My first three decades of motoring were spent rescuing beat-up old bangers and keeping them going on a threadbare shoestring until there wasn’t enough rust left to weld to.
Eventually work moved, but we didn’t want to move to an unknown house and neighbourhood and leave friends behind, so work gave me a moving allowance for fifty months worth of travelling time, ie the cost of a car, my first ever new car. I scrapped that Astra after 205,000 miles when its clutch dropped bits out onto the road, because by then I had retired and the payout on the endowment mortgage allowed us to buy SWMBO her own new car at about the same time as the Astra, so we had a spare…
Retired with no mortgage, all children flown the nest, I was saving up for a new Triumph triple but belatedly realised after a “Back to biking” day with an instructor going all around South London and out past Leatherhead that modern bikes were not a patch on the comfort and flexibility (in several ways) of my old Thunderbird 650, and much more significantly London roads were too tight!
I had saved enough to buy the new bike as an retirement present to myself, but SWMBO wanted a powder blue SLK. No way, I’d had enough experience in helping a couple of friends struggling to finance their Merc fetish. That idea faded away and the savings accumulated.
BUT, her SLK thoughts kept resurfacing, and in 2013 Which did a review on the MX5 singing its praises to high heaven, and I left the copy open at the relevant page. “Ooooh, that looks nice, but it’s the wrong colour…”
I took her to see a 2005 NB in the local s/h showroom, and while it gleamed on top, it was already posh-rotten underneath, power steering lines, brake lines, arches, sills, front chassis rails, etc all were appallingly crusty-flaky bad at only eight years old! With all my experience of rusty bangers I knew what to look for on any car, this was the worst I had seen in years and they wanted 5K!
We walked away from that NB.
I doubled my budget to the whole of my bike savings, 10K, to look for a much younger Mk3.
We shortlisted loads around 10K, 2007-2011, most had some sot of problem, mileage, no steering wheel adjustment, no seat height adjustment, sooty exhausts, and only one year had a pale blue model - the 2008 “Icy-blue” Niseko NC.
After almost a year of looking, and much of that following this website we finally narrowed the choice to having very close inspection of two Nisekos, one in St Albans, one in Frome, Zummerzet . We bought the more distant one, mainly because the dealer was happy to put it up on the lift for me to have a good look underneath; at six years old but only 17,000 miles and garaged it was shiny clean underneath and totally rust free, and less than 10K.
We still have it.
, but 13 years later and I/we are enjoying every time we go out in the 5.