Coincidentally, the car I mentioned was an Escort! It had the N/S rear corner replaced, and had been very well done. I'm guessing the SO of the lady was in the trade, and that it was his scam.
TBH, if I had been told about it before I viewed it, I might have bought it anyway, but is a seller starts off dishonestly it makes you wonder what else might be wrong.
Chris
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that one. I twice got stopped by the law, got a producer, taxed the bike, produced documents, and that was end of story. I even once got told by a plod "Make sure you get it by the 14th"
Steve
No. My renewal thingie didn't arrive and I couldn't find a way of taxing the car online without the correct number so I went to the local sub PO. They didn't look at the MOT or insurance.
The law said you had to renew the tax before it expired, and get it on display. The (Unofficial?) enforcement policy was that people and the Royal Mail weren't perfect, so the problem was quietly ignored for up to a fortnight, a number of times in my case and those of my friends in my younger days. Unless there was another problem, then it just joined the list on the charge sheet, or so I was told.
Yep, I've had that happen to me in the past. It makes absolutely no difference to the fact that pre-September 2008, failure to display a current tax disc at all times is an offence. (Apart from when going to/ from a pre-arranged MOT test, of course.)
See here:
"Although a tax disc can be purchased in advance of the current one expiring, there is no grace period following expiry in which you can continue to use the vehicle. This applies even if you intend to "get around" to buying the next tax disc, which will start from the date the previous one expired. If your tax disc expires on a Sunday, in theory, your obligation is to buy the new disc before it expires and not wait until the following Monday. However, it would be an extremely harsh court that imposed a punishment in those circumstances."
FWIW, I've found that non-specialist police officers actually know very little about motoring law.
As an aside, the changes from 2008 also allow you to renew your tax from the 5th of the preceding month, rather than having to wait until 14 days before expiry; this gives a better chance to sort out any postal delivery problems.
Chris
same with me, I have bought the best part of a hundred discs online with no problems at all, they usually arrive in 3 or 4 days.
Well they had more or less taken a front and welded that to the rear and I ended up querying this with someone in the MOT "office" who's opinion was that it wasn't really an "offence" as such!.
I suppose that all cars are lots of differing bits of metal welded together anyway;!...
And some leave the factory having already been repaired...
Chris
we had a cut and shut Austin 1100, it was two different colours front and back and came with different reg. numbers at each end. Mind you at one stage we had three different bedford mininbuses which were all ALU822B
If it's well done it's not.
Exactly so. A proper two-into-one repair is as safe as when both left the factory; however, there are plenty of backstreet workshops who don't really care about that and bodge them together.
No and since the insurance database is online too you don't need insurance docs either. Why they actually bother with the tax disc I don't know as that's online too.
Works fine, Just I can't help thinking that loss of this trade is one more nail in your local post office's coffin.
Stuff the paper. They can't "lose" the online mot data base.
That's why I go to the post office for mine, and because I can check that there are no errors on it before I leave.
My nearest PO closed a year or two ago, and others will follow.
Austin/Morris 1100's were built in the same way as a Mini of that era; the floor pan was in two parts, spot welded together. The extra length and power of the 1100 was a problem, especially when used for towing a trailer. The spot welded seam would fail, and they would break their back!
At that point, they were usually an uneconomic repair, but a friend of mine in the trade made some templates to create new panels, then he would jack them up under the middle, and weld them back up.
Once he'd finished, the shell was infinitely stronger than when it left the factory...
Chris
ISTR that on very early Minis the lip was the wrong way round, so driving through a decent puddle scooped water into the car.
Indeed; they were the shells that the early Mini racers wanted, because they weighed 50 pounds less than the ones that didn't leak!
Chris
In the 70s(IIRC) there was a thing called the pushmepullyou or the pull and push or something like that. It consisted of two front halves of BMC 1300s welded together, giving a car with two driving ends. It and it's two drivers used to do stunts at race tracks etc.
Steve
Or, more recently, James May's 'Salfa Romeaab'.
(Front end of a 164 welded to the front end of a 9000)
In the 60s, the Kenyan Forest Service (or some other African country, I forget exactly which one) commissioned a pushmepullyou Mini, for driving down into and then back out of forest access roads. I assume it was well tailored for the job, with higher than normal suspension, etc.
Would you buy this car?
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