For those interested in "Modern Classic" Cars

[RedgateModels]

1 minute ago, Classsix T said:

Ooh, lush! In Gran Turismo blue as well. The closest I fear I'll ever get is the AutoArt model on the shelf at home...BMW? Pfft!

 

C6T. 

 

The guy's owned it since it was 18 month's old. I was sweating on the weather as he only brings it out in the dry!

[Classsix T]

36 minutes ago, cheesysmith said:

My modern classic has been off road for a few years now, safely in a garage, whilst I have children . What?, A Nissan R33skyline. The GTS-t version. That means 2 door, rear whee! Drive, Turbo inline 2.6L 6cylinder with around 280bhp. Never have I had anything to sideways as easily as that.

Piccies, please? 

 

Much as I admire the R34 & R35 GT-Rs for technical and performance excellence, I think aesthetically, the R33 is my favourite design. A shame the Silvia is only seen in the UK as grey imports too, a very pretty car.

 

Look after her, I've seen too many RWD Skylines end up as wanna be drifter caned to bu99ery wrecks. 

 

C6T. 

[Classsix T]

11 minutes ago, RedgateModels said:

 

The guy's owned it since it was 18 month's old. I was sweating on the weather as he only brings it out in the dry!

She's gorgeous. I managed to get to one Japanese Car Festival at Peterborough Showground some years ago, fabulous range of motors to see, I suppose we're fortunate right hand drive is the recognised proper way of driving?

Do you know how he goes about servicing BTW? Specialist dealers or as simple as your local Nissan (or Renault!) garage..?

 

C6T. 

[RedgateModels]

That I don't know, he may be like me and does most himself.

[Classsix T]

23 minutes ago, RedgateModels said:

That I don't know, he may be like me and does most himself.

Which must take dedication, being an import. Unless Nissan did market Skylines for the UK? The only sport models I recall Nissan actively selling in the UK Eighties onwards were 200SX and 300ZX? 

 

C6T. 

Edited June 27, 2019 by Classsix T

[Sprintex]

The Skyline was only ever an import into the UK, the R35 GT-R (without 'Skyline' name) was the first model to actively be sold here.

 

Would love an R33 GT-R V-spec 

 

 

Paul

[Classsix T]

Begs the question though, why not market directly against BMW M5 and Audi A5? Unless Renault denied it in the European arena. 

 

C6T. 

[big jim]

2 hours ago, RedgateModels said:

I got my birthday prezzy fitted to the Scooby last weekend - Sti intercooler and water spray

 

 

The red STI logo will be replaced by a more suitable blue "WRX" and those red hoses have to go!

 

Are you having a Mid life crisis?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

like me with the cooper!

Edited June 27, 2019 by big jim

[cheesysmith]

Parts and servicing are easy, you can get some parts from Nissan using the chassis VIN and other parts are shared with other models ( the R33 platform was used under the 300zx and the R34 is a updated R33). 

 

As to binning it, my first car was a Sierra, on which I ripped all the rear suspension bushes apart. The thing went sideways in a straight line. Having held a 40ft bus sideways in snow, a car is not scary lol

 

My second at was a black 2.9xr4x4, the Datsun was my third at the age of 26.

[RedgateModels]

1 hour ago, big jim said:

 

Are you having a Mid life crisis?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

like me with the cooper!

 

Well I've had a scooby for close to 20 years now. Been doing show cars for the last 4 or 5 years

[big jim]

Nice!

 

im finding its nice to be of an age to be able to do stuff to cars that I’ve always fancied doing and be able to afford to do it and more importantly be able to insure the modifications! 

Edited June 27, 2019 by big jim

[Sprintex]

3 hours ago, cheesysmith said:

My second at was a black 2.9xr4x4, 

 

Here's my current garage ornament before I started the major overhaul 

 

[cheesysmith]

Same as mine, but kept the alloys 15" and it was black with silver highlights. The only thing not silver was the blue background to the ford badge. They do have a advantage in the V6 used was never oil tight. It kept the underseal from drying out and they have resisted the tin work better than almost any other ford of the same age. The original ford Ka was light in rust proofing, especially in areas like the rear and the fuel filler, and most have now been scrapped. 

[faulcon1]

On 27/06/2019 at 15:58, monkeysarefun said:

Ford guy huh? 

