After nearly seven weeks at Crossings garage phase one of my rolling resto project is complete. Having bought an Allegro sold unseen last year (price £1500) and garaged it I needed someone to inspect it and make sure it was roadworthy and hopefully within my £500 initial budget. Those who read chapter two of my Allegro adventure will know I had a slight mishap at the first place I took the car to but the second time proved to be the charm. I must confess, I’d been deeply concerned about Dolly (please don’t harm my street cred on YouTube by mentioning the name) because we had the wettest May on record and the poor girl took a battering every day, as she was rolled outside (due to a lack of space in the garage during the day ) . When I turned up to collect Dolly on May 28 th the friendly mechanic Christian was happy to go over every job done at a leisure ly pace and prime me for what still needed doing, but was not yet agreed upon. He turned out to be old enough to have
Owning an Austin Allegro is a de-facto experiment of sorts to see if a completely hands off owner can run a 1970s car, and a notoriously problematic one at that, or if the whole exercise is economically unfeasible. Money pits have broken many more mechnically minded men than me but, what with it being end times for the almost extinct and yet still keenly priced Allegro, it was a pretty much now-or-never situation in terms of owning one. And no doubt for reasons unfathomable to many, this is the car for me. Having at least got the Allegro home it now urgently needed shelter and a health inspection. I'd bought the 1300 SDL MK 1 during a rare spell of cash flow and my initial TLC budget extended to no more than £500. I hoped that would be enough to make her roadworthy and initiate one or two improvements. It wasn’t long before Covid-19 cast a spell over the land and normal business was suspended. Nonetheless, my local garage was still in action and for all intents and purposes the loc