Back around 1987 I bought an old 1970 Cortina 1600 auto, for $350.00 with about 11 months rego. I broke an exhaust manifold once, rally driving it down a quarry, so a quick trip to the local unfenced dump, and picked up a better manifold, plus another full exhaust system. I used to regularly pick up bits and pieces off the old wrecks at the dump, to improve mine, until one day someone started nosing around my Corty for bits. I used to keep a closer eye on it after that. When the auto started sounding a it rough, I picked up a full manual gearbox, and all the bits and pieces, clutch etc to convert mine to manual, but the auto never died, so I never did the conversion. It sounded like too big a job anyway. For about 3 years I drove it to work and back every day, and it would sit on 100kph no worries. Drove it everywhere, and never babied it in the slightest. Scrub bashing, mud rallying. Taught my young bloke to drive in it when he was 14. (mrs wasn't too pleased about that) Edit: actually considering he was born in July 76, he must have been a bit younger
When I got posted away, I decided to sell it, and chucked $350.00 on it expecting to get knocked down to at least $200. But I ended up selling it for the $350, and threw in about another half a car of spares, including the full manual system. But it only had about 3 months of rego on it at the time. The bloke who bought it was going to put it in demo derbies, or stock car races or something.
That thing was bulletproof.
Back in the early '80's, I had an even older (1968?) one in Malaysia, but it was a Pommy one, 1600, manual, and in fairly good condition. The wiring shorted out somewhere near the tail lights one day, and melted all the way to the front (over the door arches), taking out a stack of other wiring under the dash, when it started to burn. Ended up rewiring almost the complete car. But that car was a beast too, and took us all around different areas of Malaysia including a short (one week) foray into Thailand.
