Tagged: Ford
Lost.. and then found.. in my cars
Over 200 years ago, French emperor Napoleon had police open an office for lost objects, that were found on the streets of Paris. It’s claimed to have been the first of its kind, anywhere.
Since then, Lost and Found offices (or Lost Property/Lost Articles in the UK/Canada) have stored found property and often tried to contact the rightful owner.
As I notch up the 50th vehicle I’ve personally owned, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve found in all those cars, as I investigate them after purchase.
Probably the most valuable item I found in a car, came from one of the cheapest.
I bought the very high kilometre Honda HRV from the auction place in late 2019, after it had been ignored by bidders for a couple of weeks, at a starting price of $500. So, on its third week in the lane, it was offered at just $300 – that’s what I bid, and I was a shag on a rock as the auction closed with no other bids. I picked up this dirty and dusty oddity from the auction backlot, then began to clean it at home.
Once I removed the giant Ronald McDonald face sticker behind the driver’s side sun visor, I got to work on the seating and carpet. An Oxley Bunnings docket in the boot told me that the car had perhaps lived in the city’s south-west. Finding a gold butterfly pendant down behind the back seat told me I was rapidly making ground on the surprise car purchase.
Cash Converters confirmed that it was real gold, but because it wasn’t very big – and, because “Cashies”.. they couldn’t pay me more than $30 for it. Still, it was 10% of the car’s purchase price. There were no books or details on the car’s previous owner, so I just had to pocket the payout. Tough day.
The next car on the list probably had the weirdest find.
The Ford Laser Lynx was a car that I’d long wondered about, so when one came up on Facebook in late 2021 cheap and reasonably close by I snapped it up – even with the “Police Aware” sticker on the windscreen. On cleaning it out at home, many gold coins were found – along with an oily residue in an under-dashboard storage. I didn’t want to know.
But the weirdest find was behind the passenger front seat, in the storage pocket:
Two plain white bread and butter plates – looking suspiciously like they’d been snaffled from a restaurant after a boozy lunch. Maybe the Lynx had done some picnic duty, ‘Luncheon on the Grass’ style, like Manet had imagined. That might explain the oily residue in that drop-down cubbyhole..
I contacted the former owner, who didn’t know why the plates were there, and didn’t want them. Neither did I – nor did my ‘china plate’.
Probably the most comprehensive amount of random items to come with a car, arrived with the 1985 Mighty Boy from its former home at a mechanic’s workshop in country Kingaroy. This car had been a workshop runaround, but had sat for nearly a decade before being put on Gumtree in early 2021.
Not only did it include the former number plates, from many years earlier (which I wasn’t allowed to reinstate on the bumper), but it also offered up the child seat harness point, which had been mounted in holes drilled through the back wall, between the front seats. I don’t know if the car was ever taken on the road with a child seat installed. Given the Mighty Boy’s Suzuki Cervo hatchback basis, it wasn’t such a radical idea.
I have found a number of CDs in cars. Usually only one, perhaps left in the CD player.. But the Ford Taurus I bought in 2019 was a jukebox on wheels.
This car was already in mint condition, but it had been cleaned to a high degree before auction, and then ignored by the wheelers and dealers among the bidders, because c’mon: it was a Taurus. I managed to buy it for a few hundred dollars, plus fees, after some negotiation.
I looked up the name in the owner’s manual and discovered that this mid-90s unloved blob had been bought new and kept on a cattle property, out in the country. It was serviced by the property workshop, and only traded in when the owner, the farmer’s wife, felt it was getting too big to take into “town” – which was no doubt a strip of 8 shops in a sleepy street.
With the car cleaned, there wasn’t much to uncover in the cabin – but in the boot was a CD stacker, which was stacked full of country music. I rang the property and spoke to the farmer, who said I could keep the collection of Loretta Lynn, et al. I said I might personally return them, if I was ever out their way. Loretta Lynn will have a top 10 hit before I have reason to head out there. And it’ll be difficult for her, seeing as she passed away in 2022.
A 2022 car purchase had both a death and a CD linked to it. It was the Suzuki X-90 I bought, after years of searching.
But first on this car and its hidden treasures: I’ve been able to connect with a former owner of the “most stupid” (according to Jeremy Clarkson) four wheel drive, because I found a docket under a seat.
I looked up the name on Facebook and made contact with the man, whose partner had owned the X-90 until around 2013. Kate had also written a ‘for sale’ spiel inside the back window (so, written in reverse), which still shows up when the window gets misty. After Kate sold the Suzuki, it spent some time being thrown around as a “paddock basher” before another owner put it in his garage, hoping to restore it. FIFO work got in the way, so he sold it to me.
