Old Timer Garage

So after almost 8 hours picking up and driving back the first 2cv, I drove the 3 hours back to pick up the second one.

If you haven’t read the first part of this story yet, you can find it here: 1962 Citroen 2cv AZ full restoration (the whole story will make more sense if you read it)

This one was a 1965 2cv AZAM model. This version is one of the most thought after by this car’s fans but as far as I am concerned, it didn’t have anything of what appealed to me. It was too old to have an engine fast enough to really be considered a daily driver (I know some people drive them every day but this was not an option for me. I was living in the mountains and I wouldn’t have stood going up the hills at 15 miles an hour). But at the same time, this version was too old to have the features I liked from the older versions like the suicide doors, no windows at the back.

A couple of nice features though was the front “bench” and as for the 1962 one, this 2cv had the centrifugal clutch on top of the standard one (which means that you could stop the car in gear at a traffic light for example without having to disengage the clutch). This feature was also known to be dangerous because the 2cv hand brake locks back then were not really reliable and since this clutch was disengaging the gearbox from the wheels when the engine wasn’t running fast enough, it meant that the handbrake was the only thing stopping the car from rolling downhill if the handbrake released itself unexpectedly. I know of someone who stopped in a mountain to admire the view a moment and the handbrake didn’t hold on which resulted in her car jumping off the nearby cliff with her baby still inside.

Anyway, when I arrived there, we used the same method to pull the car onto the trailer and after tying it down quickly, I headed back home with my second car for the second time of the day.

When I got there, it was pitch black so I unload the car quickly with the forklift, tidied the trailer and headed home. By the time I got home, it was 10 pm, I had my two cars in front of my workshop and I had driven a good 1000 km in the day (600 miles)

The restoration of this car only started around six months down the line because as I had planned, I restored the 1962 first.

By the time I finished the 1962 2cv, I had enough spare parts in my workshop to restore the 1965 pretty much entirely. I was also finding lots of spare parts online which I would buy on a regular basis and sell them one by one with a mark up to help fund my restorations.

As I said in the first part of this story (here if you still haven’t read it), I ended up getting married in this car.

It was no longer mine by that time because a few months earlier I got offered an opportunity to move to the UK to work so I had sold it to someone who was living not too far away from where I used to live but I had kept his number so when we decided to get married, I asked him if he would agree to lend me the car for the weekend so that I could get married in a car I had restored myself. One of my previous cars would have been nicer but I had sold them to people living much further away from me.

I let you watch the video of the restoration of this car. And if you enjoy it, please click on the thumbs up button, comment and subscribe to the channel. I try to release a new classic car video three times a week on Youtube and all the support is appreciated.