Yes we are. Peter has that 1969 XW Fairmont plus an 1978 XC Fairmont GXL under restoration and a 1981 XD that belonged to his dad with a 302 Cleveland or 4.9 litre V8. But he's also restored a Wolseley an MG and other cars. He likes all sorts of cars but is primarily a Aussie Ford Man as am I.

[faulcon1]

Here's my car. This (for those who don't know) it's an Australian designed and built 2009 Ford Falcon G6E almost the top of the standard Falcon range. The top of the range standard Falcon was a G6E Turbo. This car was built in July 2009 so at the time of this post one month short of ten years old. It's not my daily drive but more of a once in three to four weeks drive. My daily drive at the present time is a 2019 4x4 Holden Colorado employer supplied vehicle which is no where near as sophisticated as the G6E. My car has a name "Robert" for Robert Redford or Red Ford even though it's actually metallic burgundy or to give the Aussie Ford name "Seduce"

I bought the car secondhand when it was eighteen months old with 19,000km on the odometer. It has as of this post 75,000km on the odometer.

This Falcon and subsequent Falcons were imported into the UK but not for sale to the general public, at least not whilst they were alive. A company called Coleman Milne imported them direct from Ford Australia for conversion to stretched limousine Falcons for living relatives and hearses for the dead. 

 

[faulcon1]

This is the interior. The driver sits on an eight way electrically adjustable leather wrapped seat. Lumbar support is manual operation. The front passenger has a manual only adjustment seat. The car has a reverse camera (the image displayed) in the ICC or Interior Command Centre, such fun the names they give things. There is also a sonar image which gives you an outlined view of the car with green, yellow and red dots at it's rear. There is dual zone climate control air conditioning where the driver and front passenger can select their own temperature level and there are vents in the rear of the centre console for rear seat passengers. The car has a six stack in dash CD or MP3 player plus a 12v outlet and a 3.5mm auxiliary port. The car also has an ipod connector, but only good for ipod five. There is no apple or android play. A local company has now come up with a replacement ICC where you can have apple and android play but it's a $1,000 replacement. The car also has blue tooth and the interior lights can be adjusted for brightness. Both sun visors have mirrors in them with a small light recessed into the headlining for night time use. The drivers seat also has memory functions for seating positions for more than one driver and a mirror dip feature which angles the left exterior mirror downwards when reverse is selected. You can see the white lines for parking. When you select drive or park the mirror returns to normal. It's your choice whether you want to have the mirror dip activate or not. On the steering wheel the silver buttons on the right are for cruise control and on the left for the audio. The button at the bottom on the left is for the blue tooth phone. If you wish you can turn the ICC screen off altogether but if you touch a button the screen displays and then after ten seconds turns off again. Having the screen stay on or off is accessed via the menu system.

As noticed this car is an automatic, most Falcons are. In this case a 6 speed automatic provided by the ZF transmission. Push the selector to the left and you have performance mode which holds the gear ratios longer. With the gear selector pushed left move it forward or backwards and you're in manual mode. If descending a steep hill and I select 3rd manually, the car will remain in 3rd and will not up shift automatically even if the revs become high. If you wish to drive like a hoon you can and you can take the car to the red line in every gear and the transmission will not up shift. 

The car has front, thorax and curtain airbags ABS EBD and what Ford calls Dynamic Stability Control or what everyone else calls Traction Control. The car has 4 wheel disc brakes as all falcons have had since the 1990's. The suspension set up is called "sports luxury" meaning it's firm but not too firm a ride. The car doesn't wallow around like some land yachts of old. The power steering is not overly boosted and gives plenty of feel to the driver.    

[faulcon1]

This is the rear seat which is able to seat three in safety or two if you wish to use the centre arm rest. You can see the rear vents for the climate control with a foot well light beneath. The rear seat has a design fault. The rear headrest are not adjustable and are part of the seat back. It's ok for short people but tall people would suffer whiplash in a rear end collision. This was a fault that was never remedied and remained the same from my 09 Falcon right up to the last one in 2016. 

[monkeysarefun]

Very nIce car, Ford and GMH sure have made a mistake getting rid of these big lazy Australian sedans. No one looks happy driving around in their  Euro/Korean/Jap -designed SUV's. No wonder road rage is on the up. There was no road rage back in the '70's, when you could only buy Australian cars, unless you were posh and had a jag,.

