The Beemer fix
When I was a young man, I had an interesting experience with a BMW 1800 (November). Being an impoverished articled clerk, with the help of my father (an enthusiast himself ) I had kept a set of wheels by buying small Fords, using them, smartening them up, then passing them on, hopefully for a profit. Always looking out for bargains, in 1967 I became aware of a tiredlooking BMW behind a local fuel station. Over a few weeks, I kept making enquiries and eventually met the owner, who agreed to sell it to me for £100, as a non-runner.
The car (top) had been fitted with a Hobbs/westinghouse semiautomatic gearbox and, while the engine ran well, it would not select a gear. With the help of a friend, we took out the ʼbox. Gear selection relied on some rings around the gearbox main shaft and a series of rubber bladders separating selection chambers within. We had broken rings, a ruptured bladder and no access to any form of workshop manual. Fortunately, Dad was an engineer and had many contacts in the trade, so found us some replacements. We rebuilt the ʼbox and, with some difficulty, managed to get it back together. We then had a very nice car with the exception of one slightly rough gearchange. We only used it occasionally, but on a trip from Manchester to Cheltenham it proved to be a magnificent cruiser.
The battery was tired, so we replaced it with a new one, located under the bonnet. We drove up the road and, after less than 200 yards, saw a black spot appearing on the bonnet, which then turned into a flame! The new battery was fractionally deeper than the one it had replaced, and shorted against the bodywork. Another new battery and a repaint fixed that, but after all our dramas we decided to move it on. In 1967 the appetite for left-hand-drive German cars was practically non-existent, so we ended up swapping it with a trader for a Ford Cortina Super, which allowed us to escape from our trauma unscathed.
The experience did not put me off BMWS, however: I still run one, 55 years after my first. Mike Hamlyn Disley, Cheshire