‘THERE WERE AT LEAST THREE LAYERS OF SILLS!’
Fuzz Townshend takes us behind the scenes of a very tired-looking Ford Cortina MkIII that had endured years of patchwork fixes and a deteriorating engine
‘In 1971, a few days after my seventh birthday, my foster dad arrived home with the family’s brand-new Ford Cortina 1300L MkIII. Resplendent as it was in its blue metallic paint, this car was neither ours, nor Ford’s finest motoring moment. The lardy and parsimoniously specified MkIII wheezed up hills with buses nipping at its tailpipe and began to rust prodigiously within a year or two.
‘As a result, I had a good idea of what to expect when we collected nominee Bobby’s orange 1972 example from storage in Leicestershire.
‘The car was a “thirty-footer”, meaning it looked reasonably together from that distance, but venturing closer revealed that all was not well, with tell-tale signs of rust bursting from beneath filler here and there. There was also a very oily and tired-looking 1600cc Crossflow engine.
‘One aspect of the car that was promising, however, was its interior, which was remarkably well preserved – no bad thing because Cortina MkIII survival rates are low, despite Ford having made hundreds of thousands of the things, with consequent sourcing difficulties for spare parts.
‘The car’s truly terrible condition began to be revealed once we got the car back to the workshop. We managed to get the engine running for long enough to determine that it wasn’t in great condition and that the gearbox had a tendency to jump out of various gears under load.
‘Of course, peeling back the layers of “repairs” revealed that, at best, the car had received patches to either tidy it for re-sale or get it through an MoT. Replacement front and rear valances had been welded over the badly corroded originals and there were at least three layers of sills. Its inner wheel arches were a patchwork of plates, the flitches were frilly and the wings woebegone and so another marathon of panel-beating and welding ensued.
‘These cars don’t enjoy the best replacement parts supply when it comes to panels and as a result many of the replacement sections were hand-made in-house by the talented crew at SOS Workshop Ltd.
‘The gearbox was sent away for re-building and the engine stripped down to reveal main and big end bearings worn down to their copper substrate, scored crankshaft journals and rather baggy cylinder bores. Once again, the powerplant required a complete re-build, complete with a new carburettor, distributor and sundry other items. Meanwhile, the fuel tank was repaired, lines replaced and the braking system overhauled.
‘New springs were also added and we did wonder whether the car’s newly high stance indicated some sort of error, but reference to period sales literature revealed that Bobby’s Cortina was actually lower. Given a drive around the workshop yard, the suspension settled to a respectable level and so all was well.
Don’t miss seeing the very touching reveal by watching Car SOS on National Geographic, Thursday 13 May, at 8pm.