The recent discussion, prompted by one of us (sorry, I forgot who)
saying that he enjoyed the "work-arounds and kluges" in fixing
Alpines raises an interesting philosophical question.
I owned a 1967 Series V for several years in the late 70s, and put
about 200,000 miles on it. I had bought it for $600 in fair running
condition, but it _always_ needed work. In those days I didn't have
much money, and since I didn't have much invested in the car, I
didn't worry about replacing everything with stock parts. I can
definitely resonate to the fun of coming up with imaginative kluges
and parts substitutions for the Alpine because many parts are either
hard to find or relatively expensive. One of the things I enjoyed
most about owning that car was that it was cheap and I didn't need to
worry about protecting the investment.
Now that I'm older, and have a real job and so on, I bought a 1966
Series V with 40,000 original miles and I find I am reluctant to do
anything to detract from its original condition. When something
needs repair I spend whatever I have to to keep it stock. But that's
the problem: so much of the fun used to be not worrying about that,
but now I derive a lot of pleasure from knowing that the car is being
well-maintained. It took me a long long time to find this particular
car because so many Alpines I saw on the market had been very badly
mistreated. One had no idea what one was buying due to all of the
strange jury-rigged things done to carburettor linkages, or to the
electrical system, etc. There was a great feeling of satisfaction
and relief when I saw my present car for sale and seeing how original
it was.
That said, however, I find myself constantly thinking about
modifications (all of them non-original) that I want to make, just
for the fun of it: putting in an o/d transmission if I can find one,
adding a hotter Bosch coil, adding a volt guage (my Lucas electrics
haven't done anything strange yet, but I figure it's only a matter of
time, and the guage will be something I'll value having at that
point), adding a smaller diameter custom steering wheel, etc.
To modify or not to modify, is this the question? For me, there is
so much satisfaction from both courses of action, I can't fault
anyone for following either course, within the limits of
reasonableness.
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