<VV> OT Lada

[Tony Underwood]

At 03:41 hours 06/29/2005, John Kepler wrote:

> >
> > Ladas were never sold in the US, but plenty came over from Canada one way
>or another....
> >
> > Bill Elliott
>
>
>"You know a country is in trouble when the best car they can buy is a Fiat!"
>P.J.  O'Rourke




Interesting...   I can appreciate the good points that I've heard come from 
O'Rourke but in this instance I think he's off base.

Nothing wrong with a Fiat.   You get just what you pay for.   And you can 
NOT put down their thriftiness...  gas mileage is their forte.   Fiat has 
come up with some remarkable little cars along the way and a few of them 
(unfortunately not seen much here) were damned sharp looking cars with some 
serious engineering.   Then again, there was the Dino...  again, seldom 
seen here but I'd come close to killing to get one.

Fiats were at one time saddled with rust issues what with having been built 
from "Polish steel" that was composed of recycled scrap that was floating 
around the Euro markets some years following WW-II...  and the stuff was 
not the quality it could have been, made of whatever was left on 
battlefields, burned out towns, wrecked industry, you name it... if it was 
rusting on the ground after the war, it got scooped up and recycled and 
sent to market.    A lot of it came from the former USSR...

The UK, Japan, Italy, France, etc all bought this stuff up to rebuild their 
infrastructure and that included car sheet metal.    The stuff would rust 
far too easily for even the most unassuming sort, and the only reason many 
Fiats from the '50s and early '60s survived as long as they did was because 
of dry climates.   The others simply returned to the elements, along with 
their UK and Japanese counterparts.

If you have a '50s vintage Fiat that's not rusty, it really needs to be 
rustproofed... or somebody has already done rustproofing to it.   Either 
that or it's lived in a desert or never got driven in the rain.

Likewise a Honda 600.   They seem to rust if you sneeze on them.

Today this is all different... the cars don't rust.    And even the '50s 
vintage Fiats still had fine drivelines with excellent construction and 
materials...  crankshafts were hard, rods strong, aluminum heads tough, no 
issues with the engines.    Only trouble was the tiny displacements... I 
have a Fiat with a 4 cylinder engine that's smaller than the engine in the 
"Yard Machines" riding lawnmower.     600cc, 20 hp.   The lawnmower makes 
22 hp from 650cc.    However, the Fiat will go for a LONG time on its 5 
gallon gas tank.     You can't stuck a pencil down the venturi of the carb 
on this thing.

Then again, Fiat built some of the engines used in Ferraris.


Fiat is also making some pretty sharp little cars these days.   The nifty 
little Panda has been around a while and seems to be making a rep for 
itself... too bad it's not imported here, would likely sell well.

Corvair content...?

The Fiat here has Corvair FC wheel cylinder kits in it...  they fit and 
work.   I just wish I could do something about the master cylinder... I do 
NOT like "Euro" master cylinders, use O-rings instead of piston type 
seals.  They tend to not last as long as piston style seals.

Maybe I could cook up a replacement modeled on the '60-'61 Vair 
MC...   have to do some whittling seeing as how the Fiat MC uses a remotely 
located fluid bowl.     Odd, how in many cases it's Corvairs being modified 
with other marque parts, while in this instance it's Vair parts going into 
another marque.



tony..