Monday 31 January 2022
The cars of Douglas Glover (4)
Thursday 27 January 2022
Faded beauty: a Mini Margrave in Italy
Palmer Caputo of Rome is a great Mini enthusiast who built a number of luxuriously equipped Minis for the Italian market under the Palmerspeed name. He told me many years ago he also owned a Wood & Pickett Mini Margrave and I have been pestering him about that ever since. And so it was a great surprise when last year he finally sent me some pictures of the car!
The blue Margrave is fully deseamed and comes with ivory leather interior but - it must be said - is looking pretty sorry for itself, too. Palmer added: "It is necessary to make a complete restoration because it has many rust problems!" It is registered 'PGP 920Y', which tells us it is based on a 1979 Austin Mini with 1275cc power. Colour scheme and some details make it look quite similar to Elton John's car, but that was registered 'NOB 209M', which surely has to make that a different car..? Who knows more about this faded beauty?
UPDATE 14:00 - Jens Christian Lillelund writes: "Elton John's car was scrapped many many years ago - great shame he gave it away in a raffle. The glass fiber wheel arches survived on another coachbuilt Mini - not sure were the rest ended up? Some hoarder or on a fake car - who knows..?"
Tuesday 25 January 2022
Status 365 - let's register them
Friday 21 January 2022
Mystery Mini derivative (80)
Thursday 20 January 2022
Mick Jagger's Mini Margrave - shrouded in myth
Monday 17 January 2022
The cars of Alexander Fraser: Lion buses and more
Over to the third (and last for now) installment about Alexander 'Sandy' Fraser's vehicles, with some more great inventiveness from Lincolnshire. For Frazer didn't just build the AF Spider (click here) and Grand Prix (click here), there was quite a lot more. It started with a fire engine loosely based on a 1934 vehicle and built for children's rides. I don't have any pictures of that, but I understand it was used for many years "And to the best of my knowledge it is still doing just that!", Sandy told me in 2009. Who knows it goes even on today?
The fire engine was followed by a steam engine but things become of interest here with the build of a 1928 Hants & Dorset Leyland Lion PLSC3 single deck bus, made by Fraser in an approximate 5/8 scale. This was powered by a Mini engine and used as the Fraser's family transport for a number of years! Taking it out with the family must have been something and it proved to be such a hit that several more similar vehicles were made. The next four were open topped Leyland G-type double deckers of which Fraser had used a picture as the only reference. There was also a model of the B-type double decker as built by the London General Omnibus Company in 1910. A hybrid of the two types of buses followed, too.
But there was also a WW1 RAF Leyland truck and this came in a slightly larger scale then the previous 5/8 projects. Last in line was a duo of miniature AEC Matadors. Sandy said: "Quite a small scale, but boy, could they pull! This was down to a 1275cc Mini type engine, very low gearing and 4-wheel drive" Yes - four-wheel-drive! I'd love to see how that worked.
Last but perhaps not least I've had some comments about the picture credits used in my previous Alexander Fraser articles, and hope to have amended these now to anyone's approval. I must add though that back in 2009, when I visited Sandy Fraser to photograph one of his cars and interview him for Maximum Mini 2, he was kind enough to let me copy much of his own files and photographs and so that is how they came into my possession. It goes for the pictures copied in below too.