Hi George,
I read your posting and thought, "Hey, that's me", which I feel it must be,
there cannot be two people who have done two chassis changes and labelled
the chassis thus!
My car is fairly well documented from 1976, so showing continuous provenance
is not a problem. In the past I have built up kit cars, so I am well
aquainted with the way our licensing authorities handle vehicle identities.
They use a scoring system where the chassis or shell have a fairly high
number of points. So long as you re-use the majority of major components,
the DVLA will not quibble about the vehicle identity- i.e. it will take more
than a shelling or chassis to make a 'new' vehicle. The dividing line can be
quite fine, if you are building a Marlin, say, which has a new chassis, you
will need the donor engine, prop, gearbox, back axle, electrics and gauges,
as well as the front suspension to retain the original identity. This is
critical if you are trying to avoid a 'Q' plate- once issued with a Q plate
you cannot use a vanity plate of your choice on the resultant vehicle.
For anyone with an unusual car, it is worth going to some trouble to collect
some history together, as this can be worth a disproportionate amount come
sale time, or if the vehicle is destroyed or stolen. Provenance is king, so
establishing a continuous history is very helpful to establish that the car
is cherished and not a "bitsa".
For anyone buying a car in the UK, it is worth remembering that a Vehicle
Registration document V5, does not prove much - only tells you who the
"registered keeper" is- not the legal owner! It is possible to obtain a V5
for a vehicle you don't own, which opens the door to all kinds of frauds.
If you sell a UK sourced car to a foreign national who will permanently
export it, they may not want the V5, which leaves the unscrupulous with the
identity of a vehicle to 'clone'. This is more common with Ferrari than
Morgan, but is not unknown. All you can do is look for other circumstantial
evidence that the vehicle you are looking at is genuine- wads of paperwork
do it for me!
--
Jeremy Edwards
1972 Morgan 4/4 2 str
Melton Mowbray, England
SNIP
>
> When I sought to discuss this subject on one of the other lists, a chap
> there who had replaced his chassis twice informed me that at the first
> change due to corrosion his new chassis could be requested with any number
> he liked on it......... He chose the original number with the addition of
> the suffix "A" to denote the chassis change, some time later the car was
> damaged in an accident which required a replacement chassis to be fitted
> again, this time he followed the same procedure for identification though in
> this case he added the suffix "B" instead of "A" to the chassis. He
> documented the changes in his file for the car. I doubt that anyone would
> consider his car as anything other than a Morgan, though under the strict
> terms of the registration law here in the UK the Chassis is the most
> important aspect in the registration process and it is to that chassis that
> the registration number is allocated by the registration
> authorities.......... Hmm! Like I typed earlier, it`s a bit of a minefield
> best avoided by the simplest means possible ?
> SNIP
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