What you got? Care to share the trials and tribulations of banger/shed ownership? Or perhaps recount various triumphs in keeping old cheap cars on the road.

I’ll start. Last Saturday I bought a Citroen Berlingo with the non STW approved 1.6HDi engine for £800 after my Mazda 6 burnt out an exhaust valve.

40 Miles later on a dual carriageway the dashboard lights up yelling at me to stop. Pulling into the nearest services (1/3 mile away thankfully) it transpires that the car has rapidly shed most of its coolant. Managed to limp home on a new bottle of coolant.

This is the leak as I was backing it up onto the driveway…

Turns out that the airbox has been rattling on its mountings and chafing the coolant pipe underneath…

Can you replace just that bit of pipe? Nope, £46 for the whole assembly. Oh well should be an easy enough fix.

Lets hear ’em!

You might as well buy a turbo now so you’re ready when it nukes itself into orbit!

Best car I’ve ever owned was an N reg 1.8 cavalier about 10 or so years ago. Bought it for £300 with 170k on the clock, did nothing to it apart from oil + filter changes, brakes, tyres etc and sold it a few years later with just short of 300k on the clock for £200!

That pipe usually has a gap between it and the airbox… You might be able to put in a few double ended pipe connector and gubilee clips(if they done shafe on the airbox) and a length of pipe in the middle.. Might fix the leak but run uit up and be double sure it’s not leaking or got an airlock.. Be wary of the turbo it COULD go BANG considering the leaks location..

Best got me is a 2005 BMW 3 series I reconstructed the front carrier/wheel arch liners on… Lots of drilling and cable ties later looked like a monster but held toghether..

Going way back, when tax was transferrable and dinosaurs roamed the roads:

mk2 Jetta (in bronze with beige interior), £70, had nearly a year MOT and a few months tax, ran it for the MOT period and then sold on for a tenner.
mk4 Escort, £150, had 9 months MOT, ran it and scrapped, can’t remember what the scrap was worth.
mk4 Escort, £350, ran it for 3 years with few bits to replace. Was bought with the carb mis-assembled (jets were swapped). Ran quite sweet after that was sorted, until the clutch exploded – had it fixed and carried on, sold on for £250.

The problem with bangernomics is that you have be quite good at picking decent condition cars that look rubbish (or simply be lucky) to avoid any major repair costs, otherwise the budget is blown out and it would have been worth taking on a newer more reliable car.

Cant you cut out the damaged section and replace with a suitable SAMCO silicone part with jubilee clips?

Good selection demon-tweeks.com or e bay.

We’ve got a 2009 VW Golf Estate 2.0 Bluemotion Diesel with 168,000 miles on the clock. We’ve owned it since 2013 and it just keeps on truckin’. It’s been a fantastic family car and we’ve barely spent any money on it. Every MOT I’m expecting something major – but it passes.

A couple of months back an engine warning light stared to come on periodically and the turbo would go to sleep – worked fine again once you had restarted it. We had it checked and it’s ‘probably sticky turbo vanes’ so the garage cleaned it out with some special detergent that goes in the air intake. All was ok until last week when it happened again.

We do a lot of long distance family trips so decided it was time to relegate the trusty Golf to local run around duties. (WBAC offered £400 and the garage we bought the new car from weren’t interested in a part ex!!) Its quite nice having a second car for tip runs, throwing the bikes in the back and not worrying about the dirt, commuting when its wet/windy, etc.

We’ll keep it going until it explodes…the questions is will that be in months or years? Who knows!

Here’s the old girl in Anglesey (the missing trim is the result of a deer strike)…

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Years ago I bought a Peugeot 309 1.6 GL, in an awfully dull burgundy, for £409 out the newsagents window. Was owned by an old boy who was handing in his license.
Ran it for a few years, went through 2 MOT’s with no spend!!!

Got my first car in 2008 – Ford Fiesta 1996 (N reg) with no MOT and about 75k miles. Paid £150, took it for it’s MOT and it passed with no advisories!
12 months later took it in for MOT again and it needed about £1500 worth of rust repair. So I scrapped it for £70. Annolyingly it was about 1 month after I’d paid £50 for a new tyre.

