Yeah, I know – it was bound to happen. You just can’t drive a cheap, low-production, British fibreglass car from the seventies as your year-round daily and then not expect to run into trouble at some point. It’s a given…
Regular ViaRETRO readers might have noticed my lacking presence on these pages over the past four months or so. Well, sometimes life throws you a curveball and you just have to deal with it. For me, this meant finding a new job in Luxembourg and subsequently packing up our home and leaving the UK behind us. Needless to say, such an adventure didn’t leave much spare time to commit to ViaRETRO or classic cars in general. But my Scimitar – being my one and only daily driver – obviously came with me to Luxembourg.
In fact, once you lie those rear seats flat, it’s quite astonishing just how much you can fit into this low slung and rather stylish seventies shooting brake. The Scimitar is every bit as practical as she is sporting, and as she has done on previous occasions, she proved herself as a highly competent GT as we motored down through the UK, nipped across the Channel on the ferry and then powered on through Europe towards our new life in Central Europe…
And for a while, things were looking up. But then came another curveball – in the shape of a blown headgasket. It was perhaps inevitable.
But hang on a second my good man! Maybe that’s not being entirely fair to my Reliant, as she has served me remarkably well for more than a year. When I first bought my Scimitar, I presented her here on ViaRETRO with the fate-challenging headline: Reliant Roulette, but then followed up just months later with: Roulette Winner, as I was truly enjoying all that my Scimitar had to offer. And for more than a year, my British fibreglass car proved itself reliable and trouble-free as I added a not insignificant 8000-plus miles to the speedometer through all kinds of weather and usage. But then again, that old Essex V6 has always been held in high regard as a strong and reliable engine.
Yet, it was the engine which eventually failed me. I noticed that I was needing to add coolant more often than usual, but it wasn’t alarming quantities so I dismissed it as a bit of water simply escaping the coolant system once under pressure. In hindsight, I should have known better. Of course, it became painfully obvious that I had a real problem when I cranked the engine one cold morning and she only fired on five.
So having only just arrived in Luxembourg and not having my usual classic car network around me, I needed a classic car specialist who knew what they were doing yet weren’t going to rip my arm off. Luckily, just across the German border in the historic city of Trier, I came across Jürgen Jesse Oldtimerwerkstatt. A first careful visit to Jesse’s workshop immediately had me convinced that I had indeed come to the right place.
So my Scimitar was left among a variety of classic BMWs, Mercedes-Benz, Porsches, Land Rovers and a stunningly beautiful Lancia Fulvia for Jesse to determine the precise verdict. It wasn’t long before I received a phone call: The headgasket was blown between the second and third cylinder resulting in a loss of coolant and loss of compression, but thankfully, there had been no mixing of coolant and engine oil.
At this point, the cheap fix would of course have been to whip on a new headgasket and hope for the best. But we all know that the cheap fix is very rarely the right fix. So Jesse got on with the job of dismantling both heads and then working his magic on them. Jesse’s classic car workshop has been going for more than 30 years now, and a vast experience of also building high performance racing engines for historic motorsport meant that my Essex engine was no doubt in good hands. The valve seats were looking a little tired too, so Jesse and I agreed that with the heads already off, it would make sense to see to that at the same time. So everything was cleaned, skimmed and polished leaving both heads looking rather appealing before Jesse started bolting it all together again.
SHINY!!
The engine is now fully reassembled and despite having only heard the engine at idle, I can already confirm that it sounds much better than it did before. Clearly, the valves are now doing precisely what they’re meant to be doing and the engine note is crisp and clean. I can barely wait to drive my Scimitar again, but I’ll have to hold out just a little longer. Seeing as Jesse and his little team have impressed me so, I’ve asked them to also issue my Scimitar with a German TÜV inspection which will at the very least require a new set of LHD headlights – hmmmm… let’s see how many other issues they’ll have to rectify first? Once they’ve managed that, I’ll of course be importing and reregistering the Scimitar in to Germany so I can continue to enjoy my game of roulette…
