Panic flashback !

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Silk

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30 years ago seeing one of these would have me worried...



MOT...back then (pre mid '90's) police were seperate, and we didn't worry about them, the MOT traffic patrol guys were the ones that hounded us. The police lost a lot of respect when it was amalgemated into one force.



The car is a 1982 Ford Cortina MkIV, most will call it a MkV, but there was no such thing, it's a MkIV facelift. It has the 2.0 ohc engine, these days called a Pinto, but it's a German engine, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.3, used in English Fords like the Cortina and Siera. It's a genuine Cop car, has the radio, siren and stuff. Came in guttless - new leads and points, set the timing. I'll road test it tomorrow and see if I can pull over a drunk driver. The building behind is where I was working a few months ago.
 
Haha...one night around 2AM, I was driving "enthusiastically" in my LJ 186 triples and the works, and a car pulled in from a side street and was trying (I though) to race me...Cop was a bit disgruntled that a little Torana with a six was pulling away from his 351 four speed XE...

I loved those square Cortinas, and the ones before it too actually...especially with the 250 in it.
 
I know a guy who was a NZ MOT officer back in the day, used to ride a motorbike, reckons it was the best job ever...he wishes they stayed seperate from the police, too.
 
I bet he had a mustache, I think it was compulsory, part of the uniform. Bike cops, they could ride...well some of them anyway. One guy I let catch me as he was slipping behind a bit, so I stopped at a light. He was breathless, got out his ticket book, but his hand was shaking so much he couldn't write, so just told me to slow down a bit. This was on the morning commute in the city.

The Aussie Cortina's were a bit different as they were made for the 6 - they had a different front end and a cut back firewall for the longer engine. We also got them with the 4 cyl engine. Small car big engine was not popular here, big car small engine was more the thing. We used to use the 2.0 Cortina carb on the horrible Holden Starfire engine, the carb they had was most of their problems, they almost ran sweet with the Weber.
 
Originally Posted By: Shannow
What was the Cortina carb ?

My Starfire had a Varajet...garbage.


Cortinas over here had an ICH or a DGV depending on displacement
 
The 2.0 had the DGV...and that French thing on the Starfire was junk. We also fitted the Cortina DGV to Ladas, they were bolt on...but needed a redrill for the Holden. The problem with both was the idle air bleed, just way too lean...the DGV had a proper idle mixture adjustment screw. The 1.6 had a single barrel.

We had a really nice EH in last week...not my job, but had a nosey and talked to the customer. Best thing it had was a Commodore rack and pinion and Celica box, but unfortunatly a 202. Oh, all sorts of nice things had been done to it, but it was still a 202. I told him he should've got all that work done on a 186. Then I went and had smoko across the road at the hire centre...and we talked about Holden engines, the sweet 161, and the horrible 202. My friend over there said he got suspicious about a rough running 202 he was rebuilding, and had the crankgrinder check the bigend throws....and found the were up to 2mm out. TDC was not in the same place on every cyl.
 
Silk, was the R and P front end Castlmaine Rod Shop ?

Very nice, and yes, I was not a 202 fan...I built a few, but they always sounded like they wanted to explode above 4,500RPM, no matter what I did to them...the 3" strokers were always the best. (Never heard one running, but putting in a ford 221 Crank for a 235 stroker is relatively common (??), they welded the back end of a Holden crank on the ford... anyway digression)

202s, I've had too many number 2/5 failures...by too many, 4 engines out of less than 10...two complete failures, and two with pistons heavily cacked as I pulled them apart...the last had the inertia ring from the balancer about to come off (picked it during a tune), and sure enough, near collapsed skirt on one of those.

I massively over-revved a 161 playing rally champion in Stromlo forrest...it rattled and burned oil, but never came apart. Most abuse was my 138...scraped 2L of sludge out of the rocker cover and side plates, couple litres of kerosene, and idling to get the rest out...85MPH indicated with a trimatic flat out, and a blue trail that would have made James Bond proud...bought the car.
 
He just said it was a Commodore rack, and it said so on the mod plate too. Yeah, 2/5 failure was a Holden thing, the 179 was apparently the worst. Taxi drivers would get a Premier for the trim level, toss the 179 and fit a 161. I have seen uneven firing with the 202 on a scope and just thought it was the dist cam, but this guy had the engine on the bench, marked TDC for each cyl on the pulley, and found they were out. I once changed the oil on an HQ, and it filled the rocker cover to the top. Came back an hour later and the level hadn't gone down. It left the shop, and some time later I did followers on it...pretty sludged up alright.
 
