Dream car ...

I don't want much in life. So I would thrilled if I ever passed my test and had enough money to buy one of these.

At the moment though its just a dream...

 

Couldn't agree more.
For me there seems to be two basic themes to modern car looks:

a) the ones which look like the results of a wannabe speedboat designer

b) the ones where someone has taken a few very basic designs (e.g. Mini, Jeep) and simply blown them up so they look like they are the grotesque victims of reverse liposuction

Each to their own of course

GG

 

my daily is a citroen c4 hdi. 65 plus mpg on a run, comfy, roomy and a good workhorse. built out of bals.
mrs has a focus convertible. 30mpg at a push, no space inside whatsoever, good handling but impracticle.decent build.

my dream car is the aston db5 or db6 volante. lovely!!!!

 

I prefer these

 

My kind of dream





Did a lot of my early driving in one of these (not so shiny and fancy looking though)

 

I don't reckon cars (unless you pay a small fortune) have much style these days, and it's the same with houses. Compare Edwardian, 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's? car/house designs with those of today. Somewhere along the line they got boring.

 

@longk, as you seem to know and like your classic Mercs, you might be just the person to enlighten me on something.

When I was a kid, my dad found a knackered old Merc Coupe in the 'spares or repair' section of a local used car place. He bought it for £500, which was a quite a lot back in the mid 1980s.

The front half (bonnet, front wings, bumper, lights etc) were the same shape as the second Merc in your pic above (the one below the classic convertible), but it was a 2 door coupe. The spec as I remember it was this:
* 3.6 litre V6 twin supercharged engine (which was actually newer than the rest of the car, so may not have been standard)
* Automatic gears
* T reg back in the 1980s (not sure what year that would make it)
* Full leather interior in sky blue, with wood and chrome dash
* Sunroof
* The doors were weird in that the windows had no frame as such, so that when front and back windows were down and the sunroof was open, it was almost a convertible
* It went like stink. I mean like stink, even for the 80s. When we'd finished restoring it (the body work was in tatters when he bought it, the exhaust was almost non-existent etc), he took us out in it for a performance test (on private roads of course) and it literally pinned us into the seats as it accelerated effortlessly to 140mph. My dad tells me there was room for more but he lost his nerve before the car surrendered.

Any idea what it might have been?

 

Much like this then................

Merc W114/W115 coupe. Also known as the Stroke 8.

The only modern 3.6 litre engine in modern times was the AMG prepped M104 engine. Twin cam straight six though, and deffo not supercharged. Nothing below 275hp left the build shop.
The six cylinder engine fitted to both the Stroke 8 and W123 was the M110 (280), another straight six twin cam normally aspirated.

Pretty much standard.

But by 1978 the Stroke 8 had been replaced by the W123 range..................

Gets really puzzling here. Stroke 8 interior (unlikely to have blue leather)...................


W123 interior (note the lack of chrome).......................

As with all Merc coupes.

My best guess is that your memory tricks you as far as the T reg goes and that it was a late sixties/early seventies Stroke 8 coupe that had been rather modified with engine unknown - this would be borne out by the rust that you mention as the W123 series took a long time to start rotting (and really held its value too).

 

Ok, so you want a classic dream car?? Can anyone put up a Gt40 pic please

 

Thanks FC
Now that is a classic

 

Now there is a puzzle @longk. It kind of looks like my dad's one might have been a mish-mash of different cars, which would be worrying, except it was years ago and we're all still alive.

Here's what's odd. My dad's one had the rounded front features of the first car in your last post, but maybe my memory is blurred because I seem to recall that the way the roof sloped down at the back was more rounded, but I could be mis-remembering that bit.

The engine filled every inch of the engine bay, and was not the standard one for the car, having been replaced at some point. Visibly, you could see it was much newer than the rest of the car. The engine was only, 6 or 8 year old if I remember right while the rest of the car was quite a bit older.

The seats and carpets were very much like your pic of the W123, but the dash, door cards and steering wheel were more like the stroke 8.

So now I'm wondering, maybe this was somebody else's failed/abandoned project perhaps? I.e. maybe somebody started modding the car how they wanted it, but ran out of money/time/patience? I seem to remember the bloke at the car place telling my dad it had stood in a field for a while before it was traded in, which may explain the rotten lower half of the bodywork, and the exhaust. I think the brakes were partially seized when he got it too. I remember my dad and his mates, with some limited help from me (as a kid) spending many hours with wire brushes and hammers dislodging rust and filth and freeing things up. One of my proudest moments was getting the sunroof working (which was electric by the way, don't know if that changes what it might have been). It was seized so solid that my dad and his mates had given up on it, choosing to focus on the more essential stuff instead. I was allowed to work on the sunroof, my dad thinking it would keep me quiet and I couldn't do any harm. Every day after school I'd give it a clean, spray with WD40, them operate the switch back and forth while at the same time trying to gently prise it with a screwdriver. I got it moving about a millimeter, then much more time and effort and it went a bit more, and a bit more still, until with a crunching groan it went all the way if I pushed it with my spare hand at the same time. Then a thorough clean and light greasing of the now exposed bits, and it finally started to function correctly.

Once all the mechanical and structural stuff was sorted, we sanded the whole thing down and painted it. This is where the whole project went horribly wrong. My dad had decided to hand paint it then wet and dry it to a smooth finish rather than spraying it. Hammerite had just hit the market (or had just reached the shops in our neck of the woods) and was new to us. It promised a tough and resilient finish on any metal surface with minimal need for preparation and no primer needed. It sounded ideal. We should have realised with the name (I believe nowadays hammerite is smooth, but back then hammerite was hammered metal effect finish, and if you wanted smooth, you got the sister product, smoothrite). The car looked stunning with her new coat of light metalic blue paint. The bulk of the brush marks already taken out after the first pass with wet and dry. Then we left it for a couple of days for the paint to harden before giving her her next wet and dry buffing. Disaster. The hammered metal effect came through. The poor old girl looked like an old radiator on wheels. Worse, even with the electric sander it, the 'tough and resilient finish' was proving right. It was taking hours just to do get one small patch off. Then with a combination of that, plus my dad running out of time and money, plus the fact that my dad got a proper wake-up call when he realised how much juice she was drinking, all added up to mean that my dad took a fateful (and erroneous in my opinion, with the benefit of hindsight) decision to let her go. He basically got back a little more than he'd paid, so never really lost anything, but never gained anything either. Quite possibly the car was jinxed to always be a failed project, or possible she finally went to some with the time, money and skill to finish the job properly. We'll never know.

 

That's not a proper one, it's the modern take on it
The real one has 427 cubic inches of Yankee muscle without a hint of electronic injection or catalytic converters in sight................



Of course, the trouble with a real one is that it's worth stratospheric amounts of money!