Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi

Im looking to buy a cheap 2nd hand car (£2k ish prefer less)
What are the things to look out for, particularly with Ford Fiestas, around the 8-10yr old mark?

Thanks

Wheel at each corner, one inside on the right hand side, just off the vertical, one in the boot and one in the glovebox.

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/carbycar/

Some good write-ups and checklists there, especially when it comes to stuff that goes wrong with slightly older cars.

that site is useful , thanks

£2k is not cheap for a 2nd hand car :-)

There is a school of thought that buying something older still, means that most of the expensive stuff that could go wrong will have done so already and been fixed by the previous owner.

A good rule of thumb:

Every £100 you spend should buy you a working car for one month.

So £2,000 is 20months before something "big" happens.

Anything more than this is a bonus, but it's always going to be borrowed time.

thanks for that. car in mind is around £1400 mark.

Any car with the correct periodic maintainance should last years.

Just make sure to look up part prices before you buy any car. Well, unless it's a Ford of course. But look at brake part prices, tyre prices and any part that falls into the category of periodic maintainance.

That all sounds like nonsense to me!

£2000 gives loads of options. Sub £1000 you'd need to be careful to not get a wreck, but even so you could get something that might last 5 years or more with only minimal self-done maintenance.

Fiestas: Rust can be a problem, take a careful look under the sills and rear panel for signs of bad rot. If it's a petrol one, avoid if it sounds particularly rattly at idle.

what makes you say that about a ford? are the parts cheap?

Fords seem to have a reputation for cheaper and more easily available parts than other manufacturers. This may have been true about 30 years ago. And they obviously do sell an awful lot of each model, so this helps with availability.

However, these days there isn't much to separate them from other European mass manufacturers like Vauxhall or VW. That is to say, the dealer parts prices are quite expensive and almost always have to be ordered in, should you need them.
You may also find that they drop support for the older models quite quickly - I was unable to get engine parts for my Sierra when once it was more than 10 years out of production.

However, almost all parts that you'll need to change yourself (brakes, springs, exhausts) and consumables like filters and spark plugs are available from 3rd party suppliers. And these days, even quite specific and expensive parts like sensors are available used or new on Ebay.

So, as long as you don't pick something totally obscure, I doubt you will notice any difference between the relative cost of parts.

The scrappy's are usually full of them. Cheap parts ahoy.

excellent well its a ford fiesta

might go have a look see at it tonight, seems like a good deal.

Cheap? A small clip that held the windscreen wiper onto my Mundano (seriously, it was just a little pin) cost £45 to replace.

How many miles has it done? When was the CAM belt changed? May need doing and will cost a couple of hundred.

this model doesnt have a cam belt i think its a chain but could be wrong, and service interval on it is 60k miles sure I read that somewhere.
with it being £1400 ish tho there is budget for repairs in the £2k available

its done less than 25k miles

Not sure, about 15,000? But what the fuck has the cam (or CAM, which I assume stands for Cracking Acronym Mate) belt got to do with the windscreen wiper?

I've heard that fiestas of a certain period can often have coil-pack issues. But this isn't too expensive or hard to replace really so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I don't think he was quoting you mate, although I could be wrong.

@taxalot, obvl.

obvl.