Now to the CD/death connection: I took the X-90 out one Saturday in late September 2022 and visited a weekend market, where I bought some secondhand CDs. We’re talking the music you’ll take a chance on, because it’s just $1 a disc. So, Loretta Lynn then. (jokes)
With my handful of music streams on shiny discs, instead of the internet (yep it’s a thing, kids), I retired to the driver’s seat of the X-90 and pressed ‘eject’ on the CD player. With a bit of encouragement, out popped this CD:
Normally, a Coolio CD would make for a fantastic voyage – but the very day that I was out thrift shopping, news had come through on the radio (yep, it’s a thing, kids) that Coolio had died of a drug overdose. I found it spooky. The Clarion unit found any CD undigestible. So, there was no Coolio tribute for the trip home – and the CD was scratched and unplayable at home, anyway. To my mind, Coolio died twice that day.
Finally, in October 2022 I was the owner of a cheap 2004 Daihatsu Charade automatic with a 1-litre engine and some bonus rust, just breaking through a front panel. Roadworthy certificates for the sale of cars are, let’s say, a lucky dip. I could see the rust on my inspection (even though it seems the roadworthy mechanic could not) and I could also see that the driver’s side sun visor, that had been handed to me after paying the cash, had trouble staying up once screwed in (again, roadworthy blindness).
No huge problem for both – the solution would be to source the parts, individually and locally. However, this wasn’t so easy – so, facing a huge bill for getting parts sent from Japan, I found a Charade nearby that had overheated and was now only good for parts.
This Charade had endured a very busy life, visiting building sites all over the place. The former owner even had an umbrella he could mount in the roof racks, to shade him as he worked remotely, using a wall plug mounted under the dash to power his laptop.
The umbrella was included in the sale of the car for just a few hundred dollars. He also threw in spare auto store hubcaps for the tiny tyres.
But the big discovery would come when I opened another under-dash cubbyhole (yes, I know – I should stop doing this).
Enough floss to replace an engine belt. Enough painkillers to dull any roadworthy inspection. Antiseptic cream, lip balm and band-aids. This wasn’t just an office on wheels – it was a packed apothecary to help humans, as much as it was a coolant desert for the engine.
Needless to say, everything except for the sealed lip balm packet and band-aids got thrown out. The medication was out of date, anyway.
It had been lost, then found, then found to be a lost cause.
Lynx was one cool cat: Ford Laser/Mazda 323C
The word “Lynx” apparently comes from the Indo-European root leuk- in reference to the luminescence of its reflective eyes. In recent decades, trade in their fur has tapered off, after ad campaigns in the 1980s by the anti-fur organisation, also called Lynx.
In the mid-1990s, Lynx was the name given to a 2-door Ford Laser, sold in Australia and nearby countries. It was a rebadged Mazda 323C or Familia Neo, with a different 90s “organic” headlight array and the revvy 1.8 litre BP 4-cylinder engine out of the MX-5, but mounted transverse for front wheel drive. The KJ Laser series was the first to be fully made in Japan, after the closure of Ford’s Homebush plant in Sydney.
I liked the look of them, including what’s known as a Kammback: it’s a vertical end to the car, and in this case it was see-through. I found it reminiscent of one of my 80s car favourites: the Honda CRX.
However, the interior was conventional and basic Laser: very plain and grey. The seats were quite supportive. The Lynx was priced too high for me: around $30,000, which was a lot for a small hatchback in the 90s. I also knew that they cost more than a SEAT Ibiza GTi, after seeing a newspaper comparison ad that SEAT published, after I’d bought my asthmatic (but solid) 3-door 1.4 litre Ibiza CLX in 1995.
Then in early November 2021, the entertaining Facebook page AUDM Vehicle Posting published an article about the Laser Lynx, and got me trawling Marketplace. Within a few minutes I found one for sale, unregistered, with 207,000 kilometres on the clock plus a few bumps and scratches, just a short distance from my parents’ house. It was listed around $1,000. So a plan was hatched: go see the oldies and check out the Lynx!
Its main issues were a dent in the right front fender and surface rust spots on the bonnet. I started the car and found that while the interior was a little “lived in”, everything worked – even the air-conditioning. I was told the radio was playing up, but it was just a loose faceplate. The Lynx was being sold as the female owner had upgraded to a newer car.
However, my main criteria for buying a project car for fun is that it has good paint – and the Lynx did not. So, with the cost of repainting at the back of my mind, I went away to think about it.
