Vintage Thing No.48 - the Allegro All-Ego

It was while surfing for information about 1750 cc Allegros in connection with my recent post about the Austin Allegro Equipe and I discovered the Allegro All-Ego. I don't have a television and I don't read The Sun newspaper so the exploits of the All-Ego had passed me by. It seems to have gathered a certain amount of notoriety in its short life for it recently went to auction and realised a heady £5500 on 29th October, 2008.

And having posted about it fleetingly on the Engine Punk Litmus blog (for I reckon it demonstrates hands on rolling sculpture better than anything), I feel sufficiently well-disposed towards it to claim it as a Vintage Thing.

The All-Ego was built from a 1977 1100 cc Austin Allegro by the legendary car customiser Andy Saunders. He accomplished this feat in three days in December 2006 for a television pilot programme called Juice My Lemon, described by Saunders “as a cross between the American programme Pimp My Ride and The Benny Hill Show.”

As motoring lemons go, the Allegro could be the best. Or would that be the worst?

The result is very similar to something that I had once thought about. This idea had been provoked some years ago by the acquisition of a very rusty 1750 cc Allegro. This particular example was a four-door saloon with a single carburettor so not as desirable as the Austin Allegro Equipe that I featured recently on this blog.

In fact, the only thing to recommend this particular car was its 1750 cc engine which will ran quite well. The body was badly dented and the boot floor rotted out completely, since some hay bales had been left in it and they had decomposed entirely, taking the steel with them. When it came to collecting this Vintage Thinge, I hooked up some strops for my neighbour Andrew to tow the car onto his machinery trailer only for the rear towing eyes to pull off . In the end, we put the strop through the holes in the boot floor and dragged it onto the trailer that way.

Andy Saunders has beaten me to realising this idea. I first became aware of his work when he exhibited a severely chopped Mini at a classic car show held in the Cornish Coliseum at Carlyon Bay. He also showed a weird and wonderful creation based on a Citroen CX that looked like a manta ray (the fish not the Opel) swimming through the ocean.

He doesn't do any preparatory sketches, he just dives straight in and realises his ideas in 3-D. Most people who do that finish up binning the result but Andy’s certainly got a gift and must have made his metal work teacher ever so proud.

Andy has been dubbed an "automotive alchemist" for turning base things into gold and is featured on the Car Design News website.

Max Girardo, Managing Director of RM Auctions European Division, described Saunders' work as as rolling works of modern art, which is close to the rolling sculpture interpretation of Engine Punk. "It is drivable art in the truest sense", he added.

I'd like to know how Andy chopped the windscreen down. I know somebody in the Citroen Specials Club who achieved a similar effect with a laminated screen and a grinding disc. He said he covered himself in padding and wore a big pair of gloves and several pairs of safety goggles that simply applied the grinder to the glass. Instead of shattering as he expected, the windscreen proved surprisingly easy to cut down. I don't think this would work with toughened screens.

I once worked with someone who cut down laminated screens for coaches and he told me that he made the first cut -- which is Rod Stewart would tell you, is always the deepest – with a conventional glass cutter. Another cut would then follow it carefully in exactly the same place on the other side of the glass. The next stage involved pouring methylated spirits on the glass and setting fire to it. This had the effect of burning through the plastic inner layer. Bearing in mind the size of coach windscreens, I think there would have been awful lot of people involved in just holding the screen to work on it.

Or maybe this guy was just taking the piss.

The Allegro All-Ego is mounted on 17 inch alloy wheels with low profile 195/40 tyres. With so little sidewalls to flex on these tyres, the ride could be quite harsh but I imagine that, without the glass and the rear seat trim, the All-Ego is quite a bit lighter than the original saloon so this might not be a problem.

The auction description credits the 1100 cc A series engine with 80 brake horsepower, which seems optimistic, and a five-speed manual transmission, which sounds suspiciously unique. The only transverse five-speed A series powertrains lived in Austin Maestros following a deal with VW that allowed Austin Rover to at last provide a fifth gear for the smaller engines in its ranges.

The curved rear lights are from a Fiat and I think the colour scheme really suits the car. Apparently, another 150 hours were spent after the show was taped to finish the car off properly. This fits in with what I know about Andy Saunders who has the reputation of being something of a craftsman. I imagine he was happy to rise to the challenge of the show yet wouldn't want anything with his name behind it to go out onto the road without being properly sorted for the All-Ego is fully road legal. That is very interesting to me for presumably it didn’t need to go through an SVA test…

At £5500, this is probably the most expensive Allegro you will never see. Somebody, one day, might pay this amount for a concours standard Vanden Plas or even that Allegro Equipe that was on eBay earlier this month, once it's been fully restored.

The All-Ego is giving me ideas again. I still have that old 1750 Allegro in my little paddock, next to my garage block. The engine still turns over and -- whisper it -- I have acquired a spare cylinder head and twin carburettors for it, again through the good graces of eBay. I would have to weld up the boot floor before we could tow it out of my little paddock. And I don't think Andrew the tractor man would be interested in helping me get it out with one of his tractors after what happened last time. He hates this particular example although he views my white Allegro 1300 Super with a certain amount of wry detachment.

But once I get this old brown saloon into my workshop and fire up my MIG welder, who knows what the result might be? Andy Saunders – he would know.

Photos from Serious Wheels