Hi, I'm Alastair / Al / pandora!
Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 9:13 am
This feels like we should be sitting in a circle on hard plastic chairs in a council office – “Hello, my name is Alastair Brown, and I’ve been tinkering with Minis for a very long time……”
I’ve had a load of minis over the years, the first being a rough as old boots Mk3 Elf as my first car back in the early ‘90s, a Mk 1 Cooper project, a ’71 van with a Downton 1300GT engine and a few others before coming back to minis again a year or 2 ago when I built a ’64 Morris 850 into a 1300 with various trinkets in the style of a period ‘boy racer’ car. All good fun, but not practical at the moment with 2 wee boys, so it was sold on and I currently have a late bay VW camper (currently needing work) alongside my everyday Saab.
As many of you will know, I also suffer from a peculiar attraction to weird and wonderful one off sports-racing cars (WWOOS!) mainly fitted with A series engines from the ‘60s.
Over the years I have owned ‘Pandora’ (hence the forum name), a mid engined spaceframed car, similar to the Lotus 23 from ’64 , the 1965 ‘Coldwell Mink’, an early Clubmans formula and F3 car built by Bill Needham and John Houghton, and have recently purchased another early Clubmans car, and I haven’t yet worked out what it is! Again, all of these cars have been bought cheaply as unfinished (or more accurately, unstarted!) projects, and both Pandora and the Mink were sold on as projects, but I have resolved to finish the current one…….. not any time soon though.
Perhaps this buying and selling urge is a legacy of my time in London in the early 2000’s when I was a showroom manager with one of the countrys best known classic car sales and auction houses? It would go some way to explain how I have also succumbed to the urge to buy a load of other oddball vehicles –TVR 2500M, Porsche 914 etc. again, none of these have been the finest examples! I can also lay calim so selling a variety of great cars, from million pound Ferraris, to a batmobile and Del Boys van from Only Fools and Horses, as well as a couple of very special Minis.
I now live back home in Scotland, just outside Edinburgh with my wife Jennifer and 2 wee boys, Robin and Innes. I’m 37, a Health and Safety Insector with HSE (a civil servant) and I drive a Diesel Saab estate – when did I become middle aged??????
Al
I’ve had a load of minis over the years, the first being a rough as old boots Mk3 Elf as my first car back in the early ‘90s, a Mk 1 Cooper project, a ’71 van with a Downton 1300GT engine and a few others before coming back to minis again a year or 2 ago when I built a ’64 Morris 850 into a 1300 with various trinkets in the style of a period ‘boy racer’ car. All good fun, but not practical at the moment with 2 wee boys, so it was sold on and I currently have a late bay VW camper (currently needing work) alongside my everyday Saab.
As many of you will know, I also suffer from a peculiar attraction to weird and wonderful one off sports-racing cars (WWOOS!) mainly fitted with A series engines from the ‘60s.
Over the years I have owned ‘Pandora’ (hence the forum name), a mid engined spaceframed car, similar to the Lotus 23 from ’64 , the 1965 ‘Coldwell Mink’, an early Clubmans formula and F3 car built by Bill Needham and John Houghton, and have recently purchased another early Clubmans car, and I haven’t yet worked out what it is! Again, all of these cars have been bought cheaply as unfinished (or more accurately, unstarted!) projects, and both Pandora and the Mink were sold on as projects, but I have resolved to finish the current one…….. not any time soon though.
Perhaps this buying and selling urge is a legacy of my time in London in the early 2000’s when I was a showroom manager with one of the countrys best known classic car sales and auction houses? It would go some way to explain how I have also succumbed to the urge to buy a load of other oddball vehicles –TVR 2500M, Porsche 914 etc. again, none of these have been the finest examples! I can also lay calim so selling a variety of great cars, from million pound Ferraris, to a batmobile and Del Boys van from Only Fools and Horses, as well as a couple of very special Minis.
I now live back home in Scotland, just outside Edinburgh with my wife Jennifer and 2 wee boys, Robin and Innes. I’m 37, a Health and Safety Insector with HSE (a civil servant) and I drive a Diesel Saab estate – when did I become middle aged??????
Al
