hello and welcome in this episode the team fix a car and its a Bristol car its a nice one and interesting episode. so hope you like and thank you for watching
I thought Lance was a nitpicking poseur until I saw that nigh-on invisible weld. With that he earnt a mass of respect & the right to nitpick. The man is not just a car restorer, he is an artist who is into nothing less than absolute top quality work.
drove one in australia = had a 440 4bbl and std exhaust manifolds - good distributor and thermo fan electric fuel pump = wheel spin 1st to 2nd auto - squeek into 3rd on hard down ! burgundy tan interior .
An interesting and entertaining series. The question is," Why did they usually have some ridiculous time restriction? ANYONE who has ever worked on older equipment knows there is ALWAYS some little thing to create problems. The only way the schedules could be met is if there were three shifts, and all the parts were available BEFORE they started.
I went from Stockholm to London only to visit the Bristol showroom, the only one in the world and run by Bristol them selfs. I knew the area but not the excact address so I had booked my self up in a hotel in that area. Me and a friend looked all over the place for the showroom but we couldn’t find it so we went back to the hotel and yes, it was located in the hotel, just next to the main entrance. We just happened to walk out in the other direction. Inside the showroom we where shown every car by a nice person working there. It think it was five car on display in a rather small room. Nice experience.
In my general experience the fancier the car, the less flashy the showroom. It is cars that have little glamour that need their showrooms to draw in & wow the buyers. An Aston Martin showroom that used to be nearby was a bare room with only dustsheets to break up the monotony, but the imagining of the magic under those dustcovers - that was enough. And potential Aston Martin buyers are not the types to be swayed by impressive decor, leaflets & a fancy sales pitch. Whereas when someone enters a Kia (for example) showroom, the sales staff needs to exert all the leverage they can.
A pal of mine had a Bristol 410, spent so much time and money on it and after 7 years sold it at a loss, these "classic" cars are OK if you have bags of money and time and don't mind the almost constant problems and don't expect to make a packet out of it. Some do, but buyer beware is still a good saying, especially with so called classic anything!
Go buy a new car, have it serviced by the dealer for 7 years and see what it is worth. Nobody makes money selling a used car. Maybe if it is super rare and you keep it in climate controlled storage for 40 years but no normal person expects to make anything.
They started with a pre-war BMW design straight six which they manufactured themselves, improving it over the years and in several models until it wasn't practical to develop it anymore. At that point they switched to a Chrysler V8 that came with a Chrysler automatic transmission they wanted to use. It was too much cheaper buying the whole package to justify the expense of developing a new engine of their own.
From what I gather, at the end of WW2 Britain has a massive surplus of BMW engines. This came from the fact that over the preceeding 6yrs the Luftwaffe had been sending them over to us in the thousands. And because we were playing unfair and not letting them go back Hermann Goering, at one point, even had to stop his guys from sending over so many because he was afraid that we might end up with more of them than he had.
Bristol began using Chrysler V8s in 1960 because they wanted an automatic gearbox and a 100MPH+ top speed. It was quite a change from the 2.2 liter six they had been using. But if you want to build a grand touring car capable of cruising at 80MPH all day without noise or fuss, that is dead reliable and good for 100,000 miles or more with only routine maintenance, and American V8 takes some beating especially on a value for money basis. The 313 cu in V8 in this car was sourced from Canada. That saved some money as they could take advantage of the British Commonwealth exemption from import duty. This was the base V8 that did workhorse duty in millions of Plymouth and Dodge sedans and station wagons. Bristol hotted it up slightly with their own camshaft and a 4 barrel carburetor which was optional on the Plymouth and Dodge. The result was a luxury car that could do 0 - 60 in 8 seconds and a top speed of 122MPH. That got 20 MPG and was good for well over 100,000 miles without an overhaul.
