Comrade Car - Introduction (Part 1)

As my friend Yuriy put it: What the hell did you do, scan the small ads for the most rotten and cheapest Lada Niva? And in all honesty, he wasn't quite too far off. I went there because it meant having a little rideout on the old Dre-XT-Stück deep into the country-side and have a look at a car that was obviously trash. It was stored for several years in a dusty (yet dry) wood storage barn, had dry rotten tyres and the left sill was at best a glimpse of its former greatness. Badly (terribly actually) painted, moss growing on it and dings and scratches all over the place.

So I agreed with the seller that a half-decent pressure wash was precondition to assess the situation and even seriously think about the deal. 

It was at this point, that we hooked up a battery, fed the carb some petrol and it fired right up. The price was too reasonable to pass on the car and so I ended up to become the new owner of around 1100kg of an amalgamation of (rusty) Soviet steel, worn leaky tyres and the world's worst respray job all on a single car.

So why get "something like that" in the first place? I mean I have a relatively reliable old Volvo V70 station wagon, but there's an appeal to the Lada that most people will probably find difficult to grasp. In short, this car is a reduction of the concept of car to the bare minimum. No fluff. No superfluous features. The actual wiring loom going through this car is thinner than on all bikes I own and my Volvo probably has got more cables hidden behind every single door card. The best way to describe this car is that is in a good way the missing link between a tractor and a car. It is purposeful. Simple. It is, without the slightest doubt a car from a bygone era, funnily enough the same statement can be applied to my friend Roli's Lada Niva 1700, which is roughly 25 years newer than this one. It's a car from the 70ies, with what people would call "proven technology" or in other words, parts that were somewhat outdated at the time of construction. One could say it is a sort of 4-wheeled equivalent to the late Enfield Bullet. (And I've owned two of those...)

Or in short, I am fed up with modern cars, their electronics and some weird electronic controller stopping my car from working again and I want a car that makes a "CLUNK"-noise when shutting a door.