Swan Jnr

apologies for being slightly off topic, but did you have any trouble getting the car through SVA without a reciept for the kit, and it being part built when you got it? the problems i had with mine stemmed from the fact that i couldnt provide proof that it was an amatuer build as i didnt have receipts or photos of the major components being fitted.

not sure if this has been done before or not but i'd advise you to be cautious about this kind of thing. not least because people at DVLA/VOSA have been known to look at internet discussion boards! more to the point as has been mentioned in some other posts VOSA are very keen at the moment to spot things that appear dodgy. to the point that even seemingly fine stuff is being questioned and rejected. common sense is not applied in some cases. i've had my own hassles on this and it has been very tricky to resolve. i still wont fully believe it has been until the thing is sva'd and registered if possible i'd try to get a real letter from GBSC if they have a record of your kit being sold. paul

We're selling our 2003 (03) Ford Focus Zetec. Its a 5 door hatchback, in silver, is a 1.8 petrol and has 51k on the clock My dad bought it at one year old with just 7 thousand miles and sold it to us just over a year ago, so its been in our family for most of its life. it has a full service history, and at 35,000 miles had new brakes and a cambelt change. it has just under a years tax and will be sold with a full years MOT asking price 3650 ono. pics to follow...hopefully

certainly not.... "Since leaving the RAF in 2005 I have been struggling to build a business selling home produced pork, sausages and bacon"

glad to hear about the new job and a shame about the demise of your business. didnt know we had a supplier of excellent bacan and sausage in the club! shame. this place never ceases to amaze me

what was special about them? anyone have any pictures?

can you imagine the Grand Place full of hoods? that would be great. a bar just off it that serves a beer called Morte Subite!!! (sudden death) and another with a horse hanging from the ceiling. sounds like a hoody kind of place

sketch up from google is free, though it wont do the stress stuff. easy to use, 3d package, loads of support on the net. loads of examples too. i had a play qwith it and its fairly easy to put a chassis of sorst together in a couple of nights. for stress maybe it would be worth showing the plans to a chassis builder for his opinion, for a real world thought on it? paul

edited link

can i make a suggestion to bring peace back to the board? the whole barskton things seems very simple to me. RAFMSA charge rhocar a set fee for a track day. this incudes temporary membership for everyone to RAFMSA. Joe already has a full membership to RAFMSA as he races. Can someone ask RAFMSA if, given these circumstances they can knock the £5 off the toal bill? (if you give me the number i'll do it) if they can then great. Joey pays £5 less. and everyone gets the chance to amass their style points. if they wont discount this then joe, as a member needs to contact them and ask why as a member he has to pay twice. if rafmsa wont discount this, its not a rhocar issue but a rafmsa one. and we can all get back to helping each other out and having a laugh.

brilliant, thanks guys. this board is the most amazing resource! the google stuff looks good, have you seen the street view stuff in the states? incredible.

Hello, my wife volunteers at a charity, helping to man the national helpline. They have people calling from all over the country trying to find where their local support office is. At the moment all they have to do this is a map. Easy if its a big city, tricky when its a remote village that they have never heard of. (and also hard to work out at times which office out of two is nearest or easiest to get to. I just wondered if there was a piece of software (freely available; this is a charity) that they could load the postcodes of all their offices, and then query this with the callers postcode (or town/city) to give them the nearest office? or maybe nearest two? it might save the charity lots of staffing costs and give distressed callers a better service it almost seems like something you should be able to do on a database but i cant think how you could put geographjical data into a table! Paul

the fact that i have declared the build as amateur is not considered evidence in itself for them. neither is the fact that the MD of the kit car company visited the previous builders house during the build socially and has stated that the builder was an amateur. short of me getting the poor guys wife to write to them, which seems a little bit much or holding a seance i cant see a way that i can prove any more effectively that the guy was not a in the business of building cars. it seems to me from this that anyone buying a part built kit, who does not intend to strip it back down and completely re build needs to obtain testimony from the preiovus builder and photos showing the major components being installed by them before even thinking about buying the part built kit. if the kit passes through several owners prior to sva it seems that letters and photos from each owners showing which components they installed would be required. i cant quite believe the system is this bad. someone i spoke to yesterday suggested that this is one person being a pain, and that i should consider complaining. will see to day.

the feedback i've had from DVLA today regarding my sva is that it cannot be put through as an amateur build unless i can prove that it was built by an amateur. trouble is if it goes as a professional build the pinto will fail the emissions. since the builder is now deceased this it is rather tricky to get proof of his status as anything other than deceased. to add to the confusion he was seperated from his wife at the time of his death and it seems she is reluctant to get involved in anything relating to him anymore. what will happen to those kits that pass through several hands before they finally ge sva'd? does this mean that part built kits become worthless?

do you have a picture? actually do a google search for jenson healey engine and it shows this page on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen-Healey from what i can see the engine should be a lotus 907 engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_907 have a look there for info. and yes it was fitted with Su's in its export guise to the US. its the same engine that went in the first lotus esprits so should go well!

page two on this link. perodua nippa, 2000 reg. 37,k on the clock. cheap, old reliable technology, and he'll never get caught speeding with that engine. http://www.ww-autos.co.uk/107840/stocklist.htm

sat in the cab of an AA truck once we spotted two mgf's broken down at the side of the road within 30 miles. AA man reckoned that they were quite a common car on his call log, due to head gasket failure brought on he claimed by the location of the engine. It was designed to go at the front with all the airflow that this entails and in the MGF location didnt stay cool enough and this placed extra stress on the head gasket. drove one a while back and they were good fun though, and they are really good value second hand. other than HGF no other horror strror i recall reading about.

Is it really worth ruining your positive feedback for the sake of less than £7's worth of items? some people.....

my old car built by pete cherry.

from talking to someone involved with the sva process it seems that the UK gov is trying to maintain its right to continue offering the sva test to keep the kit car business alive. the rest of europe dont have anything like it and so there is pressure from europe for us to drop it. i understand that the recent tightening up of the sva proceedures with more paperwork hoops to jump through are a part of the government attempting to make the sva scheme look as strong and convincing as possible in order to be able to force europe allow us to be a special case.

July/August good for me. glad to see you made the decision to stay on john. paul

apparently one of the fraud issues they are trying to combat is kit car companies passing off their owen turnkey cars as amateur builds. if they are a professional builds as i understand it then they need to go through the same modern stringent emissions tests as a new car. as an amatuer the emissions test is a lot less strict this means i think that this is the end of the pinto as a turnkey engine choice as there seems little chance a pinto will go through as a professional build. (though there might not be many of these left anyway) even if you have the company build up to a certain stage this will no longer be an amatuer build.

do you mind me asking where you got the seats from?

just spotted this, and its amazing, tragic and lots of other things. i thought it was fascinating though. http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=9321 the rest of the forum is quite good if you're nosey like me!

thanks alan, i sincerly hope it is that simple. The problem with the letter i got is that it is all about the amateur build declaration. when they demand build photos in the same letter it makes you think that its linked, as that would make basic common sense. optimistic really to apply such a crazy concept to something such as a governmental body! Paul