Brenda Ann wrote:
"D. Peter Maus" wrote in message
...
Thanks. The car always started with just a click of the key. Never a
problem. It was the
undercarriage that failed.


Really. In what way?
If you recall the design it had a trunk in the front as well as the rear.
What happened to
mine was that moisture up under the front apparently rotted out the area
that supported the
front struts.



No kidding. Damn. You're lucky something didn't let go on the road.

I've only encountered dramatic rust like that once. On a Renault R-5.


Fiat must have had a real issue with rust. I had a 128, cute little car.
Was driving it to work one day when it just stopped moving, but the engine
was still running. Pushed it the rest of the way to work (only 4 blocks or
so) and had a look at it. The front behind the bumper had rusted out and the
strut that held the engine up and fallen, allowing the engine to drop,
disengaging the transaxle from the wheels..

Fortunately, we had a metal shop where I worked at the time, and I was able
to fabricate a fix and got to drive home.



Fiat provided rust as a factory fitment, not an optional extra, back in
the seventies. That said, I owned 3 of the 128s, the last being the 3P,
a nice little hatchback bought new in 1977. I kept the hatch the
longest, passing it on to one of my nephews in about 2000. Apart from a
couple of stretched valves, a common habit I'm told, we did nothing to
the engine in 200,000 kilometres. Only rust it seemed to have was around
the hatch glass. It was still a runner when my nephew onsold it to
someone in N.S.W. about 2 or 3 years back. I rarely drove it in all the
time we had it as I had a work supplied vehicle for most of my working
life. It was just a glorified family shopping trolley. Probably did less
than 3,000 of the odometer total and a thousand of that was when we
delivered it to my nephew in another state. It was on that trip that I
discovered the standard fitment radio had good AM dx qualities. Picked
up stations from all over when we were miles from any nearby towns.
Could even pick up Melbourne station from the middle of N.S.W. Don't
know what brand it was but suspect it was some Italian variant. All the
electrics on the Fiat were Italian manufacture so reasonable to assume
the radio was as well.

Krypsis