Rescuing a ZAZ
Ed preserved a Tavria, but was left asking why…
Back in 1999, I was receiving nightly phone calls from Commie Keith – a genuine Marxist-leninist from the People’s Republic of North Yorkshire. He’d spoken to as many people as possible about Seventies UK Moskvich and Lada importation – and had the four-figure telephone bills to prove it. He was also in touch with Eastern Bloc deviationist Julian Nowill, who lives a few miles from me.
Commie Keith had been busy extracting information from the last man standing at the Lada importation centre in Carnaby, near Bridlington, some three years after it was all over. There were still three right-hand drive Ukrainianmade Tavria cars languishing there, left over from a doomed proposal to make them ‘Britain’s
cheapest new car’ in 1994.
On a mission
So… one bleak winter’s day, Mr Nowill and I found ourselves in a large compound, empty except for three faded red hatchback cars lined up in the middle. Two of the Tavrias had been put on a 50,000-mile test; the third, which Julian was authorised to take, had covered barely 1000 miles. It had, I think, been sent around Lada dealers as an enticement. A strange enticement, since the carburettor had some sort of major defect and has never worked properly.
Back in Devon, the Tavria had an inauspicious start to its new life. Not only did the carburettor make it virtually undriveable, but it had been without a fuel filler cap since 1994. This meant it wouldn’t do more than a few miles without breaking down anyway, although Julian somehow coaxed it about 200 miles on one occasion.
The red paint was matted orange. The seats – once grey – were faded to a dirty white augmented with stains from a lavish number of water leaks and mould colonies. Things didn’t go well and after further languishing, Julian transferred the sorry-looking thing from his car orphanage to mine in about 2003.
To cheer it up, I changed its original (!) oil and filter and polished its paintwork. I did this by hand, one panel at a time – each one requiring days of painstaking effort even when using nuclearstrength cutting compounds. Mechanically, it looked OK, so apart from freeing-off the brakes, I left it well alone. The electrics all seemed to work, too. The biggest problem was the upholstery, which was utterly ruined.
Take your seats
I took the seats out. The rear squab cushion took six weeks to dry. I then did something I was sure I’d regret – I took the seat covers apart, with the intention of replacing the cloth inserts.
Copying the inserts was easy enough, though using the right wadding (which gives the fabric a padded appearance) was a challenge. Some types made it impossible to sew in a straight line and eventually, I ended up re-using the original stuff. For the facing, I chose a pleasing red fabric with a brushed, suede-like effect. Although I did the decorative stitching on my mother’s old domestic sewing machine, actually reassembling the seat covers had to be done by hand, re-using all the original stitch holes in the vinyl. Creating a second run of holes with a machine would have fatally weakened the vinyl and almost certainly caused it to tear. To my surprise, the upholstery learning curve went well: the renovated seats looked fabulous. I booked an MOT… it passed, then promptly broke down on the way home. And again. And again, until I installed fuel filters at each end of the fuel line. These accumulated rust and sediment at a terrifying rate, and I soon became adept at leaping out, blowing back down the fuel line and continuing with my journey. Then the clutch jammed. It continued to leak rainwater. The lovely red seats faded to orange within six weeks – never use domestic fabric for cars… lesson learned. A combination of zero performance, massive understeer and a steering rack that was either too tight, or too loose and nothing in-between meant that I kept the poor old Tavria on the fleet due to its rarity, rather than because I liked it. I drove it around a bit, spent quality time giving mouth-to-mouth to the fuel lines and failing to even approach the manufacturer’s startling claims for fuel economy. Having resurrected it again in 2006, I spent much of the next ten years parking it up in various sheds. Strangely, though, the Tavria was to have a complete reversal of fortune in 2016… but I’ll tell you about that in another issue.
‘I became adept at blowing back down the fuel line and continuing my trip’