Johnny said:
always look on the bright side, eh? :lol:
BUT... i admit your are 100% correct.
cheers :mrgreen:
the ongoing development of my bus is one of my great passions... i AM trying to do it a bit differently to the norm, hence
another of my resons not to want to start a photo thread, and i'm also trying to do it 100% legally, and despite presumptions made elsewhere i do fully intend to get it back on the road (literally) one day... in the meantime i'm building it, for me, and i'll be gutted if changes forced on me by others are the thing that stop me, rather than any of my own shortcomings.
my fear, and i'm deadly serious when i say this, is that i'll have a half re-engineered half spread about the house and its surrounding environs bus on the day that they legislate 'us' out of the game.
possibly only in the last decade, certainly since we started a family, have i become more aware of the very slow but very real changes in legislation towards all sorts of things, the rules and regs surrounding the care of children being the ones i'm possibly most well up to speed on, if you put my passion for vehicular modification to one side for the moment.
we have a constant 'battle' with parents complaining about changes to the provision of care for their kids, but of course it's not us making the rules, we just have to abide by them, or ofsted close us down... indeed there will soon be a major upheaval in the day to day running of one setting within this small town, simply because changes to legislation due in 2010 means that they have to all intents and purposes 'outgrown' the building where they have been based for decades... shit will hit the fan, but that's irrelevant in a discussion about cars i suppose :roll:
i remember seeing a comedy routine from years ago about how basically the very idea of us owning and maintaining our own cars is nonsensical really... and how the idea of us being able to pull into a garage and brandish about a hose capable of delivering very quickly very large quantities of a carcinogenic, highly flammable liquid with no formal training or certification whatsoever, whilst relying upon a small laminated sign to stop us sparking up a cheroot whilst we're filling up is a bit far-fetched nowadays, especially considering when i do voluntary work in the local community cafe for instance i have to have basic fire safety training not to mention food hygiene certification, just for being legally able to slice a tomato.
factor into that the fact that we're then able to propel them towards other, similarly qualified road users at closing speeds of up to 140 MPH with sometimes mere inches between the two cars and you soon realise that these are the tail-end of some pretty halcyonic days, but they won't last forever.
the 'incident' that was all over the news and the forums where the guy had modified his land rover and it'd gone wrong and wiped out his family was catastrophically sad. makes me want to cry just thinking about it, but a small part of me winced for a different reason when i heard the story, because every case like that is another nail in the coffin (no pun or any disrespect intended) of the home-modifier.
when i was growing up i used to visit a stock car track every other sunday, and i cried when the bastard council closed it down in '76. i've also always wondered what it would have been like to have watched racing at another fabled northern track that closed in '79, but the truth is, from piecing memories and old photographs together, there's NO WAY those tracks, even if they hadn't had to close prematurely when they did, would still have been going today, in the current climate of what joe public blames on 'health & safety' and calls the 'nanny state'.
i would strongly advise anybody considering modifying a car, even if it is only changing the exhaust, to study vehicle regs and stick to their guidelines, and to take the MoT test very seriously, rather than as a mild irritant which needs to be circumnavigated every 12 months, because if we don't before too long we'll have that privilege taken out of our hands, and do we really all want to be driving around in ford mondeo clones ?
yeah, well, don't say you weren't warned
