Practically Classics Forum

I thought the Pist Office stopped giving out tax etc from end Match? DVLA didn't renew their contract I believe

It has now been renewed I believe. A couple of things struck me since my last post, firstly DVLA must know when the car was built, otherwise it would be on a Q plate. Secondly, Glass's Check Book doesn't cover vehicle which were not officially imported into the UK. I've got the 76-85 book and Trabant is not listed.

suffolkpete wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 03, 2024 11:33 am

It has now been renewed I believe. A couple of things struck me since my last post, firstly DVLA must know when the car was built, otherwise it would be on a Q plate. Secondly, Glass's Check Book doesn't cover vehicle which were not officially imported into the UK. I've got the 76-85 book and Trabant is not listed.

It does have the usual "Vehicle was previously registered/used overseas. Declared manufactured 1984." on the front page. Figures that the DVLA are happy with whatever evidence they got for the manufacture date for registration purposes, but won't believe it for changing the tax class. Sounds like business as usual really.

Shouldn't be a problem to get a dating certificate from the owner's club though I'd imagine.

-- -- --

With more than a slight feeling of déjà vu, I found myself here again this afternoon.



Managed to end up with two cars with their MOT due within a couple of weeks. Not the best planning on my part.

I need not have worried.



Advisory for some rust on the offside outer sill, which is absolutely fair I reckon. It does need to be attended to now to prevent this becoming an actual problem.



Think there's a couple of nicks in the stone chip there which have let water get in behind it and lift the paint. There's nothing which seemed at all crunchy when I poked it today, so now the weather's (in theory) getting better I'll get it all sanded back, rust treated and repainted soon. Now we've got a clean MOT pass under our belt I feel a bit more free to throw some time and resources at the long term future of this vehicle. I've heard a few people speaking highly of Lanoguard for underbody protection recently, so might be time to give it a shot on this one.

As an immediate reward for the MOT pass I made the front end look at least 50% less shabby in less than ten minutes.

Before:



After:



That delaminated and rust stained number plate had been bugging me since the day I bought the car. The rear one will involve taking the tailgate interior trim off to secure properly so that will wait till tomorrow. Said trim also rattles so I want to pull it anyway.

Other small and utterly pointless job which will make it look massively disproportionately better will be cleaning up and re-painting the light guards, though I don't think they look as rough in photos as they do in person. Hasn't quite got to the top of the list yet, but it's one I'm looking forward to doing.

The original plate I removed of course didn't get binned, it was added to the ever growing number of them on the walls in the garage.



Funny...from that very specific angle you could almost believe that my garage wasn't an utter disaster area.


The Rover's new washer pump arrived today and was fitted. Not exactly a difficult or exciting job, but it's another box ticked on the to do list at the end of the day.



Thankfully this did restore reliable screen washing every time the control was pressed.



It's nice when a job doesn't snowball for a change.

The fuel pump service kit has also arrived, so hopefully I can now make one good mechanical pump out of 1 3/4 bad ones. We'll see how that goes in due course.

2 mot passes! Congratulations

Zelandeth wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 05, 2024 12:35 am

suffolkpete wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 03, 2024 11:33 am

It has now been renewed I believe. A couple of things struck me since my last post, firstly DVLA must know when the car was built, otherwise it would be on a Q plate. Secondly, Glass's Check Book doesn't cover vehicle which were not officially imported into the UK. I've got the 76-85 book and Trabant is not listed.

It does have the usual "Vehicle was previously registered/used overseas. Declared manufactured 1984." on the front page. Figures that the DVLA are happy with whatever evidence they got for the manufacture date for registration purposes, but won't believe it for changing the tax class. Sounds like business as usual really.

Shouldn't be a problem to get a dating certificate from the owner's club though I'd imagine. -- --

The date on the front page will be accepted, it was for my Matra, however if it was built in 1984 then it will not be eligible for free tax until 1st April 2025.

suffolkpete wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 05, 2024 9:07 am

The date on the front page will be accepted, it was for my Matra, however if it was built in 1984 then it will not be eligible for free tax until 1st April 2025.

Thanks for the clarification. It's always going to be a bit of a struggle I think around here - when I got the Cavalier a couple of years back it took me three post offices to find one who had even the foggiest idea what a tax class even was, much less that they could be changed.

-- -- --

Actually had a bit of a hiccup in the Trabant couple of days back. Was about a mile from home, came to a stop at a junction and found it bogged down when I applied throttle. Was able to coax things back into motion by adding choke, suggesting to me a fuelling issue. I immediately headed for home (which thankfully was mostly downhill so little engine power was needed) with the revs and throttle kept as low as possible. Knowing how quickly a lean condition can become catastrophic in an air cooled two stroke, this wasn't something I was taking chances with. Car was parked up and I grabbed the Partner to continue the tasks I was heading out for. I was working around other appointments at the time so didn't have time to immediately investigate.

