already know that the four-pot engine’s up and running again, but it wasn’t going to get terribly far, and certainly not through the MoT, without a properly functioning fuel system. I needed a replacement petrol tank fast – and to make matters even trickier, club expert James Holland didn’t have a spare one in his treasure trove of Reliant bits.
Happily, the club knew someone who did, so a couple of days later I headed deep into the Lincolnshire countryside to meet a fellow Reliant devotee who stepped in to help.
William Jarman uses his 1985 Rialto 2 as his daily driver, and just happened to have a spare tank that’d fit our Robin. He’s also offered me a chance to head out in the Rialto to get reacquainted with the joys of three-wheeled motoring before the Robin hits the road again – but that’s another story for another time.
The new tank’s now been delivered to the spot our car’s been occupying for the last few months. That is a good thing because it’s now the one component stopping it from venturing towards the testing station, and ( hopefully) out of the other side with a fresh 12-month ticket and a queue of CCW scribes lining up to have a go in it.
Unless something else snaps unexpectedly in the meantime, that is. Let’s hope the Wheeler Dealers team are right, and it starts behaving like the first kind of car resto!