Quote:
Originally Posted by Tondtar
Most of you are too young to even have seen one of these on the road!
Fiat 131
" Fix It Again Tony" ...FTL!!!
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I don't have a pic, but my wife brought one of these to our relationship as well. A 1977 131
S Strada. Oh, the joy. Changing gears was like rowing a truck, it made up for speed with noise, had a leak under the distributor that dripped oil onto exhaust for smoky accents, a collapsed exhaust melted the parking brake cable "on", so had to cut that, parking up against trees/curbs/signs from then on since there clearly was not enough compression to prevent it rolling away on a 1% grade, paint was flaking and fading where it wasn't missing. The leather was still good though...
Almost forgot - it had some sporadic electrical distribution block problem that would make it just stop at random. Sometimes it would restart after 5 minutes, many times after a 2 day rest. Finally found some stoned British dude in Opelika, AL who not only could sort it out, but had a spare master block to rewire in. As an aside, this was after the oil smoke, before the parking brake issues!
We got $300 in trade against an '87 Maxima.
The only good news was this made my earlier '72 Capri, '74 LeMans and '72 VW Bug seem simply sublime in comparison......