I get a kick out of you guys from down under reminiscing about your old cars that I know nothing about. Now I know how my wife feels when I talk about the hot rods of my youth!
grin.gif
 
Originally Posted By: Shannow

I loved those square Cortinas, and the ones before it too actually...especially with the 250 in it.


That's the one I wanted, with the 250 6-cylinder in it.
 
Originally Posted By: SR5
Originally Posted By: Shannow

I loved those square Cortinas, and the ones before it too actually...especially with the 250 in it.


That's the one I wanted, with the 250 6-cylinder in it.


Colin Bond's Cortina Rally car had the first 4.1 crossflow head on it, before release in the Falcon, and an instruction not to open the bonnet with media present...good article in a motor mag at the time that they invited (Wheels, Modern Motor, one of those) to help shift the car before a rally to the rally start, and do some shakedown, and the journo was driving over a rail crossing dukes of hazard style when they were pulled over...Cop apparently asked if the driver thought he was Colin Bond, and the answer was no, I know Colin Bond, he's asleep in the back.


While trying to find vids of the Bond Cortina (front and back bumpers could be unpinned and used to unbog in sand..., found an LC XU-1 lap of Bathurst...I drive around there 5-6 times a year, and it's nothing like that anymore
 
Originally Posted By: jhs914
I get a kick out of you guys from down under reminiscing about your old cars that I know nothing about. Now I know how my wife feels when I talk about the hot rods of my youth!
grin.gif



Driving to work today, I was wondering what the modern repro late 60s transams were like to build from scratch...not an itch I'd ever scratch, but was doing a build in my head.
 
That cop car looks like its based on a mustang then made into a 4 door. Same body lines as an 82ish mustang. I have heard of police cars with small engines in the USA. None in my area. Smallest was the 318 dodge that was extremely under powered and could not run down a corolla.
 
Question for the Southern Hemisphere guys:

You say there were Police and MOT patrols in years back?

Was it the case that the cops were cops and the MOT guys were overzealous road enforcers in order to keep their jobs?

Here in the Garden State (New Jersey) there were county (NJ has 21 counties) cops and talk of their dissolution was constant.
Now they are fused with the Sheriff Departments. I don't have any broad personnel reduction numbers.
 
Originally Posted By: Chris142
That cop car looks like its based on a mustang then made into a 4 door. Same body lines as an 82ish mustang.

I dunno about that. I mean an 80's Volvo 240, BMW e30 etc all had "similar" body lines and were RWD etc.
 
I always laugh at the foreign names for police. Seems odd to have two separate "divisions" maybe it's like state patrol and the local police here.
 
Originally Posted By: Kira
Question for the Southern Hemisphere guys:

You say there were Police and MOT patrols in years back?


Yes, we had police, and they did crime only, it would be some serious traffic offence before they became involved. Just speeding or an unroadworthy vehicle was not their concern, even accidents weren't attended by police, unless there was a death maybe. They did investigate dirty scruffy guys on noisy British motorcycles from time to time, but were usually polite and didn't create agro.

The MOT had their Traffic Department, and officers in cars and on bikes (Triumph Saint was the cop bike), and the Borough Councils in Auckland, and there were several, had their own traffic cops. They were very much enforcement types, and run ins with them were countless...I have plenty of stories. One rule was they couldn't go onto private property, so you could end a chase by turning into someones driveway. In the early '90's, as part of our these days called Neoliberal changes, the traffic cops were combined into the police. Some of the Traffic Cops patched over, some became unemployed. Now that police do traffic duties, everyone hates the police...sad when they were so respected when I was young.
 
That XU1 looks pretty slow these days. That cast iron Xflow Falcon head was a dog, the 3rd attempt was hardly better. My XC was retro fitted with the old red rocker cover 250, loved the max torque at 1600rpm. The OHC Cortina engine was reliable apart from the cam and finger follower problems - clack, clack, clack down the road. We just used to slip another finger in to shut them up. Still the easiest cambelt to do, ever. I towed a broken cambelt in from the supermarket carpark one day at 4.00pm...I left work at 4.30pm, the Cortina was parked in the carpark and the bill already made up ready to go. I was told the 1600 would bend valves, but never saw one do it.
 
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