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Two of these images were categorised since many weeks on the receipt date (2 Jan 2012) of this bot message. The third (uploaded yesterday) had also been categorised since a few minutes after upload. What is it with these dysfunctional "bots"? Charles01 (talk) 10:55, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Charles,
My knowledge about cars is almost none. I got the date from the Dutch registration. I leave it up to you to change whatever you think fit.
Regards,
Alf
Daimler Sovereign Series III March 1983 4235cc[edit]
Hi Charles01. Because you wisely left the licence number on this car I, having doubts, went and looked it up and the DVLA says YBC 897S was first reg 7 April 1978 and has a 5343cc engine. This is so different from your description I wonder if a computerist has mis-matched something? Apologies for re-categorization without recognizing the discord. Will fix following my receipt yr advice. Best regards, Eddaido (talk) 03:07, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You're absolutely right. I usually reckon it's not worth the candle renaming a file simply because I've mis-spelled the name, but this is a bit more than a simple mis-spelling. I'll try and upload it with a new name and apply to have this one deleted. I guess I'd better make sure the brain is re-engaged and the other bits are more or less where they should be first, however.....
Many thanks. I still haven't worked out why it wouldn't work for me, but the objective I had anticipated you have now achieved. Best wishes. Charles01 (talk) 11:28, 27 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Charles 01, have been fiddling with this article and it may now contradict the journal of the Inst of Adv Motorists which I'm unable to view. Is there any chance you could check and amend as necessary? Very best regards, Eddaido (talk) 11:32, 11 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Message received and listed for action. I'm afraid I've not had as much wiki time as I'd like recently, but I guess that's nothing new. I do remember finding the British tax horsepower thing very complicated, and the IAM article didn't necessarily clarify things for me as one (ok, I) would hope. But one needs better sources than distant memory of what my father told me forty years ago. I don't see how calculating the area of a circle and then multiplying by the number of circles should be so complicated. If you've succeeded in simplifying the entry, I'll be happy and wikipedia should be grateful. Brain (mine) not quite in gear yet. I spent too much time in the sun Saturday AND Sunday. A good cause - photographing cars at an old time show - but the today world still swims a bit before my eyes. Charles01 (talk) 10:13, 13 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Charles, I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this designation. Judging from the short front end, the turn signals position high up on the front fender by the windscreen, the chrome strip under the side and rear windows and the wide radiator grille I would say this is a Mercedes-Benz 190b or 190 Db (W121) from 1960 or 1961. I have taken the liberty to move your image to the W121 category. Best regards -- Herranderssvensson (talk) 17:09, 31 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I am not the world expert on this. Other things being equal I would expect you to be correct. My only slight reservation is that I thought I saw a 219 badge on the back of the car. I have never noticed a 219 badge on the back of any Mercedes before so I was surprised. Anyhow (1) if I ever see the car again I will try and photograph the back of it and (2) I appreciate that it is easy to put the "wrong" badge on the back of a car. Anyhow, you clearly have more relevant expertise than I do and for that reason I am about 90% convinced! Thanks for putting in the corrections. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 19:08, 31 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hello again Charles! There’s a great web site called mbzponton.org, covering almost everything regarding the Ponton model. If you want to really “dig deep” into MB Ponton history, that’s the place to start. Best regards -- Herranderssvensson (talk) 08:01, 1 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I found this picture of a Spanish-registered Marcos GT, sans roof. Is this a factory car or did someone have the (probably expensive) rear windshield smashed and simply cut off the roof in response? Any clues? Cheers as usual, mr.choppers (talk)-en-05:59, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Short answer: I don't know.
But speculation is free. It is certainly very rare. I've lived in England more than not in the last 50 years. These Marcoses first appeared (with a Volvo 1800 engine) in the 1960s and since then they've been back on the market off and on whenever someone has come along to dig the business out of insolvency. They're eye catching and when one goes past I notice it. But I never noticed a cabriolet one. So I would GUESS it's a one-off. However, if the thing is built around a steel frame, I'm not sure any of the external body panels is load bearing. Certainly at the front the bonnet/hood comprises the entire front section of the car and tips forwards as on a Triumph Spitfire. The Triumph had a separate chassis: as far as I know the Marcos didn't, but if it had a meccano-style steel frame designed to carry non-load bearing fibre-glass body panels as a sort of skin on the outside, maybe it wouldn't be such a massive job to cut a hole in the roof and fit a strong metal horizontal bar of some sort somewhere near the back window to address any loss of rigidity in the sub-frame.
It's a cool car in either case. I just looked more carefully at the Marcos rear window, is that a front windshield from some other car that is put to work at the wrong end? Hm. mr.choppers (talk)-en-18:22, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Cool? Yes, I think I agree. There's something appealing about a design where one gets the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the design was penned and finalised fairly early on, and after that the engineers were told to adapt the working parts to the style rather than vice versa. And of course with these small volume cars there's much less pressure from the production engineers to change things so the car is easier to produce as you push it down some production line. And moulded "fibre glass" (or similar) panels could readily be formed into a much more diverse range shapes than sheet steel using heavy presses, especially back then.