In following weeks, I looked at other cheap cars with better paint – but they were a mess in other areas. Eventually, I thought that the Lynx could at least be relied on to be a runaround, even if it didn’t look entirely appealing. So, more than a month later, I contacted the seller and arranged a second look.
The Lynx had now been sitting on the front lawn of the seller’s parents’ home for a few months. It blocked the side gates, where their caravan was parked. It had been moved to allow the parents to go away on a trip, but now they were coming back. So the Lynx was parked out on the kerb for some days – on what I’d call a “jaunty” angle. The rear half was up on the verge, with the front half on the road.
It was so randomly parked, a local resident had reported it to police as an abandoned car. Officers had attended, and put a “Police Aware” sticker on it, so no-one else would report it. The owner rang the police, told them it would be sold soon, and was told to leave the sticker on it until it was gone.
This all happened before I arrived for another look. I started it up again, and was met with a very noisy engine. However, after consulting with my daughter (sending a video to her) we figured it was from lack of use, as her own NA MX-5 had made the same racket after being left idle for months by the previous owner. I drove the car a few metres, forward and back, partly to get it off the footpath but also to check the clutch. It drove fine, although the gearshift was quite vague.
I was warming to the Lynx, but the deal was done when the young lady said that with her parents returning, it really should be gone soon, and that to ensure it disappeared from their home she’d take just a few hundred dollars for it. I said “I can do that, I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”
So Mum and Dad got yet another visit, this time with my daughter in tow, set to drive the SAAB 9-3 to follow me home. We topped up the tank with some petrol out of a can. The turps we brought with us took the police sticker off the screen. It was a very hot summer’s day, so I was grateful for the air-conditioning. The trip home on an unregistered vehicle permit was largely smooth, with just some surging under load due to the air intake pipe having a hole in it, that had been taped up.
The first thing to get my attention was the driver’s side headlight trim, which was damaged after a minor bingle. Amazingly, a local wrecker had Lynx headlights on the shelf (they’d been there for years) so was happy to sell me both headlights at quite a cheap price to move them on. I used the plastic trim from one headlight to fix the loose surround on the front of the car. And before re-fitting the headlight, I pulled most of the front panel dent out. I put both spare headlights in the boot, just in case a rock ever broke one at the front.
On cleaning the interior, I discovered 2 bread plates in the pouch behind the passenger seat. I asked the former owner about them: she had no idea why they were there and didn’t want them.
I ordered and fitted a new air intake pipe. Then my mechanic looked after gear bushes, brakes and engine mounts (except for the rear engine mount, which had to be put in at a workshop due to its difficult location/mounting). Within a month or so, after it was registered, I’d have the timing belt replaced as the car was now well over 200,000 kms.
Once it was back on the road, the engine was still running rough – but now at idle as well as under load. I had plugs, leads and the distributor rotor replaced – but the problem persisted. Thankfully, my mechanic happened to look at the base of the distributor, and saw a hairline crack in the plastic housing, that he figured was allowing spark to escape.
Another trip to the wreckers found a replacement Laser distributor, with just the plastic housing changed over on mine. The engine problem immediately disappeared! I put the remainder of that spare part in the boot, too.
A noisy wheel, which I thought might have been bearings, was shown to be a dodgy tyre, after it was replaced, on the recommendation of my mechanic.
I learned the hard way that you should always leave a car window open when you’re changing the battery. With the new one in, the power locks operated and had the car nice and secure – with the sole working key on the driver’s seat! The motoring club got the car open, and I got an extra key cut.
So, mechanically, the Lynx was sorted. However the paint still looked bad, and getting caught on the highway in heavy rain in February 2022 ripped more of the paint off the bonnet. I got a quote to respray the car: $4,000. That was way too much, so I bought some rust converter, primer/filler and touch-up spray paint, and went to work on all corners of the car.
With 90+ kW from its 16-valve DOHC engine, the Lynx loved to rev and was well planted on the road. However, coming up to a year of ownership, I’d had my fun with it as a runaround, so I put it up for sale for what it owed me. And now it owed me even more, after needing new shock absorbers all around to get the roadworthy to sell.
I had plenty of offers, some ridiculously low, but I insisted on the asking price because of what I’d put into the car, but also because COVID had thinned the ranks of used cars with a roadworthy.
One Saturday afternoon, as I completed the sale of the wife’s Toyota Corolla on the driveway, a father and son arrived to look at the Lynx. I gave them the keys while I finished with the Corolla buyer. They had a good look, then I went with the son for a test drive, and that car was also sold.
I think it was the striking styling which was the selling point – even if the paint still was nowhere near as luminescent as the eyes of a lynx.
Classic and Clunker 