This is a carefully researched, definitive guide to specialist and self-build British cars from 1945 to 1960. The post war period to 1960 saw an amazing number of specialist cars produced in Britain – Very Highly Recommended
NAME: British Specialist Cars, Specials & Kits 1945-1960, Definitive A-Z Encyclopedia of Low-Volume British Sports Cars FILE: R2903 AUTHOR: Chris Rees PUBLISHER: Quiller Print BINDING: hard back PAGES: 152 PRICE: £35.00 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: Post war auto mobiles, DIY cars, Kit cars, sports cars, station wagons, vans, saloon cars, self-build cars, fibre glass, glass reinforced plastic, cold moulded, budget motoring, race cars, road capable race cars, Ford donor vehicles, Austin donor vehicles
ISBN: 978-0-992665-1-2-8
IMAGE: B2903.jpg BUYNOW: http://tinyurl.com/y6myzvet LINKS: DESCRIPTION: This is a carefully researched, definitive guide to specialist and self-build British cars from 1945 to 1960. The post war period to 1960 saw an amazing number of specialist cars produced in Britain – Very Highly Recommended The period up to World War One saw a relatively slow growth in automobile use in the UK. The 1911 Lucas Road Atlas remarked that the road from Aberdeen to Inverness was usually open to motor vehicles in the summer. This was typical of much of Britain where canal and railway building had taken the focus from road building. After World War One there was a faster increase in car ownership but it was still largely confined to the wealthy and to commercial vehicles. Once more, war took manufacturing away from building civilian vehicles, with factories turned over to producing aircraft and military vehicles but many more people learned to drive during war service. The result was that 1945 saw a growing appetite for motorbike and car ownership but a distinct shortage of available vehicles, most of which were war surplus jeeps and staff cars. The cost of new cars was high and few non-military vehicles were available on the used vehicle market. The specialist cars stepped into this void and an amazing number of designs became available. Many of these sold less than one hundred copies, some only one or two examples, and the high selling designs rarely exceeded fifteen hundred. Some of these vehicles were designed as race cars and few were suitable for modification to road capable. Initially, bodies were built in metal, often aluminium, which was in surplus after 1945 with aircraft production falling dramatically, in mild steel and wood. The most popular vehicles tended to be open topped two seaters. It has to be said that more than a few designs were truly ugly and the safety and performance sometimes left much to be desired. To save money, home builders often bought a donor vehicle from a scrapyard. That sometimes provided the chassis and most of the mechanical components, requiring only a body, and the availability of glass fibre meant that new, and often very attractive, body shells could be moulded relatively easily and cheaply. Increasingly suppliers began to also provide chassis, either repaired chassis or built replacements for Ford and Austin chassis. The most advanced specials increasingly used space frames of steel tube in custom chassis construction. As the industry developed, a few suppliers offered complete kits of parts, chassis and body shell, allowing a high quality and very attractive copy of a Porsche 2+2 to be built for a fraction of the cost of a new Porsche. Some of these original specialist car builders and kit suppliers survived on past the 1960s, developing niche markets that could still compete with the huge increase in volume produced cars of increasing sophistication and reducing real cost