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I've spent the past 6 months, possibly longer... hunting for a suitable shell for the vital organs (mi-16, bodies, suspension, fancy manifold) from my bashed up leaky rust box Blue Miami. Do i go Gti? Do i go base model sleeper? do i bin all the hard work and buy a Porsche... 996's are very cheap right now. I've looked at shells in Bristol, Gloucester, London and many thanks in advance to Anthony for accompanying me to see a couple of them. All have not been quite what i was looking for. To say, mint shells are hard to come by, is an understatement, if you have one, and somewhere to store it, you're looking at the modern day mk 2 escort. The one in bristol had gone in every conceivable place, and he still wanted 1250 for it. It had rotten headlight panels, rotten sills, rear quarters, boot floor big time, roof between b and c pillar..all the worst bits of 205 shell related rust... However there was an answer staring me right in the face. After looking for six months, Anthony's other black 1.9 became available again, I quite literally bit Ant's hand off. It's had a respray, has a bit of micro-blistering, but other than that, is really solid in all the important areas, once we got it apart we found it was even more solid than expected, quite possibly one of the better ones out there. There are a couple of bits of restoration to do in a preventative capacity that made sense, but we'll get onto that later. I've always wanted a black one, since i was about 7 and my second year teacher Mrs Simmons had a brand new 1.9, i distinctly remember thinking it was the best car i'd ever seen, it was black... This example is phase 2 k plate, half leather interior, and the price was more than reasonable. There were a few minor issues highlighted during the previous attempted sale.... it supposedly had an exhaust pipe so leaky an entire race might get nearly gassed out of existence... and idle so uneven the vibrations caused major shifts in global plate tectonics and resulting catestrophic earthquakes, and it's killed at least the entire population of Alderan due to it's unlicensed badly mounted planet destroying laser canon. I was a little trepid about the purchase. But Ant assured me it had just completed a 3000 mile round trip across europe and had not resulted in any fatalities, skipped a beat or otherwise harmed any children, animals or baby kittens. Ultimately none of the supposed and totally non existent issues mattered because, the simple fact was I was going to use it for a re-shell..... Anyway... I'll give some more updates and continued body count in the not too distant future. I'm genuinely excited to be owning a nice example finally. Woo hoo.