Welcome to my Capri page

I purchased this car in March 2002. It is a 72 3ltr V6 auto GT Capri. This car has 81,000 miles on the clock and had been in storage since 1996. I bought the car off a couple in their 80's in Adelaide. They had put the car in storage six years ago when they were no longer confident driving. I picked the car up in April 2002 and after gaining a temporary permit for rego and an insurance cover note started the long drive back to Alice Springs. The first day we did not even make it out of Adelaide due to a battery failure in traffic - I pushed the car to a nearby tyre outlet and bought a new battery. The next problem was that the car would flood and stall when idling in traffic so I stripped the caburettor down and cleaned out the needle and seat. The car was then running well no load but as soon as it was put into drive or reverse it would die. By this stage I was in a similar state and decided to leave the car at an all night service station and get a motel room for the night. The next morning thinking a bit clearer I decided to replace the condenser with a spare I had in my emergency spares box. The little V6 was now running quite sweet although it still bogged down a bit at low speeds. The next hassle came at Clare when I stopped the car and could not get it to start again. The starter inhibitor switch on the auto transmission had failed so from then on I had to lift the bonnet and hotwire the starter every time I wanted to start the car. on the second day we made it as far as Glendambo. On the 3rd day from Glendambo back to Alice the car purred along beautifully. The only complaint I had was that the factory AM radio could not find any stations so I had to sing to myself all the way back. Nearing Alice I decided to stretch the cars legs a bit and was quite surprised at its acceleration at high speeds but it redlined on the tacho at 90 MPH.

After getting the car home I found that the tacho was way out and the auto had been set up to change gears according to the tacho. This is why it did not accelerate very well down low - it was in 3rd gear by the time it was doing 40 Kmh. A friend brought his V6 Capri round and we took it for a run then we took mine for a run. Now that I knew the tacho was out and I wasn't over revving the engine I pushed it up to 180Kmh. It did this quite comfortable until I backed off for a bend and the synthetic timing cog let go at about 175 Kmh. Not a pretty sight, all pistons hit valves and bent pushrods. It even snapped a pushrod guide and parts of the synthetic cog made it into the bigend bearings and scored them. This was a real shame as the car had only used about 200ml of oil on its 1500 Km journey and was in quite good shape. I'm now going to purchase steel timing cogs for all my V6's.

The Capri is currently awaiting an engine rebuild. I will add more to the site as it happens.