6:15 pm, March 14, 2009
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RIGHT – time for a Bangers4BEN update. You’ll probably have recently read about our epic adventure to Scotland in the latest issue of Car Dealer.
Just to recap – for those of you that are new to this Bangers malarkey – four of us at Car Dealer bought cars for £200 or less, drove them from our Portsmouth HQ to John O’Groats and back again and are now trying to sell them to raise money for BEN.
I’ve already managed to get rid of the Mondeo to a friend of a friend. I got £600 for it – a tidy profit, but then it was in great condition. The guy didn’t even haggle over the price.
Dan’s sold his BMW– again to a friend of a friend. But for just £250. Still, it’s a profit.
That leaves us with Dunc’s Calibra and Wills’ Volvo. I seem to have taken custody of the V40 so needed to get it sorted this week.
Our friends at Paragon Remarketing have said they are happy to auction the Volvo off as part of an online sale. They’ve picked up the cars left over from Camden Retail, which went into administration recently, so the Volvo will fit into that sale.
With the deadline for collection looming I needed to spruce up the beast. It still had half of Scotland caked on the outside and it was utterly filthy inside.
Knowing what a good valet can do for a car’s value, I called a good friend at Shine! the valeting company. These guys work with Halfords to provide a top notch cleaning service.
I’d seen them at work before for a feature I did on valeting for Auto Express so knew they would be just the chaps to get the Volvo looking like new again.
They sent their top technician to do the job on my drive – and after four hours of hard work, inside and out, the car was absolutely sparkling.
The difference the deep clean made was unbelievable. The door that had flat paintwork was buffed back to brilliance and the interior was thoroughly rejuvenated.
In fact the interior looks like new now – and with a handy set of mats from Ring Automotive that I had in on test, the job was complete.
In all it took about five hours of hard work – but I’m sure it will pay dividends for BEN at auction time.
A clean car can add hundreds to the value and we’re pinning our hopes that rings true when it goes through the Paragon Remarketing sale.
Dunc has organised for similar miracles to take place at BCA, who have said they’ll put the Calibra through auction for us too. To be honest, we’ll be lucky if we wipe our feet on that one – but we might be surprised.
Let’s hope the Volvo makes up for it and adds to our impressive total for BEN!
More updates soon…
James
