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.