The Frantic Garage Clean-Up....

An hour or two after the online auction had ended - the realisation had set in. Yes, we had bought ourselves a Fiat 500!

What had started as a crazy idea based on a text message a few weeks previously, had now resulted in us buying a car we had never seen before, that was in bits....

As the excitement of being Fiat 500 owners sunk in, so did the realisation that we now had to somehow fit a car in a single garage that was full of, well, junk! Oh, and the small matter of retrieving the car from it's current home, 255 miles away...

The evening times after work the following week consisted of tidying, discarding, sweeping, painting, binning, swearing (!), sweating, falling over, umming and aaahing. Until finally our garage looked like something ready to accept a little car:

That's better

The secondary task was to work out how to get the car from near Torquay to Nantwich. After much head scratching trying to hire a van with a trailer (it seems companies that hire vans and trailers don't have any vans with tow-bars....) we decided to let the professionals look after the delivery of our new project... 

...And then a Purchase!

So on the 30/05/13 we noticed this little chap for sale on eBay:

The eBay advert

We didn't intend to buy one so soon, but there was something about this one that just seemed right. It was a 500F from 1970, where the owner had just begun restoring it but had decided to sell it and his other restoration projects due to unforeseen circumstances.

The price was good, and it already had the 650cc engine and synchromesh gearbox from the Fiat 126. The body was in generally good condition. The owner, Mike, had been kind enough to put lots of photos online of the current condition of the car during the auction:

Mike had started to strip the car and prepare the body for paint work. The parts he had taken off had been labelled and stored sensibly. Did it look too good to be true? Maybe, but it was worth a punt we thought! 

We decided to go for it, so on Sunday 02/6/13 we gathered around the computer anxiously waiting.......and after some edge-of-the-seat bidding, the car was ours! 

The Start...

So this is the picture that started it all off. Sent by Fabian, one of my ex-colleagues in Germany on 18/05/13.  Here is Fabian's 500R, with his friend Felix's 500D (in front) on the route of the Mille Miglia rally in Italy.

500s on the open road

Unfortunately, Felix's 500 had a slight mechanical issue that meant an appointment with a trailer to take it back home.

:(

The seed was now planted......