’06 Ford C-max, paid £5k for it 10 years ago with 30k on the clock. It’s now on 135k and the most expensive repair so far was £200 for suspension bushes.

OH has a ’54 Fiesta which is a bit more ropey. Although apart from the heater fan not working except on 4 and one electric window switch it’s not doing to bad at the moment.

The new pipe assembly is already on its way. I know its not really doing bangernomics properly by spending out, but to my mind, adding a bit of pipe just creates more places to potentially leak from. But that’s just me.

Engineer friend at work has offered to help put new valves in the head of my Mazda 6 engine if I can bring the head to his workshop…we shall see. Got to fix the Blingo first.

Thanks for the responses by the way, I’ve got turbo anxiety now!

aazlad . There are a couple of tricks , get it warmed up thoroughly and go through the rev range from 1000 -4000 rpm in 3rd a good few times ( x10 ish ) . This will move the vnt through maximum range , so nearly full throttle , then full lift off , engine braking down to near idle, rinse and repeat.- alot.
Or , disconnect the EGR pipe and fire a load of oven cleaner up into the turbo assembley, or drop the down pipe off the turbo and fire a load of oven cleaner up there. Wait an hour then italian tune up

mk2 Jetta (in bronze with beige interior)

Oooh now that sounds lovely. There’s a few folk I know who would love a car like that.

Thanks @singletrackmind. I’ll give the rev range thing a go next time its on a decent journey.

banging bingo that .

I had one in the same colour up till last year. 140k on the clock – only got rid because the wife was transporting kids around with her work more often and i didnt feel happy putting someone elses kids in a 15 year old van with very little in the way of safety.

it was still rattling round until june there. Its out of MOT now – i sold it for peanuts so its unlikely someone saw value in fixing it even for little issues and ran it to ruin.

little to no electrics to go wrong , and hard plastic interior with no carpet to hold water

I have had about 40 cars . Most sub £1k , some sub £100. Most do 1 year , some more , some less. I have a 3 strikes rule, buy car fix any immediate niggles then aim to spend as little as possible from then on. 3 fails or let downs and its moved on.
The 235,000 Passat that went to 325,000 and was sold for what I paid for was possibly the best sub £750 I spent, although a few of the £90 were horrific and great at the same time . The Fiat Tempre TurD ( the brick .- as it was faded red ) was truely shocking and refused to die despite 32,000 with no servicing . It was replaced with another one in white ( the ambo ) and a few parts swapped. Similarly mistreated and still didnt explode.
The £90 Golf mk3 TDI that also ran and ran with next to nothing spent
A Citroen BX with out of ruound tyres that would move from understeer to oversteer in a second , it leaked , smelt , was fast , did 50 mpg , and got us home from Cornwall after a gearbox explosion. Although it did flattern its battery occaisionally
A Citroen ZX converted to run on veg oil ,and sold for a profit after 25k miles . wasnt a bad car although the electrics were abit shonky

misterp, it was not that lovely, but, beauty and the beholder and all that, and, I should have kept it in dry storage for 15 years and re-sold it. Hindsight, eh. It was an X reg (1980? 81?). That might even have made it a mk1. It had 4 top quality ditchfinders fitted of the narrowest biscuit lid proportions and was a lot of fun to drive in the wet, where fun in this case is meaning oversteer, understeer, an inability to brake, sometimes all three at the same time, and not always entirely deliberately.

tinas, I can’t help thinking you’ve not quite got the hang of this bangernomics thing.

Don’t worry nostrils,
Turbos can live forever or go bang.. I know fix cars in a garage every day had a defender keep oil starving-3 turbos 6 months, and my college has a 13 year old mk4 golf running its original never touched turbo.

They are very reliable and if the leaks fixed shouldn’t be a big danger.. Just keep your oil level up and it should be fine..

I’ve finally taken the leap and got out of bangernomics but my old Mondeo did a grand job. 2.2 diesel and ghia spec so it was actually quite nice, 150000 miles on it by the time I wrote it off, it did need a new turbo and a couple of injectors and a cheap exhaust in the 5 years I had it but that was fine, and I put new shocks in out of choice. Paid £1850 in 2014, got £1200 insurance payment when I killed it, and along the way damn nearly killed it when it got flooded in a loch. It was getting to the point where even minor maintenance was a pain due to everything being so corroded and tired, so it was about done but what a champ. Awesome bike car too.

