My Dad had a Simca 1100 van in the early '80s'. I adjusted the tappets nicely, and it ran like a sewing machine. It got borrowed to take my TZ Yamaha to the short circuit meetings, until one day the idle speed started getting faster, and faster,,,The inner guards had rusted through, letting the engine tilt and pull on the throttle cable, and that was the end of that.

Had to tow it home with my ageing Mini Clubman, which had it's own inner guard problems, and a cool crab stance when viewed driving from behind.

My contribution to this thread might take some time:-

In the early 1970's I needed a runabout car to get me to work while I rebuilt another car.

I bought an extremely old 850 mini that had had a hard life for £30 - a runner , just about.

It rattled and burnt oil badly - but couldn't afford anything else at the time, mortgage, wife at home, baby etc etc.

Got to the point where it was burning 2 pints of Duckhams Q20-50 a week going to work and back , about 150 miles a week.

Over one weekend, engine and box out, shoveled the oil out of the bottom of the sump (it was that bad). washed it out with paraffin. Measure up, bores knackered, crank the other side of knackered, something like 0.010" oval.

Round to a mates house who used to mess about with minis, found a crank in his shed that was rusty, but better than mine.

Back home, polished the crank up with crocus paper,size not too bad, the rust pits will hold the oil!

Down the local autoshop, set of Cords rings, set of mains and bigs, cheap gasket and seal kit,gallon of Q20-50.

Recon the oil pump by facing the end of the housing and the cover with a file and emery.

Slapped it all together, got it all working, ran quite well considering it's history!

Ran it all that winter, put a set of the cheapest remoulds I could find on it.

Got the other car back on the road, by this time OH had passed her test, so she had the mini which by now acquired the nickname of "The Black Pig" as the last owner had sprayed it black, but had done it in sub-zero temperatures so it had gone a sort of crazed matt finish.

It reliably ran her about for another year after that, and then I sold it to a bloke I used to go to school with for £150 - result, that's bangernomics in action!

I vaguely remember a friend having a Simca not long after I passed my test so circa 1990/1/2. I also remember the noise, so that must have been the tappets....

And I also remember seeing it in the scrapyard a bit later on as looked for bits for my Austin Allegro.

Ironically, all those cars were a lot younger than the Volvo I have now. I doubt if my friends' Simca was older than '76 or thereabouts, so would have been ~15 yrs old.

The All-aggro was 'only' 15 yrs old when it was scrapped in the mid 90s, yet the wonderful Volvo 440 I currently possess was just rolling off the production line then.....

I took a Simca 1100 in part ex in 1972 I forget what for and it ran to my knowledge for another 5 years.I remember it being red, rear engined and lovely to drive everybody was mad on minis although the Simca in my opinion was a much better car.

Thats the way to do it,

I still regret - and will always regret not buying and keeping a Škoda Rapid 130 when they were plentiful - I've owned a few Estelles and loved em, I bought and sold a couple of Rapids coz there was always profit in them (bargain auction buy then turns up an enthusiast tp pay twice the auction price) for the sake of a few hundred quid - why didn't I keep one? Doh!

Ah, overheating. There was a trick to fixing that too.

The heater was controlled with a brass rotary valve operated by a bowden cable on a "push to close" basis. This would clag up and cause the cable to bend rather than close it. Once that had happened, the tiny bypass hose between the heater pipes in the engine bay would silt up through disuse.

Eventually, come the hot weather, one would get cheesed off at the heater being warm and replace the valve. Catastrophic overheating would ensue if the bypass hose were not removed and cleaned out at the same time.

I found that the valve could be dismantled easily. Reassembling it after cleaning and smearing the components with vaseline when doing so made it last forever. The local Skoda fettling place were delighted when I told them, they'd been after a permanent fix for years as replacement valves were a rather pricey component.

If it was all looked after properly, the "engine in the back, radiator in the front" setup worked fine. I never had any problems with airlocks.