Lewis's Escort mk2 Build Story

This is honour of Lewis's Gandfather, sadly passed, Lewis is restoring this back to factory original, this is episode one of his mega build stay tuned for the next one, only in our magazine

StanceAuto

Please join the site and our new Facebook group, you can Post your cars there, this helps us find more HOT cars,

Stance Auto Mags Facebook Group

I had a mk1 Escort 1300 once. I bought it for £25.00, it was bright orange! So my little Brother and I painted the entire car with a tin of white gloss paint!! it looked sick, lol, I only bought the car because of a film i saw. The driver in the film was driving in reverse, handbraked, did a 180 and drove forward - I think thats called a 'J-Turn'. And, well being 17 and daft i wanted to try it. Needless to say, the car ony lasted a couple of months before we dumped it. Sometimes you have regrets in life and this has to be one of mine.

Mk1's are now worth more than most standard cars. Anyway...on to the Mk2. I love these. I taught myself to drive in one of these cars, the same colour aswell! Lewis looks like he his doing a fantastic job here, looking at the details of his car reminds me of my days doing the same to XR3's and XR2'S and to my Lexus. Parts for this must be rare now (and expensive) so refurbing is a good idea not just for the love of the car but from an investment point of view also. Its nice to see he is doing just that. I for one can't wait to see the finished product, which of course will be exclusive to us in our magazine.

Escort MK2 1600 gl

My name: Lewis marsh

Instagram: @projectmarsh_

When I was a really young kid my Dad had a mk1 escort project that he never got to finish. He loved Ford, especially the Escort series, he spoke about the mk1 all the time and what he was going to do with it. From a young age I've loved cars and motorbikes especially classic cars. As I grew older it was my dream to own an Escort.

After starting an apprenticeship I saved as much as I could to buy one, I wanted to buy a project car which I could build with my Dad and make it my own. I was scrolling through Facebook and found a mk2 escort gl that had a 1600 engine fitted. I didn’t quite have enough to buy it, lucky enough my mum agreed to help me buy the car. So Me and my Stepdad arranged to go and pick it up with his trailer.

I got it home, me and my dad inspected the car, wrote a list of the parts i needed and began ordering panels pretty much straight away. After the panels arrived I got the car to my Dads so I could start working on it. I stripped out the interior first. mainly so i didn't ruin it while working on the car and so i could see if there was anything else that might want doing to the body, its better stripped to its bare bones, so you can see if there is any holes, rot that needs attention, but after a while I sort of lost interest a little bit (im not sure why), I regained my composure and started again after watching videos on YouTube - which is always a good source of inspriation, and you can learn a lot from other people's help video's.

I then moved the car to a garage to start some real work on it, and have some more space to work around the entire car, but it was during this time that sadly my grandad passed away. This gave me my motivation I needed to get the car on the road. The last time he left the house for a day out was to go to a car show, so I wanted to have the car ready for that same show this year as a tribute to my grandad, he was very special to me and my family.

But unfortunately, due to the lockdown the show was postponed/cancelled. However, I carried on with the work. I have recently changed the passenger side rear arch, cutting away the rot and rust, bought an after market arch to weld back into place, the front wing was to far gone to save so i got one i found at a car show a yellow one, the inner sills was alot of work because of rust and rot, but you can get after market panels to fit, we have made some bits of panels where needed, because parts are very hard to come by or too expensive,working with some of the panels I've removed, I've been able to shape and fabricate the same panels, some panels that we removed, someone in the past had covered the holes very badly, which is probably another reason there is a lot of work to do.

We have started on the drivers side now, having recently welded the inner sills, which believe me after all these years there was a lot to do, old fords are known for this. We cut the rot out where we could and grinded the rest down to good metal,I have also got the front wing ready to go on and started building a 1300 engine to go back in, which my dad brought for me, my dad as helped with pretty much all the work, he is so good and knows alot, also a good freind of mine also helped with some of the work, The 1300 engine is not the original engine but it did originally come off the line with a 1300, this as involved a complete strip down of the engine, some parts replaced with new ones, and an engine paint to make it look smart and clean, we've put it all back together, with new gaskets and seals, so she last quite a few years longer, however this is only for insurance reasons, I plan on saving the 1600 I took out, and maybe increase it's power, so when my insurance is cheaper I can put it back in.

We still have alot of work to do, body wise, i'll save the surprise of what colour until the next part of my journey which you'll find right here in stance auto, so stay tuned.

At this point Id like to thank my Mum, Dad, StepDad and a close freind who have all helped me on my journey. The car wouldn't t be where it is now with out the help of them. I still have a fair bit of work left for to do, as you can see from the pictures, but I’ll save that for an update...