I had a very unusual mail through from Andrew who owns a 1978 Panther Lima. If you have never heard of a Panther before, I don't blame you, they were a rare car with under a thousand made. The styling may not to be everyones' taste, which could be best described as a vaguely 1930's sports car design, reminiscent of a Morgan, but less angular and more bulbous. It followed typical 70's kit car methods, by placing a lightweight glass-fibre shell sat atop a steel chassis. The running gear and electrics were sourced from Vauxhall and were based on the large capacity engined Firenza and Magnum models.
I was surprised to see some quite impressive performance figures quoted for the Panther Lima, especially in an era where a 0-60 time under 10 seconds was the benchmark that set apart true sports cars from mere family saloons.

Panther Lima - respectable performance from modest Vauxhall parts
Andrew badly needs a new indicator switch for his car and is apparently not having a much luck with either the Viva Club or the Droop Snoot Group who would be my first choice for Viva/Magnum/Firenza parts from this era.
However, it looks as if eBay may be solution to his problem where a suitable item is currently on auction.

Much to my shame I have to confess that I haven't been near the Opel Manta Owners Club forum in months, I was the original Administrator from 2001-2008 so in a quiet moment decided to what has been going on.
I spotted that Robert was in dire need of a good accelerator pedal for his Opel Manta A series, when his old one split, he removed it, but was now becoming tired of prematurely wearing out his trainers.

In case you don't know, the Opel Manta A series has a plastic hinged accelerator "gas" pedal which is screwed into a plastic block on the floor panel and the metal rod that draws on the accelerator cable descends from the bulkhead to meet it. This design is not only used on other classic Opels such as, the Commodore, but I was surprised to discover that both the Porsche 911 and the BMW 2002 from the same period used a similar principle. I can only conclude that it was a Teutonic design thing.
This floor mounted "organ pedal" design does seem to be prone to splitting in half, I wouldn't have thought that the return spring would be strong enough to do that sort of damage, but it happens a lot.

Accelerator or gas pedals are exactly the sort of sundry parts I have in profusion floating around in a selection of cardboard boxes. So I contacted Robert, struck a deal and got it in the post to him as soon as possible.
I hope it will prove to be better value than replacing your trainers every couple of months.

Blogger news

Blogroll

Archives

About