Practically Classics Forum

A mobile bedroom!

Does this mean I have to start frequenting remote car parks at night and flash my headlamps in 'code' ?
So I've heard

Now that turns me on. Lots. Thing is, with these earlier (Hydrolastic) Maxis, although the accommodation is superb in the spare bedroom rôle and 'lastic ones ride far, far better, the bottles tend to allow the car to rock in a most disconcerting way when the occupants attempt to do the horizontal tango in there.
So as a sexy piece of BL's finest, 14.7 out of 10. As a venue for, erm, "canine-related entertaining", you'd be better borrowing one with Hydragas.

Here's my '79 (Hydragas) 1750 in Carmine Red with Tess, the family labrador/greyhound/lurcherish beast looking on hoping for some people-ing action (Yes, the old man had a Stanza at the time, but that's ok 'cos you can't make a double bed in one of those):


(Note the "Practical Classics" sticker in my windscreen, I must have known they'd be sought after and desirable some day....)


Sorry, don't mind me, but you know what a good Maxi does for my heart rate.......

a stanza... cool, me likey

Uh-oh, what have I done?

Rich, please do your breathing exercises and concentrate on the idea of being chauffeured around S****horpe by Anna Friel, in a pink BMW MINI. That should calm your Datsunitis symptoms a bit.

Edited. Eh? Why didn't the name of the famous Lincolnshire town appear properly on the post?

Following my little you-tube appearance in it,the limeflower lovely had me firmly in it's grasp.
So today I went up to far away lands (Luton) and bought it :-

I had a Maxi exactly like that one, in Limeflower. I hope yours doesn't have the same ruinous thirst for oil though.

Mostly, the earlier ones weren't too bad for oil thirst, though as you'd expect from BL there were still Friday afternoon cars out there. The only one of the eight or so Maxis that Dad and I had between us when he was running them as company cars from 1969-'81 and later when I was running mine as useful, cheap "bangers" was his last, split new one - FTN493W. A Maxi 2 1750 HLS, FTN needed a new short engine at 2000 miles under warranty as a result of the oil thirst, that didn't solve the problem so eventually, BL paid to have the block linered back to standard and that did the job to a point, though I doubt that anyone would accept oil consumption of a mere 400 miles per pint as a satisfactory cure these days.
That said, the car took him all over Scandinavia with work and - apart from a persistent leak on the Hydrasag pipe between bottles on the driver's side which required inflation every week or so - it never let him down in the subsequent 130,000 miles he covered before he ditched BL for the Datsun Stanza.
FTN also rusted rather badly; the front valance was through at a mere 14 months from new. The dealer cure? Slather the thing with a thick coat of bitumen-based underseal after hiding the hole with a fag packet.
FTN, seen here during a family holiday in the Wye valley at Llandogo, circa July, 1983:

JPB wrote: though I doubt that anyone would accept oil consumption of a mere 400 miles per pint as a satisfactory cure these days.

400 miles per pint, I would have been overjoyed if I could get that much from mine. It was nearer 40 at one stage, but an engine rebuild improved it a bit, so it managed three figures. That said, it went like stink, if you could stand the noise, and carried huge loads and never let me down.

This ones a beauty,earliest 1750 left and I was told that the Maxi 1750 was the first vehicle ever to wear the B.L logo,so is mine the earliest ever vehicle on the road to wear the logo? Not sure if that is something to boast about though
It's obviously been well cared for throughout it's 41 years and I intend to carry on the same,don't really want to use it over the winter months but come spring time I might travel to Southampton or even Scunthorpe ?

Meh, just use the thing, if it's its time to die, then it's its time to die.
Not sure about the Maxi 1750 being the first car to wear the Royal Order of the Plughole though. I won't clog up your Maxi-related celebratory posts with pics of Mother's 1969 mini Clubman (which carried the badges, 'cos the areas of its A panels that surrounded the emblems were among the first parts of the min to rot through), but that was on an H plate and the Maxi was still in cable-change, 1500 only guise back then. And I think that I'm right in saying that the Triumph Toledo and the 1500FWD also carried the badge from their launch, in 1970 so pre-Maxi 1750. You may need to squint a bit or use some sort of implement to magnify the picture, but the plughole's visible on this early 1500:


Yeah, that funny old thing's definitely embellished by motoring's answer to the brown starfish.