Don’t worry nostrils,
Turbos can live forever or go bang.. I know fix cars in a garage every day had a defender keep oil starving-3 turbos 6 months, and my college has a 13 year old mk4 golf running its original never touched turbo.

They are very reliable and if the leaks fixed shouldn’t be a big danger.. Just keep your oil level up and it should be fine..

The K26 turbo in my 944 is 33 years/170000 miles old.

My Gfs car is a 2004 Astra estate 1.6 8 valve. I’m sure it’s the same engine as the MK1.
It was £300 5 years ago with a water leak (was the roof seal under the roof rail trims), been to the Alps twice, Scotland, commuted from reading to Oxford for a couple of years.
It’s had an exhaust, tyres, lambda sensor, brakes and oil and filters etc. Basically consumables.

my college has a 13 year old mk4 golf running its original never touched turbo.

OTOH I had a colleague who had a Mk 4 Golf TDI eat its turbo… just out of warranty.

I may have previously moaned about both mine and my wife’s Mk 5 Golfs losing the air con compressor at 4yo, which is an engine-out job to fix.

To be fair a turbo in an old Porsche bears no relevance to the prone to oil starvation due to fine gauze in the pick up getting blockex by people using the wrong oil and/or neglecting to change it.

had a defender keep oil starving-3 turbos 6 months,

Which defender engine was that.

One turbo is fair enough it happens.

A second turbo in short order after the first has been replaced has me thinking about using a new garage.

Had an 07 Focus automatic handed down through the family when I changed jobs and lost the company car.

It’s cost me £130 for a new ‘special’ battery lately but that’s all apart from a few services and MOT’s and it runs like a dream. Even if it is a little crusty around the edges.

Running a ’99 Audi A8 4.2 quattro, absolutely lovely, had it ten years and now it’s on 2012000 miles, the heating has just packed up and its MOT is due so depending on cost it may have to go, hope not tho.

On talk of turbos, it’s one of those things that sounds worse than it is. I got a recon turbo (with exchange) for the mondeo, £270 + gaskets and an oilchange, and fitted it myself. THere’s always a risk that it causes other damage though.

With the new car, which is a bit nicer, I noticed a little play in the turbo so decided to replace it early rather than risk leaving it to explode in a year or two, and threw in a mellett core for £170, again plus gaskets and some consumables. I doubt I’d do that on a bangernomics car but, maybe. The size of the job varies from car to car of course but the principle’s always the same.

We bought a 1993 £600 Mazda 323 (old low model with frameless glass doors). It was 13 years in the ownership of one lady before us, folder of receipts in date order from same garage. I could criticise that the electric aerial was noisy, but that would be splitting hairs.
We ran it for a year / 6k miles. It cost a new tyre for the MOT and sold it for £675…

Yep like clutches and head gaskets turbos are best replaced when they start to show signs of dying rather than when they die.

The bills are smaller that way

tinas, I can’t help thinking you’ve not quite got the hang of this bangernomics thing.

You say that, but if you divide the depreciation by how many years we’ve had them, it’s been quite a bit cheaper than a lot of the ‘its got a years mot and run it till it dies’ cars mentioned! Done as many/more miles than most too! The c-max in particular has shown no inclination to breaking stuff so I want to see 200k from it at least (unless electric cars take over first or I give in and buy a van).

Think of them as bangernomics (because neither is worth more than £500) with a very well known history!

I need a presentable / corporate car for work…

In 2017 bought a 2004 Jaguar XJ6 (3.0 V6) with 82,000 miles on the clock for £3,600, mint condition. Now maintained by my local independent Jag specialist and has 122,000 miles … drives like a dream. Scored brownie points when I brought it home and my missus thought I’d spent about £8k on it.

Budget £1k per year for main service, tyres, interim oil.

It replaced a low mileage 2006 Jag S-type (2.7D turbo), which i had bought for £4200 and received £4800 off the insurer when someone carelessly knocked the corner off it. Gutted for the loss of the car but blow softened by the settlement.

if you divide the depreciation by how many years we’ve had them

I’m with you there, as one of the cheapest ways to own a car is to buy it nearly new and simply keep it for a 10+ years.

