Whilst I wait for some garage space so I can continue with NWL I managed to rescue this beauty from a garage up in Bilston.
A 1972 Dolomite Auto in Honeysuckle, registered very very early '73 so must be a '72 build.
It belonged to a chaps Aunt who had died recently and he wanted to see it back on the road and not scrapped. So the story goes is that she was bought new by the sellers grandfather, when he died in 1982 it was passed to his uncle then when he died in 1984 it was passed to his aunt who drove it a bit until 1997 when it was driven into the garage and left. so it is a genuine 3 owner and one family car. I have loads of history which confirms this so it has a nice story behind it.
It has been sitting in here for 20 years. We had to clear some foliage just to get the gates open!
As you would expect from a car thats been sitting for so long the tyres were flat and the brakes were seized. So off came the wheels and I managed to strip the rear brakes and remove the calipers so we could at least use the discovery to drag it out of the garage onto the road so we could get a good look at it and some air in the tyres.
Condition wise for a car thats been standing in a relatively dry/damp floored garage for 20 years its very good. Obviously the rear bumper is past it! However, the underside is solid, drivers side front and rear door bottoms are shot, there are a couple of smallish holes around the bottom of the windscreen and the drivers side inner valance will probably need some attention, a weekends welding, honestly. But that's as much as I can see at the moment so we shall see.
The interior, apart from being dirty and smelling bad, I would describe as exceptionally good. One of the cappings has a small amount of cracking on it and thats it, it just needs a damn good clean. I'll take some photos when the light's better.
So it was onto the trailer and back down the M40 to deepest darkest Hampshire ready to be put back on the road.
Shes now back home with me nicely tucked up next to NWL.
The sun was out today and the area in front of the garage is a sun trap so I opened all of the doors and windows to give her a really good airing, she now smells a lot better!