13th May 2006 - An oxygen thief came into work looking for someone who could fix his Cortina cos he'd seen Black Betty outside and was hoping that I might know something about em. He'd spent a shitload of money getting the bottom end of the engine fixed and it leaked oil like a sieve. After he lucked out with warranty from the original repairers he decided to cut his losses and sell the car. I couldn't hand over the $800 quick enough. I wasn't going to knock back a licensed, registered, engineered V8 TC on dual fuel.

At some stage in it's life someone had spent a lot of money on the car because it had all the right goodies although it wasn't oxygen thief. The oil leak was caused by the last repairers dropping the engine onto the cross member and cracking the sump.

Amongst heaps of little other imperfections in the body it also had this little dent from when oxygen thief lost control in the wet and collected a pole.

4 Sept 2006 - First things I had to sort out the front apron and guard. I unstitched the upper and lower apron off the car, straightened it all up and then unstitched an upper and lower apron from a donor car I had. I reckon by the end of it I was hallucinating spot welds and wake up screaming dreaming about bloody spot welds. The top photo is the front bare and straight and covered in deoxidine. That's not black paint, it's the deoxidine reacting. The lower photo is with the donor front end at tack weld stage.

I couldn't help myself. Young blokes use neons and 24' chrome rims for bling. This is Old Skool Bling. If my phone had a better microphone it'd be my ring tone.

 

Little did I have any idea just how much rust and bog this paintwork was hiding. Bit by bit I attacked the body of the car fixing each and every little imperfection and removing all the rust. I had never planned to completely strip the car, just neaten it up and give it a quick respray in something close to it's original colour.

December 2006 - This is when I found the crack. I peeled a small chunk of deadening from the floor pan and found a small crack, I kept peeling away the deadening, the crack kept getting longer. It runs from the bottom of the firewall on the driver's side, follows the inner sill and ends up in the rhr tyre well. At some points the gap was 10mm wide and the edges infected. This was serious. As the rest of the car still needed heaps of bodywork it wasn't worth completely gutting out the interior to fix it. So with that, I couldn't be fucked with it anymore and this where this chapter ends.

Stay Tuned for Episode 2 where you'll hear Norm say "I got another one" and "holy shit, she's a goodin"............

 

October 5th 2008 - I can safely say as the photos show that there will be no more updates on this car. It sat derelict in my backyard for long enough and anything that still worked and of value was stripped off it including a NOS upper and lower front apron I'd welded onto it. Then off to the Cortina land in the sky.