Later on I checked the screen in the fuel outlet at the tank (pretty clean), and confirmed there was good fuel flow to the carb. Next step was to pull the cover off the float bowl (which you can *just* do in situ), to confirm the needle and seat were working properly and to see if there was any crud in there.

There was a little bit of sediment in the bottom of the bowl but nothing particularly major. What I don't know (and this does make me kind of wish I'd pulled the carb) was whether there was possibly a bit of water in there as that could definitely have explained it prior to me cleaning it out.

With everything put back together normal service appears to have been resumed. I do need to actually look up a proper diagram for this carb anyway as I'd really like to turn the idle speed up a touch, it has always felt like it's a little on the slow side. Especially if you've got the lights on.

Yesterday I had another crack at changing the gearbox oil. I jacked the car up a bit this time to give me better access to the drain plug, and thankfully successful in getting it freed off this time.

What came out both looked and smelled like absolutely ancient EP90. Which given that the correct HLP68 fluid is a light golden colour isn't great. Definitely well overdue a change either way. A little bit of swarf on the drain plug magnet, but nothing unexpected really (especially given the oil has clearly been in there for a long while) and certainly no chunks.



Here's the magnet once it was wiped off.



Area around the filler was cleaned up to ensure no chunks of anything fell in during refilling.



This filler is normally pretty well buried under the cold and hot air feeds for the heater, though that's no huge hardship given it takes about 90 seconds to pull this lot out of the way.



Given these gearboxes have a freewheel mechanism on 4th, you do really want to keep an eye on the oil quality. Also all the more reason to use the right oil (which while it's a little oddball over here in 2024, HLP68 was apparently a common type in the home market back in the day).

Definitely seems like it's made a worthwhile difference. The synchro on 2nd and 3rd definitely feels like it's having an easier time of things and I *think* it's a bit quieter. All things are relative there though and it still sounds like a tumble drier full of marbles falling down a flight of stairs at idle compared to most modern cars. That's true of pretty much everything on this car in terms of mechanical noise though!

We suffered a major technical failure today.

Okay that might be overselling it a bit. We lost a tail light bulb.



Though admittedly on plenty of modern cars that is a pretty major headache! Takes much more than the five minutes and a flat blade screwdriver needed to replace both on the Trabant.



Really do need to get some paint on that rear panel.

Also, aren't Nissan Qashqais huge?



This car is still very much making me smile every time I see it.

Wot, no updates? Hope you're OK....

Yes I'm beginning to worry! Should we send out a search party??

Quite simply, life has been busy of late and I've had very little opportunity to mess around with car related things over the last couple.of weeks.

Aside from a little bit of investigation of the HVAC system having become a bit noisy on the Partner (it's a bit short on gas I'd say based on the head pressure), both it and the Trabant have just been keeping busy doing normal car things with little noteworthy to report.

The Trabant did end up briefly at the side of the road with the hazards on a couple of days ago - but in a situation surely to confuse passers by, it was there rendering assistance to a broken down vehicle rather than being the broken down vehicle. A lovely guy was having electrical issues with a recently bought van. We were both pretty sure than we'd found the root cause of the problem (loose connection on the battery to alternator connection), but his battery was utterly flat by then. I grabbed the battery out of the Rover and my beefy jump leads, and we were able to get them started up and moved to a safe location to check that things were charging and all seemed normal (they were). After letting the van run for about 20/30 minutes and confirming that the charging system was behaving, that the battery was taking a charge, and that there weren't any other obvious issues like grounding problems or loose connections that could be provoked by wiggling wires, they were sent on their way.

I don't think they had quite expected salvation to rattle up next to them in a cloud of two stroke smoke!

Disclaimer there is that I was in the Trabant when I first stopped to offer assistance and looked things over. I did actually go back with the Partner once I'd stopped off at home to collect tools/battery etc. The logic being that I was trying to get back there quickly, and if we did end up having to do a full jump start, taking the vehicle with the beefiest battery and alternator on the fleet made sense. As it was that wasn't needed as a standalone booster battery did the job. If all else had failed I was keeping dragging the thing out of harm's way in mind as well (as they'd been quoted something daft like five hours as the ETA from the AA), and a tow bar makes that a lot less hassle.

Was nice to be actually able to render assistance on this occasion though, and to have actually been able to render it to someone who was polite and grateful rather than either so clueless as to be a danger to themselves and others or blaming me for their car having broken down!