Independance Day

We celebrated Independence Day on the M25 by flying the American Flag from the ariel, having a Snickers bar whilst playing Jimmy Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner on the "stereo"

You might like to have a listen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2bGUeDnqPY

I am sure the French appreciated this playing as we rolled off the ferry onto French soil...

Anything beyond Dover is a bonus

Friday morning saw us maintain our annual pilgrimage to the Goodwood Festival Of Speed, both myself and Marc were through the gates at 07.30 ready for a good 12 hours of petrol induced utopia., suffice to say that we left at around 19.00 that evening having crammed as much into one day as we could humanly do, takeaway was then ordered and taken back to the campsite were thoughts turned to the Nurburgring, Alpine passes and more importantly how far the car would go before we booked ourselves on Easy Jet to head home.

The photo at the top shows the tent we all used. It is the biggest tent you can erect without a licence. Probably. Marc and I had the modest task of putting it together for the first time, what the photo does not show is the temperature in which we had to put it up. Although my sun hat kept the sunburn at bay it did somewhat boil my head so the rest of the day did not go well.

Just some of the highlights....

Thought we would do a taster, just to prove we were there, in case you all thought it was a big Capricorn 1 hoax

1 day to go....

The air con is not working, the nice man at the garage who was going to fill it found a leak, and with a possible bill of up to £250 to find, repair and then refill the chance to have ice cold air evaporated. Much like the air con.

But never mind at least it's not hot outside.


Marc has bought a solar shower for camping, reckon it might be gafer taped to the roof of the car a la Clarkson

4 Days to go.....

I have just spent an unpleasant amount of time hoovering the inside, this is because I forgot to dust of my chop saw before loading it into the car and then compounding the problem of sawdust by opening all the windows on the motorway.

I have never driven a saw mill before but it is not pleasant.

The picture at the top has no significance to the chop saw at all. I just like the photo, taken from the Chalet by the way.

Tomorrow the aircon is being refilled, so i could then carry the chop saw and leave the windows up.

It's clocking up some miles now

It has now done two journeys to Cornwall to allow me to do some work on my fathers chalet, so the car has been used for lugging around almost every tool I posses, it has also lugged 3 big blokes and two huge parasols back to Bridgwater with frequent stops to prevent deep vein thrombosis taking a hold on the Pimmy in the back. As you can tell from the picture at the top he was less than impressed.

The car still pulled well though and returned very good fuel economy with a good overall layout of the major controls and I am turning into William Woolard. Pass the gun.

New wireless for the Celica.....

This is more like it, this has been donated by Chris for the duration of our trip / ownership of the car.

Just in case we forget....

Best put our destination on the car!

More stickers!

The Monte Carlo rally sticker is now on the bonnet as are the additional Castrol stickers for the back end. The red and green flashes on the tail gate and spoiler are made from the offcuts of the sticker kit. Not quite as big as the original Castrol rally car but they give an impression

Blingin' wickd sound system init!

As you can see from the photo we have found the most awful wireless in the the whole of cardom. But it works, sort of. The tone control ranges from hiss to muffled. But hey it's only 2500 miles

It hits the road!!

The car is now taxed, and insured to compliment the crisp MOT ticket. All that we have to do now is order up a couple more stickers,paint the door shuts and change the stereo.

Now the stereo is directly proportional to our budget but with the obligatory but thrown in for laughs.

We all have old CD players knocking about but we wanted to play MP3's that we have downloaded from the interweb and stuff without the complications of adding them to a cd. Because that is just one more thing to do. So we want to use our MP3 players and mobile phone which is where most of our songs are stored these days.

Now for those of you that have just joined us and may feel that we have something that resembles a budget for this project please take two aspirin and call me later. We have a budget of "as low as possible" for this whole crackpot scheme, so purchasing a stereo with MP3 compatibility, USB ports and I pod plug sockets is just (frankly) ideas of legend and myth. No what we have is a cassette adaptor to plug into a tape player purchased from the pound shop.Now this presents it's own problems. Where to find a cassette player being the biggest.....

So much for a tin of white gloss

Marc and myself have spent 2 days putting the stickers on this car. It is fair to say that Marc certainly is sick to death of the site of the thing. At least I can go home and not have to see it.

But this is the moment where it was nearly finished

Laying out the stickers

It's upside down you plums

Our sticker kit arrived and great news the colours were absolutely spot on, as you can tell from the photo, so with a really early start at exactly sometime on a Monday morning we laid out the stickers onto the car. However we had a disaster ! it looked like the colours had been printed back to front with the red and green transposed Marc and i looked at this problem for at least 5 minutes before retiring for another coffee. Our options were to stick them on anyway and hoped no one would notice, paint our own after all or take photos and ring the supplier.

A quick phone call later to Autograph graphics http://www.autographgraphics.co.uk/ and Ben was kindly listening to our plight. he agreed to look at the pictures and see what had happened.

After a return call, and myself and Marc assuring him that we had tried everything he patiently suggested that we turn the stickers the other way up.....

Silence followed as I looked at Marc and he looked at me.

We did what Ben said with the actions of sheepish 2 year olds.

We looked at the floor and shuffled our feet.

As I was holding the phone it fell to me to salvage what dignity could be retrieved from this debacle . My mouth opened but no words fell forth. I felt that Ben was actually watching us. "well Ben Marc and I are a right couple of plums" was the best that I could say.

