Studs

One night, myself and two or three other guys from college went off to Southport for some fun, the beast was the ideal companion for those twisty roads heading to the coast. On the way home (with far too much alcohol in my blood stream) we had a puncture on the drivers side front wheel. So, on a deserted country road I jacked the car up and attempted to remove the thing.

The wheel nuts were so tight I had to use the old stand on the wrench technique to loosen them, unfortunately, the stud sheared right off. So, now I'm left with a wheel held on with three studs and still flat as a pancake. So, the same technique was utilised with the second nut with exactly the same result, shearing noises and sudden dropping in altitude for one rather drunk pseudo-mechanic.

It was then that I applied some deep thought to this problem, two out of four studs were gone, did I have to shear all four off to change this tire?.....well, after careful thought and consideration a light came on in my drunken head and I decided to try to UNSCREW the bloody things instead of standing on the wrench in a clockwise manner, surprisingly enough the remaining two nuts came off with no bother. The front wheel remained in this two stud condition until the cars demise (which wasn't that far off). We were lucky that night that a friendly policeman didn't happen upon us to give some help, Very lucky. I put the (bald) spare tyre on and slung the flat job into the petrol filled boot then set off successfully for home.

The Mk-2 Cortina turned up again, lurking in some driveway in North Skelmersdale, and I advertised the Mk-1 locally to see if I could get some money back on it. I think I sold the twin weber carbs seperately and managed to get 25 quid for the rest of the car (which sat outside my house half stripped for a long time).

There's no denying that this car was fast and dangerous (even more so when driving on a front wheel with only 50% of the studs remaining) and the two months I used it were happy times (although Karen did complain a lot about the petrol fumes and the fact that her door didn't have a handle).