 

. And whats with that name anyway -  Sports Utility Vehicle? They aren't sporty, they aren't utilities.... The V bit is all that makes any sense.

 

Meanwhile, back to your car - that  4 litre in-line 6 has had a long glorious history, says lots for it that it was still being developed  up until the Falcon got canned. Unless its still around in some guise in some SUV or something?  A mate had an early -80's Cortina with one in it back when it was still known as a 250 (as in Cubic Inch) .That was one insane  death-trap of a car.... you obviously don't see any of those around any more!

Edited June 29, 2019 by monkeysarefun

[faulcon1]

This is the motor of my G6E a 4.0l "Barra" naturally aspirated with originally 195kw or 261hp and 391 NM or 288.125 lbs of torque. This motor purrs like a kitten and has only run rough once and that was after a Ford dealer service, the one and only time it's been serviced by Ford. All other servicing has been carried out by an independent mechanic who tried to get me to sell the car to his dad. But what would I buy as an equivalent. There is nothing on the Australian market that offers all that this car has. A Mercedes Benz or BMW comes close but their spare parts are an outrageous price. All that's been replaced in the engine bay is the battery and that's it's third battery and most powerful battery to date. No globes have blown yet. G6E Turbos have a red motor instead of silver and an F6 has a blue motor. In another twenty years time this car maybe, just maybe a classic. After all 30 and 40 year old Falcons are now starting to fetch high prices.

If I run the car on premium unleaded or 98 RON it ups the hp to 270 and yes there's a slight difference. On 91RON round town the fuel economy is around 9L/100km and on the highway 7L/100km which isn't bad for a car that weighs almost 2 tons.

Most people are only interested in the turbo variants but the N/A like mine is no slouch. A while back I was driving along a motorway at 110 kph and I was approaching a left merging lane with cars wanting to join the motorway. A semi trailer was right on my tail and a Nissan Xtrail was in the right lane keeping pace with me. If I braked the semi driver would have hit the back of my car and I would have hit the cars joining the motorway from the merging lane. So I opened the taps or gave the car a boot full. In no time I was rocketing down the motorway at 165kph leaving the semi with enough room to brake and allowing the merging traffic to merge. Thank heavens there was no police about. 

These cars were used by the police but a slightly less luxurious version and I asked a policeman what they were like. The policeman had an XR6 Turbo or the same motor as mine but fitted with a turbo. He said the Falcon turbo was the car to chase people and even high powered European cars just couldn't outrun it. Their cars were fitted with brembo brakes so they stopped well too. He said even Subaru WRX STi's couldn't out perform the XR6T and they'd give up trying to run when their interior rear vision mirror was full of police XR6T Falcon. The motor can trace it's lineage right back to the first Falcons in the 1960's which is those days was the XK Falcon.   

Edited June 29, 2019 by faulcon1

[faulcon1]

4 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Very nIce car, Ford and GMH sure have made a mistake getting rid of these big lazy Australian sedans. No one looks happy driving around in their  Euro/Korean/Jap -designed SUV's. No wonder road rage is on the up. There was no road rage back in the '70's, when you could only buy Australian cars, unless you were posh and had a jag,.

 

. And whats with that name anyway -  Sports Utility Vehicle? They aren't sporty, they aren't utilities.... The V bit is all that makes any sense.

 

Meanwhile, back to your car - that  4 litre in-line 6 has had a long glorious history, says lots for it that it was still being developed  up until the Falcon got canned. Unless its still around in some guise in some SUV or something?  A mate had an early -80's Cortina with one in it back when it was still known as a 250 (as in Cubic Inch) .That was one insane  death-trap of a car.... you obviously don't see any of those around any more!

In the 1970's Ford Australia put a 6 cylinder in a Cortina which had been a 4 cylinder. A nimble car with good handling. The heavier 6 cylinder turned it into a nose heavy fuel gulping horror.

The final locally made and designed cars from both Ford and GMH were the best the companies had ever produced but people by and large had fallen in love with these awful SUV's. They looked upon the Commodore and Falcon as outdated fuel hungry dinosaurs. But as I've found out on the highway 40mpg is easily achievable. One reviewer said that round town you'd be lucky to get better than 15l/100km out of a G6E Falcon. I've never got economy as bad as that. Not even close to it. He must have been driving around in 2nd gear in manual mode.

