So after nearly ten years of forgetting to ever get around to actually introducing my little fleet, I've finally decided I need to kick myself into doing so. There are several cars, so there will be a few threads up soon so I can stick to the rules regarding titles etc.
I figured ascending date of production probably made sense as an order to post things in. Especially as this one will - with a decent pinch of good fortune - see the road for the first time in a couple of decades in the coming week.
This is the smallest car I've ever owned, and definitely one of the most interesting.
Some of you may think you recognise this car, especially if you subscribe to Hubnut's channel on YouTube. You do, this one used to be his spares vehicle.
So what is it?
This is an AC Model 70 - though more commonly known as an Invacar. Being strictly accurate, Invacar were a company who made a variety of invalid carriages up until the 1970s, including this one which was made both by Invacar Ltd and AC to virtually identical designs (the design being all ACs). The only consistent difference seems to be that the Invacar bodywork is more often fully painted while AC seemed to use colour impregnated gel coat on the fibreglass.
So, invalid carriage? It's not actually a car then?
Originally these were classified as invalid carriages, issued by the DHSS to people who would due to disability be unable to safely drive a normal car. While the last of these rolled off the production line in 1977 when the Motability scheme was brought in, it wasn't until 2003 that the last Model 70s were finally withdrawn from service. That's not the end of the story though. As of 31st March 2003 the vehicles were all recalled by the government to be scrapped. Officially they were all (a few in museums excepted I'm sure) were supposed to have been rounded up and destroyed. Of course being such small (and odd) cars with relatively little scrap value, it's unsurprising that a few managed to escape. The big step forward though came a few years ago when the folks behind the Invalid Carriage Register successfully persuaded the DVLA to let the handful of these cars that still survive to have the scrapped marker removed allowing them to return to the road - essentially being legally treated no differently to a Reliant Robin, Morgan 3-Wheeler etc as a result.
*Technically* speaking the Model 70 isn't actually an invalid carriage...the construction & use regs stipulated a maximum unladen mass for an invalid carriage as 350kg...and a Model 70 is around 400. This is why if you look at the body type on the V5 document it is listed as "Invalid Vehicle" rather than "Invalid Carriage" - meaning that these cars weren't actually subject to the same restrictions as the earlier cars.
The whole car is essentially 400kgs of bits out of a whole plethora of parts bins from around the world flying in close formation.
When people think of invalid carriages, a lot will be thinking of the earlier models which were quite crude in every way, and with a single cylinder two stroke Villiers bike engine, making them diabolically slow. To be honest while they looked quite similar to the Model 70, under the skin they were still mostly bits of motorbike bolted together on a backbone chassis. They were slow, noisy, didn't handle at all well and weren't reputed to be all that reliable.
The Model 70 is a bit of a step forward from that. Power is provided by a 500cc air cooled flat twin engine sourced from Steyer-Puch (good for roughly 20bhp), delivered to the rear wheels through a Salsbury made CVT belt drive to the rear wheels. Properly to both rear wheels...quite a few of the earlier ones only drove on wheel. The entire rear suspension assembly is from a Fiat 500/126 just with the addition of Spax adjustable shock absorbers and some slight modification to the hubs to suit the BMC wheels. The component count in the engine bay is kept down by using a Dynastart unit instead of separate starter motor and generators.
It's a lovely little engine actually, and I'm very much looking forward to hearing it being used in anger soon. 20bhp in a car this light with pretty low gearing should be quicker than it looks.
This is actually the second one I've owned, the first (hereby referred to as KP) while having reasonably good mechanical bits, was outright missing large portions of the body (not limited to but including everything forward of the front bulkhead). As such when the second car (hereafter to be referred to as TP) became available with a scruffy but present body but no drivetrain, it was obvious to me to make one good car out the two.
After a few months of tinkering with it on and off, we're hoping that when the new fuel tank arrives from the fabricators that we'll have the first test run this week.
I'll try to get a few better photos up tomorrow and add a bit more information, along with the rest of the fleet getting their own logbooks set up. Here's what you'll be seeing:
1985 Sinclair C5 (no, not a car...but it's fun and gets used regularly).
1990 Mercedes-Benz T1 208D AutoTrail Navajo camper van.
1993 Lada Riva 1500E Estate.
1996 Citroen Xantia 2.0T Activa.
Any requests for where to start...other than at a computer rather than typing everything out on my phone as I just did here... I'll do a scan through in the morning at a computer to try to snag any autocorrect madness that I didn't see. It's nearly 2am, that's my excuse!
There is a common misconception that these cars were banned from the road, that's not the case. What happened was simply that they were all recalled (remember they were all* government owned, just leased to the user) and formally were all scrapped on mass. However this predated the existence of the certificate of destruction - it was simply a box ticked on the registration document. Once that was done though it became impossible to tax them, as the DVLA computer would refuse as the vehicle would show as scrapped...that essentially meant that there was no legal way for them to be used on the road. They were never "banned" though.
* A tiny number of these cars were actually sold privately, but we're talking maybe into the tens if that, I'm personally aware of two - which both survive. To the extent that all that was done on the production line to differentiate them was someone painting over the "government property" text on the VIN plate!
