Reliant Scimitar SE5
1971 Reliant Scimitar SE5
Owned by Nigel Boothman
(c/o classic.cars@bauermedia.co.uk)
Time owned Eight years
Latest/total mileage 0/106,241
Latest/total costs £179/£5741
Previously Broke down slightly in the Alvis
Life has not been easy for the Scimitar recently. Evicted from the garage when the Alvis arrived, it’s been crouching on the drive looking depressed at its change of role from ‘working classic’ to ‘outdoor storage pod’. To be fair, covid-19 allowed this to happen in a way that never would have occurred if there were motoring events to go to. So this month sympathy overtook me – I removed all the junk that was too good for the tip but somehow not worthy of remaining in the house, then freshened the interior vinyl with some spray cleaner and a microfibre towel. I oiled seat hinges and door hinges then got it started and ran the engine up to temperature, something I’ve done every few weeks. But the atmosphere in the car was still decidedly soggy.
The only point of water ingress I could find was the hole for the roof-mounted aerial. I witnessed a drip from the rear-view mirror; a few hundred of these over winter made it pretty fetid inside. The answer came in a box – a new desiccant dehumidifier. The litres of water it sucked out of the Scimitar’s internal airspace were startling, and soon the carpet felt as fluffy and dry as a warm dog.
This month’s major project is the re-wiring of my garage. I need to be able to use power tools without the house going dark and Mrs Boothman losing hours of work she forgot to save. This has involved stuffing the Alvis into storage with my VW T4 Westfalia camper van and pulling the Armstrong-siddeley 20hp out of the garage with the Scimitar, the only remaining car with a tow-bar. The Armstrong used to start and run well, but it’s lost its spark recently and a new coil, distributor cap or rotor arm seems likely to feature before I can advertise it for sale as a ‘running project’.
This was working well until the Scimitar developed one of its old maladies – a crippling misfire that brings on extreme lack of urge. I think there’s an intermittent short somewhere, caused by parts of the loom overheating when an alternator had a meltdown. This meant heaving the Armstrong around by hand on wheeled dollies, which almost induced a hernia. To show that Volkswagens aren’t totally reliable either, the T4 then declined to start. But with jump leads to the underfloor battery in the Alvis, all was well. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about owning too many cars to give the required attention to any of them. I will ponder it.