Tag: nova

Paperwork

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I would like to think that my posts are positive to read, maybe informative, sometimes make you smile and above all they make you want you to come back for more. There is usually an exception to any rule, and I can say I need to have a rant just to get it out of my system so I can move on and just put it all down to one of life’s little trials, if this is all I have to moan about then i am a lucky guy really.

Because I have had such a nightmare with all this registration process, I have tried to provide a user guide for importing a used car from the USA, paying the import duties, taxes and first registration here in the UK. The are screen shots, live links and examples on how to fill in the forms. Both the links are below or can be found under the “Articles” Menu above.

Importing a car from the USA – Part 1 (Tax & Duties) or click here for the link

Importing a car from the USA  – Part 2 (DVLA registration) or click here for the link

The full story:

When the wife gave me the money to purchase the car over four years ago I didn’t realise the most frustrating part of the whole restoration project was trying to get it on the road legally with all the correct paper work, which as it turned out I didn’t have. In my case the car was imported into the UK via a USAF service man while stationed over here at an Airbase. He bought over his car with him and used it for a number of years before he returned back to the USA leaving the car here which eventually ended up in the hands of the guy I bought it from. The car was on his Virginia plates when I purchased it which didn’t matter as the car was a bit of mess to put it mildly as I knew it had to be UK registered. To cut a potentially long story down the car was fully restored and an MOT issued for being road legal.

The next step is notify our Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), who in theory would issue me with UK registration plates. Part of this process involves filling in a form and supplying the insurance, MOT and ownership papers if you have them. I called them to request the appropriate paperwork and things went down hill from there. A call handler who couldn’t handle going to sleep without getting confused, said “I had to download the form from the website somewhere”. Thanks for that then, Not. I was trying not trouble Adam at Mustang Maniac and do it myself, but things were getting frustrating so I called Adam who explained I needed a few things and went on to explain it all to me. When a car is imported to the UK permanently you have to pay import duties and taxes to our government (who seem to rinse you of money no matter what you do). This confirmation of all duties paid is called a Notification Of Vehicle Arrival or NOVA. I was shown what they look like and sadly confirmed that I needed to get one. Sadly the car has never been officially imported which I was unaware of at the time, partly due to my ignorance I guess at the time of the sale.

The first step was to get this NOVA certificate and I was told to email a particular government department who responded with a form to fill in. I needed to supply import codes and details of the car. This was unbelievable task on the website as there are codes for literally everything. Eventually finding what I thought were the codes, I replied to HMRC (Her Majesty Revenue & Customs). These guys were very efficient and within a few days forwarded me another form to confirm what I had sent them and asked some additional questions. I completed the form and sent it back and within a few more days they confirmed the codes and invoice for Import Duties and the VAT owing. I paid the invoice and they send me back the critical Nova certificate. The car was now in the country, officially. So far so good and things were going well.

Back to the dregs of the gene pool where I filled in another form as before. This time I called up to say that I wanted to keep the original USA ownership certificate, just to keep with the car for provenance if you like. Now on the paperwork it does say that all paperwork must be the originals. So I wanted to see just how rigid this rule was, I was told that “a photocopy would be OK”. Two weeks later the form was rejected as I “hadn’t supplied the original ownership certificate”. So again I called up the department who told me “I should have supplied the original and nobody would have told me that a photocopy would be acceptable”. They then said that “if I supplied the original and put a covering letter in to say that wanted the original cert back it would be returned with the new registration certificate”, great I thought. So another form was filled in exactly the same as before, because I had to resubmit the application. Getting wise to these idiots i had ordered the forms in bulk from the website just in case. I wrote them a letter and sent it all back to the DVLA to the now christened “Devious Vile Losers Association”. They eventually sent me back the new registration documents and confirmation of the License plate. Brilliant, so the car is now registered in the UK and officially all paid up.

Wait, what is this in the returned pack? The original MOT, insurance certificate, NOVA form and lousy PHOTOCOPY of the ownership certificate. Not happy now. I called them up and they said “nobody would ever have said that to me, it wouldn’t have come back to me as they are sent back to the USA”. So there you have it; I have been lied to twice, and when I argued with them, they called me the liar. This is the best bit; I also received a separate letter from them posted the day before to say “they had made a mistake and sent the documents to the wrong address”. WTF? So they want me to try to track down a letter they sent to the wrong address. Now somebody else has ALL my vehicle and personal details. What a bunch of incompetent, self righteous, sellf important idiots they are. They did however send me a pre printed envelope to return the incorrect certificate, I would still have to put a stamp on it though. that makes is all OK then – I don’t think so.

