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Thank you all for the welcome. Will hope fully get some pics up tomorrow.

Well, we did it all by our little selves, (with a few phone a friend calls!). The 1.9L is sitting in the Westie, waiting for a long list of connections. Whether we did it right , we'll soon find out !

Welcome. Has anyone mentioned pics yet?

Third times the charm +2 pics We like pics

It's always the 'extras' that add up! I remember initially budgeting a few hundred for an engine - oh how I laugh at that figure now!

Nice bargain brother.

Similar story for me - I bought a lot of parts off ebay/forums/mates-of-mates etc and came in well under £10k on the road - I guess my extra expense over Shaun's car was the brand new JK seats, new WiIwood brake kits, new MSA roll bar, new carbon can and the extra cost of adding fuel injection with a non-donor engine. But I still reckon having a 2.0 injected 168bhp Zetec on the road for that is a result And sorry if you've seen her before, but I just love it, so one more time...

I think it depends on what you can get your hands on as a donor. A lot of cars use the sierra so as in Dave's case, they may of already got hold of a donor before they had chosen a kit. If you are looking at an SDV, don't already have a Ford donor and don't want 200bhp + N/A then a Mazda has to be the way forward IMHO. I build my Mazda when the factory were doing £1000 off the starter kit in Jan last year. I also bought a few other things like shock absorbers, 4-1 manifold and some brackets etc from them - everything else I either made or bought second hand from here/Ebay. On the road it owes me just under £8000 and apart from the seats + roll bar (I bought some we used westfield race seats in red/black and the roll bar needs painting) it looks like I had bought everything from the factory. The only parts I used from the donor were.. Steering column + stalks/cowling Wiring loom Engine + gearbox Prop/Diff/shafts Front + rear uprights Everything else that was supposed to come off the donor I replaced with new. This just shows that if you are a bit savvy (tight!) You can build a decent car to std spec for less than you think. HTH Shaun

Good to see you back out again Dave

I would treat the dates as a rough guide anyway, and not get too hung up on them. Kits get bought and then occasionally might be ten years in the completion, so you can have a 2003 car with a 2003 chassis and body, or a 1993 chassis and body. Or you can have a 1989 car that someone has retrofitted with a 2001 body etc. If there is something in particular that is important to you, you just need to learn how to recognise it; don't forget, two or three sellers down the line the current owner may be blissfully unaware that their pride and joy is actually a hybrid of different years parts. On the Ford parts question, again, I wouldn't read as much into it as their sometimes appears. Yes there may seem to be parts made for lots of Ford options going back years, but that doesn't mean it's anything like OEM quality still. (Though there are plenty of fine quality retro parts). There's a lot of nasty Chinese re pro stuff as well as just mediocre quality stuff. A classic example is some of the replacement gear sets for the Sierra diffs, the quality just isn't the same as the OEM Ford parts, as a consequence makers have started to move away - Caterham had loads of issues a few years ago with diff noise. The Mazda market is huge and global. It's not going to go quietly!

Unfortunately I had band Practice on Sunday so couldn't leave early doors! How was the drive? I had an eventful weekend which ended up in only a short drive yesterday in the beautiful sun to North Berwick! ... Long story short, took the car out Friday night for a preflight check and it was running really rough. Saturday all day and the morning of Sunday and Monday was spent stripping the carbs down, replacing parts and tuning it up!! Took ages, but it was damn worth it! Absolute flying machine now! (much to my girlfriends delight I am sure! Ha ha!) Stripping the carbs: At the beach:

Mini Citroen AX GT (x3) VW Corrado Audi A3 1.8T Westfield (still own today) Porsche Boxster BMW 330CD Preference Audi A3 2.0 TDI S-Line BMW 330CI M-Sport BMW 320d (family wagon)