At this point we must thank Ben and the team at autograph http://www.autographgraphics.co.uk/

the kit they supplied is absolutely spot on, the reservations we had at first were proved to be completely unfounded, the picture on Ebay does not do there product for the Celica justice. Thanks also to Ben who was very patient and professional when we rang

£80 what the hell?

We had planned from the outset to have the Castrol Rally graphics on the car, or at least as close as we could get with a some red and green paint a roller and some paint brushes, and seriously that was the original plan.

However as the car had continually come in under budget and everything we had done to it had worked well and looked good we realised that we could almost justify spraying the graphics on with aerosol or even Marcs paint gun. If we could mask the shapes any sense.

We batted the prospect of masking the shapes and buying the Castrol stickers back and forth for weeks, with occasional Ebay and Google searches throwing up kits for around £250, we did find one for around £80 but it just seemed to good to be true on price and the colours seemed to be wrong, but after pricing up the individual Castrol and Toyota stickers we decided that £80 was worth a punt to get the writing and if the colour of the shapes was wrong? Well we would just need to paint our own any way. How hard could it be?

We left the action with a well painted matt white Celica, after a lot of head scratching it was concluded that we had pushed the boundaries of cheap skate money pinching to far and by using some old thinners that we had lying around had inadvertently fooled the paint into thinking it was a base coat that would normally be covered in a lacquer, and not a glossy top coat.

So it was back to the paint shop for more paint and top coat thinners. The result? A nice shiny white Celica.


The problem with white Celica's is that there are hundreds of them, so we were now committed to our original idea for an eye catching paint job that would would not look out of place in Casino Square, or at least being chased out of Casino Square by the local fuzz.

Like I said it was the cheapest paint in the shop...

Our initial feelings off euphoria were short lived when the paint dried matt white, could it be because the paint was "the cheapest in the shop" ?

Undeterred we bought some more thinners and another splash of white paint and added a third coat.

Prime Time Entertainment

Here we go, bar coat being applied and not a roller or paint brush in site.

Don't Panic I know this looks like a lavish luxury to bestow upon our cheap as chips project but the paint that is to follow was the cheapest stuff the shop could supply that didn't need a roller to apply it.

Some of you may notice that these pictures are not in order.

They were when this was put together, who knows why they have swapped places.

It's paint Marc but not as we know it...

We had two glorious days over the bank holiday weekend to paint the car outside, but we chose the third day. When it rained.

This meant we had to move the car to the body shop to prevent rain drops and leaves blowing onto the freshly applied bar coat. This move meant the emptying Marc garage of assorted useful items* and pushing the car back about 12 feet.

However once inside the top quality paint application area we began earnestly masking the car with the Daily Star and other quality publications.

Very soon the car was ready for the Bar Coat, this layer prevents the paint that is already on a car reacting with the new colour causing bubbling and cracks, so in theory this coat should prevent the top coat of gloss white from reacting with the red paint underneath.

What could possibly go wrong?

* although Marc would argue with gusto most would refer to this stuff as junk, with the exception of a compressor that is waiting for a motor.

It's time to apply some paint

With an MOT the next part of our plan is to apply some paint. Now you have to bear in mind that the car cost £124 and not much more than 74p has been spent on it since so I ventured off to the pound shop for some out of date emulsion and paint and brushes.


Marc felt that the car deserved more than that so we went to B & Q instead.


It soon became apparent that it would be generally easier and probably give a better finish if the car was sprayed, so after returning the tins of white emulsion we stopped off at the local purveyor of car paint stuff.



Now fully armed with bar coat and paint we set about removing the last of the matt black paint and unbolting the spoilers and other bits of trim.




And you thought we were going to bodge this.

It has an MOT

Against all of the odds the celica has an MOT, first atempt to.

As you can see most of the black stealth paint has been scrapped, rubbed and softened off with blood sweat and tears to the point where the car is now a matt pink, however the new paint job is just around the corner, we are planning a decent coat of paint having spent at least 10 minutes beating the dents out with a couple of heavy stones we had lying around but it may yet be a roller, a pack of economy brushes and some emulsion from from the pound shop.

Our route has undergone some meticulous planning with hours of research trawling Pistonheads and google maps. We are looking to travel in this order; Nurburgring to Wurzburg to Volkach then to the Alps and the Stelvio Pass onto Lake Como then into Turin. We are then hoping to "pop" into Monaco for a quick photo of the car in casino square before the rozzers move us out for having such a cheap car. This will then be followed by a quick jaunt through the Mount Blanc tunnel then a furious dash through France to be back in Blighty in time for tea and buns.

Drinking wine, eating cheese and catching some rays

Things are really looking good now, a Friend has offered us accommodation after the "ring" and we may have the opportunity to visit a wine chateaux http://www.schoenborn.de/97.html?&L=1

Many thanks Manuel

This picure does not convey the true size of the task, Marc is now manufacturing an entire system from odds and ends that I had in my garage. The exhaust system is now a Range Rover and Marina hybrid.

As Marc is a perfectionist the sytem fits perfectley and sounds very nice.

The whole exhaust cost us 74p........ for a new bracket. We are truly doing this on the cheap.

On the right is the Celica back box that Marc was hoping to patch, however after removal it became apparent that the the box was bereft of any soundproofing as well as being rotten beyond belief, on the left is a Range Rover box that I happened to have lying around.

As they are so similar Marc should have no problem in swapping them over.....