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News Archive 2018

Latest News March 2018

The Capri is still in storage whilst this nasty cold spell grips the UK.  Hopefully by the time the clocks go forward at Easter it will be time to think about getting her our ready for 2018.

So as reported last time I have three jobs to do which are all underway.

1) The windscreen wiper arms are round at Quest Bothers waiting for some black paint.  I should be getting those back soon.

2) Bob Hammond has finished the cloth seat restoration on the Recaro seats.  If you remember he did the full leather restoration last year and agreed to finished the job off after I sourced and bought some genuine Recaro cloth last year.  I was due to go and pick them up on Saturday but I was beaten by the heavy snow we had last week.

3) The front nearside wheel is off the car and I’m taking it up to Ace in Huntingdon tomorrow to be refurbished (again) after I damaged it on a curb in 2017.

During the winter months I have been buying some blank cassette tapes and have been making some tapes up to play in the car.  My tape player still works as good as new and sounds great with the upgraded speakers and graphic equaliser equalising all the graphics!  You forget how good tapes can actually sound - a well recorded chrome tape is hard to tell from a CD and as long as they have been stored somewhere safe they will be as good as new even after twenty or thirty years!

Latest News July 2018

So here we are in the middle of a heat wave.  My Capri passed her MOT without any issues back in May and all the little jobs have been done.  I have my newly painted windscreen wiper arms back on the car and the seats are all back in place with new cloth centre sections.  Bob Hammond did an amazing job and they now look as good as new. And with new padding they are really comfortable too!

Whilst the seats were being done I stripped down the metal support frame and cleaned up the runners.  After all the grime was removed and new o-rings fitted to the plastic slider bearings, the frame was hand painted with satin black Hammerite and refitted to the car. The scuffed alloy is also fixed and back on the car.  

So here I am in July with a few hundred miles of driving on her.  She looks amazing in the sunshine and attracts enormous attention wherever we go.  It is genuinely nice to hear all the positive comments and see lots of people waving in appreciation as you drive by.  And for once I really don’t have any additional work to do on her for now. Pretty much everything is working perfectly.  Even the blower is working!  It is just a case of dry cleaning her and keeping the bird pooh of the paintwork (we have an army of house martins at our house in the summer months).

I’ve been buying up old music cassettes off Ebay and now have quite a collection.  They (for the most part) play as good as new and they sound amazingly good.  You forget just how god old analogue technology sounded and it is keeping in line with the period of the car to have a box of cassettes on the rear seats!

I hope all you Capri owners have a great time enjoying your cars in the hot summer months!

Latest News November 2018

Annoyingly my Capri has behaved itself so well over the summer months that there is very little to report.  For once everything seems to work fine and the only problem I had was I discovered that the washer bottle motor wasn’t working.  I found this out on a hot summer evening with the windscreen covered in smeared bugs.  On testing I found that there was 12V going to the connectors when the stalk was pressed and the connectors on the pump itself seemed clean and shiny.  So I pulled the pump off expecting to have to go and find a replacement.  I just thought I’d try a bit of WD40 squirted inside as a last resort and low and behold it fired into life and puked a load of gunk out.  So a good clean and some new spade connectors and everything was back to normal.

I also replaced the radiator hoses as I discovered the lower one was dripping and when I got it off I found the rubber was badly perished and cracked.  That’s what you get for buying poor quality OEM parts off E-bay.  They were only four years old!  Whilst the hoses were off I pressure flushed the whole cooling system forwards and backwards until fresh water ran out.  It is shocking how sludgy and brown the coolant was after only a short time in the car.  Some new summer coolant installed and all was perfect again.  Note the car is away in storage over the winter there is no point in going overboard with the anti-freeze as it ain’t as efficient as water as a coolant.

It has been lovely driving the Capri over the hot summer months.  I have had lots of nice comments and I find people often wave or smile as they drive past.  There is a genuine love and affection for old Fords from the British people of a certain generation.  Even quite young people comment on what a “cool car” she is!

So the clocks have just changed and everything is getting dark and miserable and it is time to start thinking about putting the Capri into storage again for the winter months.  I need to get her serviced and topped up with Waxoyl before this happens.

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