I’ve owned my Anglia for nearly 30 years now. It started as a “one owner from new, never been welded” 1200 Super DeLuxe. I was actually looking for a nice two door Mk2 Cortina, to re-shell an incredibly rotten Cortina Lotus. However, I found the Anglia in a local paper and at the time it seemed like a good idea to put the Cortina bits into it, after all Cortina Lotus’s were the poor relation and really weren’t worth much were they? (Yeah right, hindsight’s a wonderful thing isn’t it)! The Anglia soon became a bit of an obsession and a firm favourite with the family.
The most recent job on the Anglia was converting the old rear drum brakes to discs. With the exception of machining the o/d of the half shaft flange so it fits inside a Fiesta disc It’s a pretty simple mod that’s basically a nut and bolt job. Nick from Nickal Engineering did the machining for me and I rebuilt the secondhand Cosworth calipers.
Earlier mods include turreting the rear suspension and fitting an A frame to locate the axle, so it’s quite busy underneath and routing the modified Cosworth hand brake cable required a little care. I also had to make up new metal brake pipes that enabled the metric calipers to work with the old Imperial Ford connections; with that done it was a simple job to bleed the air out and check for leaks.
Name: Chris Marchant, technical director, Vintage Tyres
Vehicle: 1966 Ford Anglia
Time owned: 30 years
Other classics owned: Porsche 911 SC, Ford Cortina