But that isn’t bangernomics, which was all about sifting the bottom of the gene pool for good runners that didn’t cost much.

Thanks trail-rat, which engine did you have in yours? Mine is at just over 100k and is on its second turbo. I’ve found this guide: http://www.londonturbos.co.uk/16hdi.html which I’ll be following, I know it doesn’t guarantee against turbo failure and goes against bangernomics but I feel its worth doing.

In other news, the pipe assembly has arrived! Unfortunately the weather is meant to be a bit pants at the weekend when I’m meant to be fitting it.

mines was a 1.9D . gutless but would have run till the cows came home.

Did the speed limit eventually stood us fine.

Was my second one.

Would sniff out another if i needed a cheap run about for me.

real easy to work on

while i subscribed to bangernomics for a long time – i always felt that maintainance was not worth skimping on. If i didnt trust it to drive to my folks in france then why should i trust it to take my wife to the shops ?

parts were cheap , and rarely took long to fit. Timing belt was a 3hr job on my engine – i did them my self and a service was 40 quid and took about 25 minutes.

Good logic there trail rat. Managed to replace the coolant pipe assembly on the Berlingo. Wasn’t too bad of a job except when undoing hose clips, the tabs always seem to be facing away from you in an awkward position! I am now using the car on my commute so will monitor coolant levels closely.

The great thing about a Berlingo is that the boot doubles as a workshop!

Now to turn my attention to this…

Suspected burnt out valve in the head. To remove the head the engine front cover needs to come off. The trouble is that the cover incorporates one of the engine mounts which requires that the engine be supported with one of these: https://www.sgs-engineering.com/dual-hook-engine-support-500kg?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzMbp7YSR5AIVWbvVCh0EhQ_hEAQYASABEgLlovD_BwE

My concern is that the top of the crankcase is going to be exposed for at least a week whilst I carry out the work at weekends and that I wont be able to shut the bonnet with the beam in place. I could jack the engine from underneath instead I guess. Also any ideas as to how to protect the open bores/crankcase etc from corrosion? I was thinking of just stuffing with oily rags and smearing everything with oil.

1994 Peugeot 205 diesel bought for £450 with 100k on it. It had the 1.8 turbo diesel in from the GRD model and went (relatively) like a scalded cat although I wouldn’t have fancied crashing in it. It made it up to 170k before I leaned in the boot and my hand went through the floor.
Now on a ’93 Clio bought for £600, 90k and sweet as a nut.
I love cr###y cars. Bike covered in mud? Throw it in. Need to haul a load of wood/cement/bricks home? Throw it in.

I was thinking of just stuffing with oily rags and smearing everything with oil

That plus a poly sheet over everything.

Where will the car be while you have this beam holding the engine? I’d be vaguely worried about scum making off with the beam while everything was open if it’s a bit public. Jack up from underneath and it’s all a bit more discrete. You can always drop the beam back in when you re-start working.

Got a free C8 off my old man nearly 2 years ago with a known pollution fault. Right outside my house it threw a wobbler , the engine temp went screaming up and demanded I stopped immediately. Turned out there was no coolant.

Pollution fault was fixed with a new EGR for £80 and the coolant problem traced to corroded diesel heater pipes, they were completely replaced with silicone hoses for about £60. Only other big issue was a broken shock coil so got a new pair.

Since then it’s been usual servicing, I love to hate it but know it’s going to keep running. There are a few things I need to do, a new outside temp sensor would be nice so the heating works again and the fuel cooler needs moved off the underside to somewhere sensible (anyone know where to get plastic fuel hose and fittings???) but apart from that it’s pretty good if a complete wreck to look at.

I hear those springs are dead easy to change SK

I’m waiting on hearing on a couple of jobs, one of which I’ll need to drive to (it’s a bit far to ride, plus ‘orrible roads all the way unless I take a detour).

So I’m looking at bargain motors. Like a 51 plate BMW 330Ci with 158k on it. That can’t be a bad idea right?

How much is it? Long MOT?

Think you are right about jacking the engine mrmonkfinger, car is on a driveway on a busy road.