1963 Ford Anglia 105e

Whoops....too quick with the trigger finger. 🥴

We all do it.

I learned in my Mam's then new Mk2 Golf, so that was 1984 so I would have been 15.

There used to be old unused roads behind Dublin Airport back in the day.

The old man decided to teach me to drive shortly after when I was 17, he couldn't believe how well I drove his Saab the first time out.

We never told him!

Neither of my parents owned a car (cue the violins !)...but my next door neighbour did. I helped to wash his cars, change oil and service them, and he showed me how to drive, with the odd day letting me drive up the avenue and back. I bought my first car whilst at college, and kept it in a lock-up at the top of the road, and yes, sneaked out for a drive now and then. No licence, no tax, no insurance. My father caught me, and the car had to go....it was a 1947 Lanchester LD10.

I learned to drive at about 10 years old. If you could call it driving. It was a 1947 Case crawler with tiller controls and a hand throttle. We had three acres on a dead-end gravel road, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of acres of crop land. Dad taught me how to hand crank if the starter ever acted up, which it would. We had wood heat, so dad would back the trailer up to the basement with the tractor and my job was to stack the wood in the basement, then drive the tractor and trailer down the road a short distance into our barnyard and fill the trailer with wood. Dad worked out of town all week and on the weekend he would back the load of wood up to the basement door, and do the same thing every week until the wood was all in the basement. I got good at hooking up and disconnecting our 16ft trailer as well. When I was 12 I would drive dad's pickup around the property during the week standing up so I could see over the dash. By the time I was 13 I could drive dad's 1952 Mercury with a 3spd on the column. When I was 15 and took the test for my learners permit, the form asked how long I had been driving. I didn't know that the same form covered the drivers license test as well, so I put "since I was 13" on the form. My mom wondered why the lady behind the counter gave her a dirty look when we left.

Fantastic Sam. A great insight into another world that I never knew. I could read stuff like this for hours.
I find a fascination in hearing stories of other people’s pasts, especially when cars, trucks and dozers are mentioned.
....a nice ‘commercial’ break between model building.

That sure is an amazing build. Plus since you're using an R/C body it probably isn't really scaled to accurately.

Thanks. Yep, you are not wrong, apart from slicing a chunk from it’s width, there are quite a few inaccuracies with this RC body which I have had to amend or live with.

I freely admit that I’m not a perfectionist, my skills are limited, and so is my attention span, so often I’ll leave things as ‘that’ll do !’......but sometimes regret it the next day.
I’ve had a few goes at the hooded headlights, and they are frustrating me, but considering this is a ‘spaceframe’ race car, they will have to do. There comes a point where a model stops becoming fun, and becomes hard work beyond problem solving. My theory is, if I don’t leave things as ‘that’ll do’, models will never be finished.
But I have the new rear sheetmetal done and painted, and a solid state battery and battery-box constructed.....so there is progress.

I’m also stuck with the wheels - no matter how much I would prefer Minilites, the options out there in the big wide world for 1/8th scale are extremely limited. The biggest range of wheels available for RC cars is in 1/10th scale, which are far too small - same goes for tyres.
I have even considered paying out £135 to buy the recently rebooted Revell 1979 Pontiac Trans-Am, just for the wheels and tyres - because they look like Alleycats, but the rest of the car doesn’t really appeal to me - and I doubt that they would fill the Anglia wheel arches anyway. 🥴

The new fuel tank is fitted and plumbed in.
This is a good time to add a photo or two of one of my other Anglias, and the eagled eyed will notice an extra fuel filler cap on the rear wing.
This is because I had an aluminium tank fitted in the boot, and was another item that moved from car to car, as the extra filler cap can be seen on my other blurry Anglia photos. My polished aluminium ‘moon-tank’ wasn’t really a fuel tank but came from a dairy farm that I put to use after an original tank sprang a leak - and it worked well. The fuel gauge then of course didn’t work, but the tank had a convenient tapped hole to poke in a stick to see how much fuel was left in the tank - can’t see that being legally allowed now.

That tank, as well as the whole boot, sure looks the part.
I understand the whole "good enough for who's it's for" thing. I use that all the time.

Cheers Sam - It makes me ask myself ; Why didn’t I do it that way in the first place ?

So do you have any more Ts to show us?

Not to worry Sam.....I’m working on a thread of my version of the Lindberg Bobcat T.....coming up next week !! ....all being well.

CPY looks fast Ron, nice job placing the turbo and exhaust pipe below the front bumper! lol

Nice old car from back in the day. would have had a good turn of speed too with the 1500 I'll bet.

Well spotted Shay ! ....the ‘turbo’ intake is an old ‘oil cooler’ trick to direct air flow onto the filter....not sure it worked.
CPY was still the 1200. After I put the 1500 Anglia into a ditch and bent it, I sold the car with engine - but removed the Lotus steels and tyres. I had limited room to keep cars and although I had hoped to swap the engine over again, my pal who helped in the job had gone back to Hull Uni, so I had to make a quick decision to get some money back.
The extra engine parts that both fitted the 1200 and 997 engine that I had accumulated were swapped over. That included the 28/36 Weber on a gas flowed manifold, and the gas flowed exhaust manifold - not much else to be honest. Not forgetting the obligatory alloy rocker cover, pancake air filter, and PECO back box ! Although a good few had their heads removed and skimmed to get extra compression, valves reground, a good decoke and properly set up. I can see myself now sitting at the newspaper covered kitchen table, twirling those valves in grinding paste. Just those changes gave the little engines extra poke.

Thanks to this forum, this car has seen more progress in the last couple of weeks than in the past 9months. My photographic record showed I last worked on it in November 2022.
I keep looking at this car and wondering what isn’t quite right about it, then it dawned on me - the rear track was always narrower than the front, and the tyres were tucked in under the rear half-arches, so it’s those flares that are throwing me. The widest tyres that I could fit under the standard rear arch was 185/70 series, on a 5.5 rim, and that was with the return of the wheel arch rim pie-cut and flattened inside of the body - but if it was fitted with 2” lowering blocks, then a 175/70 was the max to get the wheel in, and on the studs.
......and of course the trailing bottom corner of the front wing/front valance had to be cut away to allow the wider wheels to turn without catching - Ahhhh..such fond memories !

The interior is more or less finished, and the car will have a removable Hillclimb timing blade/beam cutter. I’m almost at the final stage - paintwork.

Stunning work Ron. Simply stunning.

Neat touch with the timing blade.

Wow...

Thanks !
The final colour has been decided with the Anglia, ultimately by my wife who prefers the light blue, which is as a good as any and has some connection with my real cars - but I’ll be adding a broad white racing stripe over the roof, bonnet and boot......of course.
However, the rattle can that I used to give it a top coat wouldn’t mix, laying down bands of dark and light blue. No matter how much shaking and warming up, the colour just wouldn’t settle, but it will do as a base coat. Adding the gloss coat of course highlights all the dimples and imperfections in the plastic that I thought I had ironed out. I’ll give it dab of filler here and there, but race cars do have battle scars, dings and dents, especially if they are using lightweight alloy panels and fibreglass. 🥴

Nice work Ron.

I like the idea of a white stripe...... but how about twin stripes?

Great minds think alike !

Today’s doings.
I flatted off the blotchy paint and filled a few dings ready for tomorrow’s paint - finger’s crossed. The photo shows I have tried to replicate some sort of inner door panels, so I did the same for the boot internals.