There’s a link at the foot of the English language Marcos entry to the UK Marcos owners’ club website. I tried before to send them a question (your question) about this picture, but I don’t seem to have uploaded/installed the appropriate kind of Outlook Express since the last time (courtesy of a hard disc failure) I upgraded and I can’t send wiki-emails and I couldn’t be bothered with all the cutting and pasting and…. But they might have an answer on all this if you are sufficiently moved to contact them.
I think it slightly unlikely that a front windscreen would turn up as a rear window at this time, though as ever I reserve the right to be wrong. Windscreens presumably needed to be made of harder glass which, especially with the recent arrival from the US of a trend for curved windscreens, would have involved extra cost and weight. I don’t know if laminated screens had been invented back then, but if they had they were horrendously expensive to fit in cars, even in the early 1970s when I remember they started to appear on the options lists of mass market models (well, Volkswagens…). Windscreens on mainstream cars in the UK instead had a “toughened zone” which you could see as a slightly discoloured large section in the centre of the screen if you looked sideways and the light was in the right place. The idea was that when a stone chip shattered the windscreen the cracks on the toughened bit were further apart from each other than on the rest of the screen so you could still see through it enough to coast inelegantly to the side of the road before pushing the shattered glass out, trying to avoid too much of it landing in the footwell. Too much info? Probably. But I’m just wondering why you’d pay extra for a toughened glass front screen in the back window at a time when money was still (after the bankrupting effects on the UK of the Second World War) very tight and in a car where weight was to be minimized, especially above waist level. A lot of heavy glass high up in a car body can have a seriously disturbing impact on the handling, as they discovered when they had to widen the track, as a final pre-launch modification, on the nice airy cabined Volkswagen K-70 after they’d decided to abort its launch as an NSU. Best wishes Charles01 (talk)
I was thinking that using a perhaps more expensive front windshield would still be lots cheaper than making a special window. Anyhoo, a close reading of page 5 of this document (interesting) I reckon it's a fairly simple piece of glass made for Marcos - so much for my theorizing. mr.choppers (talk)-en-07:36, 19 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for sharing this. I agree it's interesting.
I couldn't remember why I thought the car was built around a metal frame with non-loadbearing light weight most likely "fibre-glass" or sim panels on the outside. I still can't (remember). Guess I must have read it somewhere. Anyhow, the diagram of what the assembly manual calls a chassis looks to me more like a fully fledged subframe than anything I would think of as a chassis. So I guess I was broadly right.
As you no doubt spotted, on page 11 (well, there are no page numbers printed on the document, but this is the page than my pdf document ended up calling Page 11) there's a little para headed "Hood fitting details (Spyder only)" which I guess points to the most likely explanation in respect of your original question on this. (Tho of course there's nothing in the availability of a factory built cabriolet kit to rule out the possibility of other folks simply doing a retro-fit conversion on an originally standard - ie closed coupe - bodied version.) These days the mass marketeers sell quite a lot of cabriolet versions in the UK of their Fords and Peugeots and Vauxhall/Opels, but back then the Brits of that generation had spotted that most of the time they suffered from lousy weather, and cabriolets here were pretty rare (aside from designs unashamedly targetted on the US exports by MG and Triumph) in the 1960s and 70s, so maybe the reason I never noticed one in the UK is simply that they shipped the ones they did make to warmer countries. When was "back then"? I didn't get all forensic about it, but I didn't find a year of publication on the assembly instructions document. BUT to my subjective eye it has a rather quaint old fashioned look to it from here in 2012, and (less subjectively) the way the UK telephone numbers are set out suggests that it was produced before 1990. I would guess quite some time before 1990. Best Charles01 07:42, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
The Mantula was introduced in 1984, the Mantula Spyder in 1986 (but that's a full convertible, no door frames). The telex number (oh-so quaint - I work for a lady who had to fire all the telex operators in her company in one day, after switching to fax machines) on the front page would certainly imply mid-eighties. mr.choppers (talk)-en-19:43, 21 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Image Cropping 1939 Opel Kapitän, Owner Arild Nilssen who, as his lady companion wear matching attire cropped to highlight the car[edit]
In principle I agree to cropping the picture to emphasize the car, however, I do not like the cut-off spectators' heads. There is plenty of space in front (lower part of picture) of the car with no information content whatsoever. Don't worry about the "privacy rights" of the spectators. They are in a public place and constitute a crowd (by local, i.e. Norwegian standards), so they cannot object, and I need no waivers. Regards Stein_s (talk) 01:55, 8 November 2012 (GMT)
Yes, I guess it would be better with a bit more of the people and a bit less of the road. I'll take another look when time permits. You are correct that - without really thinking about it very much - I do tend to avoid human faces of folks I never met when uploading pictures of cars. (Though I don't remember anyone ever having complained about appearing in the background of a car picture I'd uploaded.) That's a bigger - or at least different albeit related - conversation, though. Regards and thanks again for contributing a super picture of the Opel. Charles01 (talk) 06:51, 8 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