I figured ascending date of production probably made sense as an order to post things in. Especially as this one will - with a decent pinch of good fortune - see the road for the first time in a couple of decades in the coming week.
This is the smallest car I've ever owned, and definitely one of the most interesting.
Some of you may think you recognise this car, especially if you subscribe to Hubnut's channel on YouTube. You do, this one used to be his spares vehicle.
So what is it?
This is an AC Model 70 - though more commonly known as an Invacar. Being strictly accurate, Invacar were a company who made a variety of invalid carriages up until the 1970s, including this one which was made both by Invacar Ltd and AC to virtually identical designs (the design being all ACs). The only consistent difference seems to be that the Invacar bodywork is more often fully painted while AC seemed to use colour impregnated gel coat on the fibreglass.
So, invalid carriage? It's not actually a car then?
Originally these were classified as invalid carriages, issued by the DHSS to people who would due to disability be unable to safely drive a normal car. While the last of these rolled off the production line in 1977 when the Motability scheme was brought in, it wasn't until 2003 that the last Model 70s were finally withdrawn from service. That's not the end of the story though. As of 31st March 2003 the vehicles were all recalled by the government to be scrapped. Officially they were all (a few in museums excepted I'm sure) were supposed to have been rounded up and destroyed. Of course being such small (and odd) cars with relatively little scrap value, it's unsurprising that a few managed to escape. The big step forward though came a few years ago when the folks behind the Invalid Carriage Register successfully persuaded the DVLA to let the handful of these cars that still survive to have the scrapped marker removed allowing them to return to the road - essentially being legally treated no differently to a Reliant Robin, Morgan 3-Wheeler etc as a result.
*Technically* speaking the Model 70 isn't actually an invalid carriage...the construction & use regs stipulated a maximum unladen mass for an invalid carriage as 350kg...and a Model 70 is around 400. This is why if you look at the body type on the V5 document it is listed as "Invalid Vehicle" rather than "Invalid Carriage" - meaning that these cars weren't actually subject to the same restrictions as the earlier cars.
The whole car is essentially 400kgs of bits out of a whole plethora of parts bins from around the world flying in close formation.
When people think of invalid carriages, a lot will be thinking of the earlier models which were quite crude in every way, and with a single cylinder two stroke Villiers bike engine, making them diabolically slow. To be honest while they looked quite similar to the Model 70, under the skin they were still mostly bits of motorbike bolted together on a backbone chassis. They were slow, noisy, didn't handle at all well and weren't reputed to be all that reliable.
The Model 70 is a bit of a step forward from that. Power is provided by a 500cc air cooled flat twin engine sourced from Steyer-Puch (good for roughly 20bhp), delivered to the rear wheels through a Salsbury made CVT belt drive to the rear wheels. Properly to both rear wheels...quite a few of the earlier ones only drove on wheel. The entire rear suspension assembly is from a Fiat 500/126 just with the addition of Spax adjustable shock absorbers and some slight modification to the hubs to suit the BMC wheels. The component count in the engine bay is kept down by using a Dynastart unit instead of separate starter motor and generators.
It's a lovely little engine actually, and I'm very much looking forward to hearing it being used in anger soon. 20bhp in a car this light with pretty low gearing should be quicker than it looks.
This is actually the second one I've owned, the first (hereby referred to as KP) while having reasonably good mechanical bits, was outright missing large portions of the body (not limited to but including everything forward of the front bulkhead). As such when the second car (hereafter to be referred to as TP) became available with a scruffy but present body but no drivetrain, it was obvious to me to make one good car out the two.
After a few months of tinkering with it on and off, we're hoping that when the new fuel tank arrives from the fabricators that we'll have the first test run this week.
I'll try to get a few better photos up tomorrow and add a bit more information, along with the rest of the fleet getting their own logbooks set up. Here's what you'll be seeing:
1985 Sinclair C5 (no, not a car...but it's fun and gets used regularly).
1990 Mercedes-Benz T1 208D AutoTrail Navajo camper van.
1993 Lada Riva 1500E Estate.
1996 Citroen Xantia 2.0T Activa.
Any requests for where to start...other than at a computer rather than typing everything out on my phone as I just did here... I'll do a scan through in the morning at a computer to try to snag any autocorrect madness that I didn't see. It's nearly 2am, that's my excuse!
There is a common misconception that these cars were banned from the road, that's not the case. What happened was simply that they were all recalled (remember they were all* government owned, just leased to the user) and formally were all scrapped on mass. However this predated the existence of the certificate of destruction - it was simply a box ticked on the registration document. Once that was done though it became impossible to tax them, as the DVLA computer would refuse as the vehicle would show as scrapped...that essentially meant that there was no legal way for them to be used on the road. They were never "banned" though.
* A tiny number of these cars were actually sold privately, but we're talking maybe into the tens if that, I'm personally aware of two - which both survive. To the extent that all that was done on the production line to differentiate them was someone painting over the "government property" text on the VIN plate!
