I'm pretty new to this Austin 7 lark, but the reading-up I have done doesn't show this as a body type anywhere in the records or resources on the subject.
Car it's off is an AH Tourer (apparently) from 1932, that spent a fair length of time in Gibraltar and has only recently come back to the UK. I was expecting it to read AH something....
10-03-2019, 02:55 PM (This post was last modified: 10-03-2019, 02:55 PM by Mike Costigan.)
Once again we see that relying on these body codes as a means of identification is potentially flawed. As far as I am aware the AK prefix does not appear in any Austin records, but here we have an example, so they clearly exist(ed). Presumably the AH series ran out of numbers, so the factory continued with the AK series - probably without official sanction, only to be swiftly replaced by the Ruby-fronted AAK and equally swiftly forgotten!
10-03-2019, 03:34 PM (This post was last modified: 10-03-2019, 03:35 PM by PedigreeChummy.)
Yes, true, Mike. The more I look into this, the more it seems to be true that it was all rather haphazard...
We live in a world of matching-numbers classics now, all tied in to silly asking prices, inflated auction estimates and the like... add to that the modern propensity to write-off a car rather than repair it, due to cost of electronics etc. not being economically viable, and we tend to forget that in days gone by cars were repaired, updated, modified and the like usually by the owner himself... interchangeable parts across models as upgrades etc.... All part of the history of the car....
Anyway, this quest of mine was purely for foreign registration purposes, and I think it'll all go through, so happy days! On the road soon enough doing what they were designed for.... being driven!
1. can someone one with an AAK confirm what stamp prefix letters are used please... and
2. it does beg the question of whether anyone ever found evidence of an AJ!
I think its likely to be a mis-stamp. How could they have run out of AH numbers? The latest one would be just +1, surely.
10-03-2019, 06:59 PM (This post was last modified: 10-03-2019, 07:06 PM by PedigreeChummy.)
Call me a hopeless romantic, but I like the idea of some fella on the 1932 production line regaling his work colleagues with how he nearly sh*t himself watching Boris Karloff in "The Mummy" at The Regal over the weekend, as he goes to get an "H" out of the box of stamps, mistakenly picking out a "K" with half an eye on the well-oily-thumbed Marlene Dietrich calendar next to the stamp bench, taking it over to the Tourer he's working on, giving it a sharp tap with the heavyweight hammer that's a veteran of over 100,000 whacks, only to discover his mistake... then he thinks "b*llocks to it, nobody will notice until 2019... what's on at the flicks next weekend, and will I get Rita from accounts to fool around with me on the back row again...?"
(10-03-2019, 06:36 PM)JonE Wrote: ... How could they have run out of AH numbers? The latest one would be just +1, surely.
My thinking was perhaps the stamp holder would only hold, say, three numbers, so when they got to AH999, for example, they would need to go to a new prefix, but I see the highest AH number on the register is in the mid-2,500s, so clearly that doesn't apply. This AK number is a very low number, so they have obviously started a new sequence, so presumably not a mistake ...