Sometimes you are just better of just letting it go, but it winds me up big time. If I had told the losers that I didn’t have the ownership certificate and wrote a letter to say I own the car, I could have kept the original ownership certificate from Virginia USA. That will teach me for being honest and upfront in future with these people. I should have lied like they did to me. However, I have scanned images of their rejected forms and letters to me, so if they (DVLA) want me to prove any of this, I can. They want a perfect application from me, but they can’t even get my address correct.

So, with the new UK registration V5 form in my hand I could order the registration plates, (see previous posts). Now my car is on the road officially and I own it officially. In total all the back and forth with the DVLA it took me almost two months. The DVLA has to be the worst government department I have had the displeasure to try to deal with.

So that’s the rant over and I hope you can see why i need to get it of my chest. I feel better now, I will reread this again to see if I still feel the same in the morning. I can now put all this behind me and just get on with enjoying my car.

Next day 27th February 2016:

Yep, I still hate the department after reading all that again, I’m sad to admit that though. 🙁

 

On another note my car was taken on a long run yesterday, of hundred and twenty miles to be exact. Where to? Mustang Maniac of course. The journey was for two reasons, one to settle the car down on a long run, two I could have her checked over when I get there. I met up with Paul AKA “Lob Monster” just before we turned of to go to the country lanes to MM. The weekend cycle club were riding in the middle of the road, being their usual selfish selves and riding two abreast on the narrow roads. We turned up at the yard in a cool convoy, all be it only two cars making enough noise for a dozen cars. I love Flowmaster exhausts! The neutral disconnect or inhibitor switch needed a little bit of adjusting as the car would only start in the “N” neutral position sometimes, realignment was made and all is well again. Paul then checked the rear brake pads and adjusted them up for me. Now a few miles had now been put on them and should now have bedded in a bit. My car at the MM yard before the journey home. Thanks Paul (Lob Monster) for your help. Thanks to Adam for letting me pinch a ramp and move a few cars around so it could be sorted out.

The journey there and back was great, people driving past giving the thumbs up to me, lots of passengers in cars looking and somebody even taking a photo on the way home. I just love this car a no other car has ever made me feel like I do in it. Now I have an excuse to clean and polish the car again, oh well. 😀

Forgive my little rant and a long read, but next week I will make up for it as I am working on a largish post where I have all the before and after comparison photo’s. I’m enjoying putting that post together although it has taken a while to sort out the date order and trying to find similar angles before and after.

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I’m back! I know I haven’t posted for a while, but it has only been one month to the day in fact, yet when I see that last post “Merry Christmas..” it seems like forever ago, or is it just me? There is not a lot of things I can post about the car at the moment for very good reasons as it’s all behind the scenes, so more of that in bit though.

As you probably remember in November last year my car was at a Classic Car show in Birmingham on the Mustang Owners Club Of Great Britain exhibition stand. The club has its own magazine called “Round Up” for the club members and they ran an article on the show. My car had a few nice photo’s taken of it and me cleaning it. I’m Sure they won’t mind me posting them here.

I was well pleased when I saw this spread I must say. 😀

The Car Update:

Any vehicle that is permanently imported into the UK needs to have Duty and Tax paid. Unaware at the time when I bought the car this was the case I am unable to register my car for the UK roads because the car has not paid any import duty. Needless to say I wasn’t very impressed with finding this out. But, I put it down to a learning experience now, but I would like to have a conversation with the bloke who sold it to me though. It turns out that in order to put a UK registration plate on the car you need to fill in paper work, lots of paperwork. In the near future once this nightmare is all sorted out, I intend to post an article on how to do it with a step by step process as I go through it. There will be all sorts of useful links where I can find them and hopefully this will help with other people in the same situation.

