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Uno 1985 55 Super, what a gem !

Introduction

Hello all,

It's been 3 days since I bought it but I'm still thrilled !

Me and a friend have been looking for 1st gen UNOs for quite some time now, and when this came up for sale I just had to have it, and almost forced him to go see it and eventually buy it.

And so it all happened very quickly, I still haven't seen it in the flesh, here's some of the pics I have.

She's in an incredible state of conservation, presumably kept in a garage or somewhere dry she has little to no real rust, probably one of the benefits of having spent her life back home where it rains way less often.

I'm going to fix her up a bit, she runs and drives beautifully but could do with some love, then we'll team up and prep her to drive to Mongolia next summer, just to get used to the new girl.

Updates soon, thanks for tuning in ;)
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I really like your enthusiasm :slayer:

I'm getting an error trying to view the pictures..See if you can fix them as I'm sure we'd all like to see :)
 
Hi when you say Mongolia is this going to be a Mongol rally competitor? I.e. driving out never to return?

Just you apparently have on your hands the only none sorn Uno 55 super in the country (also the total left on how many left is 11!) so it would be a shame if it followed many other rare fiat's in that fate.

https://www.howmanyleft.co.uk/vehicle/fiat_uno_55_super
 
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Sorry i don't understand why attached pictures from my phone don't work on the app. The website has a great guide but I can't find this illusive navbar from which I should be able to upload pictures. Is there a fast way directly from my phone ?
Sorry everyone i usually have no problems with this sort of stuff
 
ok sorry about the sad look of the message above, I'm still trying to get my head around the image posting thing.

The car is an '85 as I said earlier, and it's almost a one owner.
we bought it from the original owner's grandaughter, who just kept it as a spare car after is grandad passed away in the early 2000s.
therefore the car only accumulated a whopping 85000kms, which are close to nothing if you bear in mind that it's 31 years old.

as you may have noticed the car is on super-uber-cool black Rome plates, which is where me and all my friends are from and where the car has spent all its life.

if your plates go damaged or missing, you can't get a period correct one, nor you can make them yourself, you just get new ones which look like poo on a classic car; and back in that day you had to change your plate if you were to move to another region.

hence why finding an original car that's still on its original plate it's true hard work and blind luck; and being "Roma" by far the coolest one of the lot (at least for me), i was ready to just hand the money over and take it home.

actually I did all this from here, London UK, while a friend took care of all the time consuming back and forth from our dvla, paying the stupid property transfer tax (we're still the third world) and collecting the actual car.

we split 50/50 and we have an Uno !!

I wanted one of these because it represented honest motoring for thousands of families back home, for more than twenty years, and in some "remote" spots, it's still going strong.

I wanted an early one because I like the shape of it, more raw than the second generation in my opinion, and with less plastic.
trouble is, it's now considered a classic, specially well kept examples like ours, you're looking at at least 2000 euros, which is a lot of money for a 30 years old fiat. if you're going for a turbo good luck, no less than 7000 euros for a battered one, that's nonsense to me.

sure a Fire engine would have been nice, they're bulletproof and **** easy to work on if you can tell a spanner from a cupcake, but ours came with the 1116 straight from a Ritmo, or strada her in the UK.

actually a Ritmo 60 was going to be our baby, we were ready to buy it, up until the white little gem came up for sale... had to have it !!
(thinking about it, it would have been much better for the task. wider, bigger, taller. can't beat the appeal of a mk1 Uno in this condition though)

nevermind, still a good solid unit, can be made bulletproof and that's what we are going for. usual stuff, cambelt, maybe an head gasket, valve seats if they leak, lash, cooling system overhaul, check how the clutch is doing, ignition is a biggie, want to get that done right, and a lot of other stuff like suspension and electrics.