A test was done with four men and their luggage driving in a Toyota Prius from Sydney to Adelaide. The fuel economy in the Prius was appalling as the car struggled. They then drove a N/A G6E Falcon back to Sydney and it returned good fuel economy and the four men were comfortable and not squashed in as on the outward leg.

[big jim]

Found a couple of old pics of the car I treated myself to when I passed out as a driver, I bought it with 96k on the clock for an absolute steal, it had everything in it, MOMO leather, 17” alloys, big spoiler, lovely car after 5 years of fiat punto ownership!

 

Traded it for a civic type r and apparently about 50 mile afterward the cam belt snapped on it and destroyed the engine!

 

alfa 156 2.0 t spark 

 

 

[Kickstart]

We bought a 156 with 105k on it and ran it to 166k. Best saloon I have ever driven. Cam belts generally fine if changed at 36k. But not a cheap or easy  job

 

All the best

 

Katty

[monkeysarefun]

9 hours ago, faulcon1 said:

In the 1970's Ford Australia put a 6 cylinder in a Cortina which had been a 4 cylinder. A nimble car with good handling. The heavier 6 cylinder turned it into a nose heavy fuel gulping horror.

The final locally made and designed cars from both Ford and GMH were the best the companies had ever produced but people by and large had fallen in love with these awful SUV's. They looked upon the Commodore and Falcon as outdated fuel hungry dinosaurs. But as I've found out on the highway 40mpg is easily achievable. One reviewer said that round town you'd be lucky to get better than 15l/100km out of a G6E Falcon. I've never got economy as bad as that. Not even close to it. He must have been driving around in 2nd gear in manual mode.

A test was done with four men and their luggage driving in a Toyota Prius from Sydney to Adelaide. The fuel economy in the Prius was appalling as the car struggled. They then drove a N/A G6E Falcon back to Sydney and it returned good fuel economy and the four men were comfortable and not squashed in as on the outward leg.

 

A bloke I worked with had a white g6e falcon turbo version, he complained it was the slowest car he'd ever owned.

Nothing to do with the car, it was due to the fact that the police at the time used white turbo g6e's as unmarked highway patrol pursuit cars so people who'd spot him coming up behind them in their rearview mirror would hit the brakes so he had to travel everywhere trundling along at 10 to 15kmh below the speed limit instead of 10kmh to 15kmh above like everyone else.

 

Up until about 10 years ago I had to drive regularly between Darwin and the RAAF base at Katherine. The Stuart Highway apart for the outskirts of Darwin and a couple of towns along the way was unlimited speed so it was like an Autobahn but with wildlife wandering on to it occasionally. The hire cars we'd want were the Commodores, Falcons or even the Mitsubishi Magna which had a really sweet 3.5L V6. Any of these would cruise at 160 easily, sitting at comfortable revs and still have heaps of grunt for when you suddenly came up behind a convoy of grey nomads towing vans at 70kmh and didn't want to hit the brakes. Fuel consumption was always under 10litres/100km.  The hated cars were the Toyota or similar 2 litre 4 pots like the Corolla.  It was a real tiring effort to keep them sitting above 140kmh, they would be revving like mad, they'd feel 'floaty' rather than planted on the road  and you'd have to back right off when you saw a road train coming the other way because the wall of air in front of it would blow the car physically a foot or so sideways. Fuel consumption was closer to 13 litres/100km and you'd have to stop for fuel  at expensive outback prices to make it back to Darwin.

 

 

Edited June 29, 2019 by monkeysarefun

[monkeysarefun]

6 hours ago, big jim said:

 

 

Traded it for a civic type r and apparently about 50 mile afterward the cam belt snapped on it and destroyed the engine!

 

 

 

 

I had an early '90's Mitsubishi Galant GSR that did the same thing at 36.000km. Since at the time warranties ran out at 30,000km it was expensive to fix.

 

Edited June 29, 2019 by monkeysarefun

[polybear]

On 26/06/2019 at 13:28, big jim said:

I absolutely love Nissan cubes! 

 

My wife said said she wouldn’t be seen dead in one though 

 

Your Wife obviously has impeccable common sense....

 

14 hours ago, big jim said:

Traded it for a civic type r and apparently about 50 mile afterward the cam belt snapped on it and destroyed the engine!

 

 

So that's how you're funding those go-faster mini mods......as a schonky used car dealer.....