Exactly - you need to enjoy repairing Omegas if they're going to last. I very much think of it as another hobby for me, and at least in my senior years it means I keep sort of active crawling around under the old girl getting covered in crap.
I've had an CD estate on the driveway going nowhere for the last couple of years and decided a couple of weeks ago to do something with it. Keeping it for spares was an original thought, but with the other estate CDX as a weekly drive and in tip top condition, I got the urge to go through it and make sure things weren't too far gone. New wishbones & steering rodsfitted last week. So far the front wheel arches & sills are all tidy now and protected inside and out, the front end behind the bumper is all sorted and protected....... I haven't even got to the rear arches and back end, so there's still a hell of a lot of work to do, not to mention cambelt, cam covers, handbrake cable, drilling out broken rusty screws, etc.
Sounds like hard work? It's enjoyable and feel as though I'm saving something in a throw-away society. Financially the car owes me nothing, and I'll easily get the budget down under £300 for a reliable winter runner.
Mine is a hobby too. As one of the group of us who have done up cars in the past which are now classics, the Omega falls into the same category now. I do run it as an everyday A to B form of transport, alongside other cars, but I couldn't run it without having another car. Every year it comes off the road for 2 or 3 weeks to have something fairly substantial done to it and as the design is 25 years old now, that puts the early ones firmly into classic territory. Mine is an 03 so it's got a long way to go. but I reckon it'll get there.
The parallels with Rover SD1s are interesting. In the 90s you could barely give them away as rotten old rust buckets and unreliable piles of ****. Now look at the values of tidy ones. The comparison is that if I were to buy another Omega it would not be on age and mileage it would be on condition. That's one benchmark I use to indicate the move into classic status.
Being older and having the benefit of a wider experience can colour our judgement compared to younger people who don't have that same perspective. Omegas are getting mentions in popular classic car magazines, one only last month suggesting people should go out and buy them as the numbers left have reduced by 48% in the last 2 years.
SD1s are cool now, Omegas can go the same way, after all they were better to start with.
presumably due to the combined weight of the battery and driver. Uk cars front springs are equal length 
