I've finally been able to workout how to download a photo of my Flame Red Rover 416 GTI Auto on to the forum so I've decided to come out of the woodwork and share my restoration project .
Some of the work shown here will be retrospective , with work carried out earlier this year, the rest will be the long list of jobs to bring the car back up to a good standard.
It was registered in 1991 and I brought the car in 1997.
It had 3 previous owners and it came with 33k miles on the clock and was in good condition although already some of the panels were already different shades.
By 2006 it become our 3rd car and went through a period of being stored in a variety of location . Unfortunately one of these included a car cover under an oak tree at the bottom of my parents garden. This caused significant damage to the bodywork and lead to a lot of time spent unseizing brake callipers.
By 2016 the car had done 140k and was looking a little worse for wear so I decided to move it in to a dry lock up garage and work on restoring it.
By this stage the list of tasks was quite long.
The sills had rusted through on previous occassions ,in the usual places , and a variety of different quality repairs had been undertaken over the years.
The paintwork on the roof and parts of the bonnet has been damaged by the movement of the car cover during storage and there are now a number of small "hailstone" dents on the roof and bonnet caused by acorns and twigs falling from the oak tree during it's storage.
During storage a squirrel decided to make it's home in the air box and use the insulation from the bonnet soundproofing to make it's nest , it however doesn't seem to have gnawed it's way through any of the cables or pipes.
The original wheels were also looking a bit worn with the paint peeling and corrosion setting in. A piecemeal approach to having them recoated wasn't really successful either.
So the car was a bit of a mess although the picture above, taken in 2017 , appears to show a car in reasonable condition.
Since the start of the year I have made some progress , although a recent discovery of a rust hole in the bottom of the A pillar caused by a rather large dollop of windscreen sealant collecting water has set the project back a bit.
Some people I guess would suggest scrapping it and going to look for a low mileage example that's been kept in a dry garage for years but somehow to me it wouldn't be the same and the number of examples of this model on the road is very small so the scrapyard is going to have to wait a bit longer for this one.
I've allocated myself some money for the project and hope it's enough to cover the bodywork repairs and hopefully a full respray (i'll leave these bits to the professionals) at the end.
