Old Timer Garage

This is the very first restoration I have ever done.

I bought this car after having been scammed. Want the full story?... I thought you would :) So here comes.

When I started thinking about getting my first 2cv, I first looked online for cars in decent shape and... saw I couldn't afford any of them. The only ones I could afford were the one that were in too bad a shape to be restored. But I didn't think I could do that myself.

So I ended up turning to the cheaper 2cv, the Dyane. I didn't like its looks as much as the 2cv but this one I could afford so I found a decent looking one and decided to go and have a look at it.

It was a car that had been "restored" a few months before and a new paint sprayed on it. The shine of the paint made the car look good from a few feet away. But knowing what I know now, a few details I did see back then should have set me running away as far as I could right away.

The first one was that when you looked closer, particularly around the windows, you could see some bits of rusty uncovered metal which meant that the windows hadn't been removed for respraying the car (How can you claim to have done a complete restoration if you don't remove the windows to look at how the metal is underneath the window seals?). Another details was the "home made" soft roof. Again, how can you claim to do a complete restoration and spare 150 € for a brand new soft roof and instead put a bad quality tarp on top of it?

OK all this should have pushed me away from this car but I was young, stupid and I really wanted a 2cv so I overlooked this. The guy told me he would have it pass the technical inspection (French equivalent of the MOT) and have it ready for me within a week. Needless to say, this was a long week for me but when the day came, the guy called saying that the car had failed its inspection and that I had two months to fix it.

And here comes yet another mistake: I should have pulled out of the deal here and there but I was young and didn't know how to do that. I had already paid a deposit for it and was scared of losing it. Keep in mind that this was the first car I was buying on my own. I have learned quite a lot since then and this wouldn't happen today (or I'd like to think it wouldn't :) ).

Anyway, I didn't know how to pull out of the deal so I went to collect the car, paid the remainder of the price and drove away... or tried to. First the gears are placed differently than on a modern car, the 1st gear is backward, then second forward and so on. OK that came pretty quickly but then I starting driving off and not even 200 meters from where I picked up the car, the accelerator pedal came off from its support. No accelerator, I manage somehow to understand quickly what was going on and while keeping an eye on the road, I manage to put the pedal back in its place and recover the situation. This was really starting to feel like a very bad deal and I was starting to not be so confident this car would take us home without breaking down.

Close by where I picked the car up was an aircraft exhibition I wanted to take advantage and have a look at (I am also passionate about anything that flies) but the whole time we spent there, I couldn't really get my mind off this car and all the problems that it was probably going to cause me.

Anyway, the Dyane got us home alright but I had no idea about all the fixes I was going to have to do to it so that it could pass its inspection within the two months. Plus I was thinking: what's the point of paying a car more if there is no guarantee it is going to be driveable and reliable?

So in the end, I decided to put it back for sale.

Knowing what I know about these cars today, this Dyane wasn't even worth a third of what I paid for it and there was no way on earth I could get my money back on it (though I was trying to reassure myself saying that I couldn't be the stupidest man on earth and that someone was probably going to want it in the same way I had wanted it too).

So I put the car for sale on ebay and I was lucky enough to get noticed by a Portuguese guy who was willing to drive all the way from Portugal to the south of France to pick the car up, put it on a trailer and drive it all the way back to Portugal. And he did. He picked the car up, paid me a thousand euros (I had paid 1500 € for it) and took the car away.

That chapter finished, I stopped to think again before doing anything else. If I was to put some serious money in a car, I wanted to be 100% sure that it would be properly restored and the only way of doing that was to do it myself. Keep in mind that I didn't know anything about cars back then so I would have to learn everything on the way and I wanted to buy an as cheap as possible base for my restoration to come. And since I was going to buy a cheap scraped car, I was going to get a 2cv and not a Dyane.

So that I did. My father allowed me to build a small shed at the back of the piece of land where he had his company under the condition that I build a second one next to it for his VW Transporter so I built the sheds, found my scraped 2cv and started learning... and as they say, the rest is history.

Watch the video below for the complete story of my first 2cv restoration.