The first step is to pay the Import Duty and VAT (Value Added Tax) on the car. There are literally hundreds of different categories for items to be imported and choose from. I have been given a helping hand by Mustang Maniac on how to do it all. Once the duties are paid you will get a “NOVA” (Notification Of Vehicle Arrival) certificate. This will state that <said> vehicle has had all import Tax and Duties paid on it. From there on you can fill in more forms to request a registration plate and pay more money for the plate to go on the car. So far to date I have been granted my “NOVA” certificate with all fees paid in full. This single document now becomes a critical part of the vehicle’s history for the UK. I am now waiting for the response from our Government department, DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) who are responsible for issuing the registration plates for the UK. Some time soon I will be given an official licence registration number allocated to my car. Then I can pay more money with all my paper work to get a “Registration Plate” or badge if you like made up to put on the car.

For obvious reasons I won’t say too much at the moment as it’s all ongoing. But once it has all be completed and I am able to get the car on the road legally, I will do a full update article on what and how it all works.

In the mean time I have been playing in the garage and looking for things to do apart from polishing the car again. I have many left over parts from the restoration, they were either broken, worn out, bits missing from them, burnt out or cosmetically damaged. I found in a box the right hand side fender badge. The pins on the back were broken off and the chrome was pitted and looked rough. I cleaned it up and had an idea for a use for it. Obviously it couldn’t have gone on the car as the paint had come off and I only had one of the pair. So, I bought some model enamel paints as close as I could get to the Mustang Tri Bar colours.

I painted the badge and it came out pretty good. I could have done it a little neater but I was more interested in the colour match at the time. However, all this messing around is all for a good reason; the badge on the AirCon unit has rubbed of a bit which has the ford Tri Bar colours on it. So now this painted test piece looks OK, I paint the tiny logo in the car as well now. As always I shall bring pictures of it when I get round to doing it.

I bought some sticky magnetic tape to stick on the back just to see how it would cope and look.

Then I found something to stick it on, my Blue-Point service cart.

I do believe I now have a unique Limited Edition 1 of 1 tool cart. I think it looks pretty good, and the best bit is that I can move it around and stick it to anything metal I want and it will become a 3D Mustang badged merchandise. I may even get some more of these emblems from the next car jumble show I go to.

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Photos of Enfield Pageant 2013

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25th – 27th May 2013 Enfield Pageant

Busy weekend for me as I paid a well deserved visit down to the Enfield Pageant. I was given my day pass out to play on my own, the good lady wife even gave me some “pocket money” and a couple of drinks to take. The journey took just over an hour and half to get there and I left early to get there before the rush. Wrong! The world and his mate was there. It was a big car park field next to the event field itself. I was certain I was going to lose the car, so I set my phone GPS app to pinpoint my car location and saved it for future reference to get home. I was still full of cold but the excitement was overtaking the misery of the sniffing all the way down there. I paid my money to get and started the walk around. There were hundreds of stalls there with everything from flower pots to front bumpers, toilet cisterns to track rod ends. Why would anybody want to see a toilet cistern at a car rally? Come to that, why take it there to sell it? It worked obviously, because somebody was walking around with it like a new-born baby cuddled to their chest! Anyway the tables had all sorts of things on therefrom tools to tins of car paint, and rear lights to front wings. It was mostly UK stuff there but it was impressive display no less. In my enthusiasm when I got there I started to Tweet a few pics of the cars. I obviously forgot the time difference to this side of the pond to the USA. Sorry If I woke anybody up. But hey, it was worth it. Hover the mouse over the pics and little box should appear with some quick details for you.

Lights
Random bits
boxes of carburetor
Exhaust
Fenders or wings.

British:

I saw many British old cars there such as old Austins, MG’s, Minis, Jaguars: a couple of gorgeous E-types, various Fords: Escorts, Anglia & even a Jensen Interceptor. The Ford Anglia is my very earliest memory of driving in a car, My late Grandfather owned a grey one just like this and the memories flooded back. I remember chuckling and giggling like mad when we went over a bump. The bench seat in the back would make us fly up in the air! Couldn’t do that sort of thing now days.

Ford Anglia
Austin
Ford Consul
Ford Consul
E-Type Jaguar
E-Type Soft and hard tops
MK1 Capri
MK3 Capri
Escort RS2000
Ford Escort
Jensen Interceptor
MG
Mini – one was owned by a lady!

Exotic:

There was the exotic Ferrari or two, one bloke was standing there with a big gold medallion open shirt next to his Ferrari, when I got near his car he got ready for me to take his picture – err. no! So sorry folks, I reserve the right not to have pictures of that sort on here. lol. There was an interesting v8 bike that looked pretty awesome that started up and drowned the music out. There was a Pontiac Dragster that had BIG bottles of NOS inside it and some pretty heft fuel lines! The Hot Rod pics I took just for my friend Debbie at http://hoodscoop03.wordpress.com/

Ferrari
Ferrari v8
v8 bike!
Hot Rod
Pontiac Dragster with NOS!

