There’s something so much better about ‘real’ car badges - die-cast badges with interesting fonts, rather than stickers. Especially the Morgan bootlid badge, since it makes the perfect monogram for my tool cabinet!

This is the sort of scummy behaviour that resulted in the establishment of a Towing Allocation Centre in Melbourne (Australia) to regulate accident towing and allocate jobs, usually to the nearest towing company. Before that, the jobs were usually taken by whoever got there first, which is why when I was a kid, a…

....just not in AWD - although there was one VL Commodore converted to AWD, but from memory it was a sedan.

I’ll defend the first generation Valiant as an owner of one - they aren’t ugly, just different. And in a world where we are all complaining that everything is now a bland econobox undistinguishable from all the others, different is good.

Not 100% unkillable - I’ve destroyed a rod bearing in a slant six. Although it did take a complete loss of oil pressure due to a cracked oil pipe to make it break. And even after it broke, I drove home on the freeway at 130km/h with the engine making a noise like a bunch of bricks in a cement mixer, so maybe they are…

A friend many years ago saw a motorbike run into the side of the car in front of him when the car pulled out of a side road in front of the bike, which was going fast enough it drove itself through the rear door of the car and bent the door out on the other side, ending up completely inside the car. The roof was at…

A lot of older Mazdas used wheel bolts as well.

I’ve thought about this sort of thing before, and came up with this idea:

And as a result we also got Holden 2 Tonners in the early models, which were One Tonners that had a chassis stretch with added lazy axle behind the original rear axle - these were built by Hayman Reese, who were/are manufacturers of towbars, amongst other things. There have been a few homebrewed 6x4 Two Tonners built…

Odd;y enough one of my favourite specialty tools for working on cars is actually one I use for working on commercial coffee machines - a 1/2" drive Mercedes diesel fuel injector line tool is exactly the tool needed to access a particular fitting in a machine I work on regularly, where nothing else will fit.

Mostly because old Japanese motorcycles DON’T have Philips screws, they are JIS (looks the same, but isn’t!)

JIS screwdrivers, for all the not-actually-Philips head screws on old Japanese motorbikes. Although even then you still have issues because the screw heads have usually been damaged by someone thinking a Philips screwdriver is the right tool, since it looks like it fits and most people have not heard of the JIS…

I’ve recently inherited a 1995 Pro-Flex 755 from my father-in-law, complete with (melted!) elastomer-sprung rear end and Girvin girder fork. Have bought replacement elastomers, but still have to find the time to rebuild the suspension so I can test out how it rides.

I was looking at one of these at a car show when I overheard a guy next to me telling his friend all about it at great length, how it was built in France in the 1930s and was a rare and expensive luxury coupe.

My first car got alloy wheels that didn’t fit, so I spaced them out with washers over the wheel studs. Then stupid racing stripes.

We got the Fuego in Australia, I remember the dumbest thing about them was that they used wheels that were a METRIC diameter, so nobody except Renault dealers would have tyres in stock that fit them.

Since it is a well established fact that the fastest cars are rental cars, put them all in Hertz rental cars and you will get the added spectacle of the Police chasing and trying to arrest them all for ‘stealing’ the cars!

The back of that dummy section looks like someone with a taillight obsession, a Dremel and files could easily cut a suitable hole to fit a bulb holder there!

Not the only faker out there - the Holden Camira (Camira being an Aboriginal word meaning ‘wind’, and the car itself being based on the GM J body platform with a 1.6 or 2 litre Family II engine) also had a fake centre bumper section.

The Fiat-Abarth OT 2000 Coupe America (a twin-cam 2 litre wide-track version of the Fiat 850) used the spare as part of the front bumper! Normally on an 850 the spare sat upright inside the front luggage compartment, but was moved for the Abarth to aid cooling the front-mounted radiator: