This is my original blog for all our non-caravanning trips since 2009 and more recently posts about coming to terms with being single again having been widowed in 2018. And anything else too really!

My caravanning blog is (Get Your) Legs Down and all our trips in the caravan are there. My grog blog is The Ale Archive where I list every beer I’ve ever tried.

Saturday, 22 February 2014

Richards Wrecks – Number Seven

Our job delivering parcels turned out to to be more than a stop gap and with volumes (and earnings) increasing we decided to become a two vehicle family again. The old red astra was showing signs of wear, so we bought, privately, out of the paper, a 1998 Ford Courier 1.8 D van.

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This cost us early on – with only a little over 50k on the clock the previous owner clearly liked riding the clutch – and we had to have a new one fitted. The cam was belt driven and with little service history available we elected to have that changed too. A number of smaller jobs I done myself – starter motor, heater valve, throttle cable and rear door handle if I recall. It was based on a Ford Fiesta and was one of the easiest motors I’ve found to work on. It was a good workhorse too and we ran it on vegetable oil from time to time as well in the days when it was a lot cheaper than diesel. The ford radio was replaced with my own Blaupunkt MP3 CD player thingy – a piece of kit that was now on it’s third car, having been pride of place in the Rover & Astra prior.

We kept this a couple of years or so, it earned us some money and we got a reasonable price on trade in too.

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