I want to leave ready but not over prepared. it's a rugged little car, not much to go wrong, but I can't stand stuff not working right. also the spirit of the event it's just to have fun.

the rally will just be a good 15.000kms on the car, driving it, living it, something that has probably missed in years of disuse.
I'm not going to abuse it, not that kind of guy, I just want to travel on a piece of our motoring history, there and back.
 
That's an amazing find... congratulations. Is it a 5-speed? That SOHC 1.1 engine is great.... my mate had a Ritmo 60CL in the late 80s : 4-speed only but it would buzz along at 80 all day. My Tipo 1.4 has one of the last incarnations of that engine - pretty simple and bomb-proof assuming you don't forget the cambelt. My sister also had a 1.0 (Fire) Uno Mk2 for a while.
 
She is a 5 speed thank god, afaik the only one to come with a 4 speed was the 900cc 45.

I made a quick visit at home last weekend, and obviously ran to my garage as I was so excited about the Uno that I still had not seen !

She is as good as described from the previous owner and my friend Marco: the underside has no real rust, the only brown spots are close to the rear bumper mounting bolts and somehow on the top of the a-pillar on the driver side.

If fired up first time with a little bit of choke but it wouldn't idle at all, even though Marco said it did quite happily. Never mind, I'm going to rebuild the whole carb in Christmas, while Marco will be dealing with the other problem, a water pump leak. Since we're going to Adress both of those things it only makes sense to to the timing belt and tensioner as well, together with an oil change and maybe some spark plugs.

Once running the car feels great. No knocks from the suspension, very floaty but it's probably just me, only a couple of little bits not working, nothing impossible to fix.

Overall a great catch in still stocked
 
She is a 5 speed thank god, afaik the only one to come with a 4 speed was the 900cc 45.

They made a 55 5-door 4-speed non-Super, but all the Supers came with 5 speeds.

And what a fantastic find - don't forget to cover the seats (front ones at least) - it's probably the only one left with that Terence Conran Fiat logo upholstery in good nick, and it's so much nicer than the later kinds!
 
another update from our little Uno!

We met over Christmas back in Italy, that's me and my friend marco who bought the car with me, and got started on working on our new car.
We both knew it had a coolant leak right where the water pump sits, and also I wanted to have a look at the carburetor, do a timing belt, drive belt, oil and filter, spark plugs, stuff like that.

I should say at this point, the car ran fine, smooth as silk and quite nippy, but it struggled to idle properly and this coolant leak was getting worse and worse.

So, to the spanners

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We split jobs of course, mine was to look at the carburetor and use as much as I could from a rebuild kit that I got sent home.

Marco had a new timing belt and tensioner as well as a new water pump and drive belt to fit, also we had to make gaskets for all this stuff too.

The carb looked like it hadn't been touched in his whole life, I've never seen so much oil and fuel residues. Apparently the car did not care since she was running like a dream before and it didn't run much different after I spent 5 hours cleaning the crap out of that carb.

Timing belt was easy done, not much space but still doable, thankfully the engine had some reference marks on, somebody had been there before.

Water pump, well, we learnt how to do this job fast at the end of the day, we had to do it 4 times !

After cutting the gaskets for the pump and the cross pipe to the thermostat, we realized the car had a different kind of problem

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The core plug on the timing side was rusted through, and leaking like old man pants, the water pump was absolutely fine then.

Hey, I wanted to do it anyways, you never know !

The day after we stuffed a new plug in there (that's the fourth time we take the timing side to bits), put some fuel in it and go for a test drive

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Fan comes on and off, drives beautifully, a couple of odd knocks but nothing to worry, good brakes, we're on!

Next time ill look into the ignition and the charging system, also the heater don't seem to work.

One of the spark plugs, cyl1, was full of gunk when we got it out, I wonder if the head gasket is compromised.
Mind you, for a trip this long and with hot temperatures I wouldn't mind getting a metal one.

That's it for now, I'll have to book a couple of flights home to work on the beast, and also start looking for some sponsors !
 
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