Vans:

There was some vans that had amazing paint jobs on them. Then the went a ruined it by hanging dolls out the back in a cage just like the film it was named after – Pirates of the Caribbean. Was it over the top, bit of fun or tacky? I thought the later as the van’s paint was incredible.

Doll in a cage!
Pirates of the Caribbean

American Cars:

This is what I was hoping for and I was not disappointed. We had Chargers, Oldsmobile, Pontiacs, Mustangs, Chevys, Trucks all sorts in fact. Perhaps somebody could give me an idea as what some of these are and I will add the details to the pics.  Please feel free to correct me as I am starting to learn the cars.

F150?
’57 Ford Thunderbird
Pontiac
Plymouth 353
Oldsmobile Catalina
Chevy Nova
Corvette Stingray
in order Fairlane, Camaro, Camaro Z28
Dodge Charger
Cadillac Sedan DeVille
King of the fin?
Buick Eight

Best till last? – The Mustangs:

I found Mustang Maniac and I was impressed with the Motorhome they had to speak to potential customers and existing customers. I was treated to a Sausage sandwich when I got there, Thanks for that Adam. The guys were there Terry, John & Adam. I got speaking to a guy called Yogi, unusual name but he has been reading my blog. Now he has a face to the “man” with a Mustang. 🙂 Moving swiftly along then, Adam did indeed get the Indy 500 hundred Pace Car out for the first time in three years so I am told. The pace car understandably had a constant stream of people looking at her. There were Mustang Maniac customer cars there too, one guy called Martin even drove up from Stockport to support Adam at the show with his ’67 Fastback. His car was a bit of a head turner to say the least. Mustang Maniac has a full set of Photo’s from the day and has updated his blog with some new pictures too. Quick link to his blog http://mustangmaniac.org/

The only ’64 Indy pace car in Europe
Mustang ’66 GT Factory Fastback
’67 GT390 & Rare T5
’67 Fastbacks
Mustang ’67 GT 390 side vents
Mustang ’67 GT 390
’67 Fastback
’67 Fastback
’67 Fastback
’67 Fastback
’65 Convertible
T5

Other Mustangs around the show:

There was this signed ’68 with all sorts of names all over it. I don’t know why but it looked amazing. Unfortunately I couldn’t quite get the pictures to work with the ’68 Bullitt car, they had a dummy inside holding a cigarette with a face mask on of Paul Newman. Shame it didn’t come out.

signed Mustang
The man himself who started it all. The late Carroll Shelby.
The ’68 Bullitt & Dodge charger

Other Views:

The advantage of getting there early, you can see a lot of the cars coming in. When this picture was taken the place was just starting to fill up. A lot of the cars were dirty from their journey down and a some frantic cleaning and polishing was going on. along with topping up of fluids and head scratching!

An early morning view.

When the show was getting late I decided to go home and you’re wondering if I found the car? The app was perfect and I was directed to the car within feet of it. The funny thing was my car was all on its on own, and I spotted it yards away. But I wanted to test the app regardless. I was asked what did I buy with my pocket money? I purchased some Imperial small stubby spanners, some cans of spray primer & some Redex. The journey home was a real pain, there was a major traffic jam on the M25 motorway and everything ground to a halt. I was sitting in the traffic and hot, I didn’t care to much as I was still glowing over the cars I had seen and new friends I spoken too. After a few minutes we crept forward and I decided to turn off the motorway. The SatNav was havin’ a mental and wanted me to “Turn around when possible”.  I reset the route home from the little town I was in and the trip home was through some glorious countryside in the evening sun. Maybe next year I could be in my Mustang, maybe, just maybe. I got home without any trouble thanks to the SatNav and to add to my cold I do believe I got a touch of hay fever too. Mind you I couldn’t tell the difference between the cold and the hay fever. But I do say the sun done me the world of good, not to mention the smell of old car, burning oil and rust metal that also helped. The advantage to an old car rally? I was standing next to bloke he was buying a top hose to his ’60’s mini, it had blown on the way to the pageant, he was chuffed as he was going back to his car to change it and drive home again. Just how cool is that?

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