isetta

If the fault is intermittent you should be able to turn it off if the fault is not being faulty at that point in time, but it will come back on when the intermittent fault arises again. I assume you just want it off for the mot and don’t care if the airbag won’t actually work . I’m not criticising you for that as not all cars (eg old ones) have airbags anyway and I would still drive one of those.

No reason why you should have gone to a Ford dealer unless you just wanted to spend extra money.

I believe it is based on date of manufacture if you can prove what it is. It gets messy if the vehicle is mot exempt but not yet tax free. Eg my motorbike VFG630Y. 40 yrs from date of first reg was last august, but it’s not tax free until 01 April 2023. I can’t tax it on line as it says it needs a mot, I phoned dvla, they said I can only tax it at post office and complete mot exemption form. But it still looks to the police like it’s mot is expired. Red warning on dvla website. As I understand it, on 01 April 2023 it is tax exempt and I can get it altered to Historic tax class. I think that makes it show properly as mot exempt perhaps. They don’t make it easy.

I don’t think you will be able to persuade dvla unless you are suggesting it was registered and used somewhere else (eg another country) earlier than the registration date on the v5. I am aware it says 40 years old so in theory should be from date it was made and not date of registration. In case you are not aware, the tax is not free at 40 years old. Tax is free on 01 April in the year AFTER the car’s 40th birthday. So if a car becomes 40 yrs old on 01 March 2023, it is now mot exempt but it’s not tax exempt until 01 April 2024, more than a year away. I know this because I had a vehicle which I thought had become tax exempt and dvla explained this to me. It’s on their website.

Is fuel getting into the cylinders? Eg do spark plugs get wet?

Changing the exhaust was a silly idea but I am 60 years old so I would say that wouldn’t I.

I don’t know the answer. But I am wondering if you can use that micro bore copper pipe on a roll put can be used for house plumbing . Fairly easy to bend I think. Never tried it myself. And the use wider rubber pipe on the joins.

I thought the bit where it suggests you show the policeman a ferry ticket as evidence a bit laughable. Do ferry tickets show reg no? I don’t know , I haven’t taken a car on a cross channel ferry for 35 years. But I suppose the main point seems to be that if you are a British resident you can’t drive a car with a foreign plate on it, or can you, is it a No if I bought the car, but a yes if it is a foreign friend’s car here on a temporary visit? I don’t really know. But I suspect that if I bought a foreign registered car here, as long as I did nothing wrong I would never get stopped as anpr can’t check mot tax insurance on foreign registered cars. And if I got stopped I could just speak in Greek and then the police would give up. I’m not really going to do this.

Slightly off topic, a bit more akin to non policing of temporary tags in USA, if I bring to the uk a car from another country, how long would I be able to drive it on the foreign plates for? Cars dont have passports so how would a policeman know how long the car had been in uk. I am in England. Is this a common problem in Ireland / Northern Ireland.

If someone transfers a plate in uk(although that does not look like a typical type of plate you would transfer) does it show up straight away on the dvla websites we can access or is there a time lag?

There’s a lot going on in the fuse box. You can’t really bypass everything, but if you have one particular circuit playing up it’s easy enough to bypass it. Well I suppose you could bypass everything but it would be extremely long winded. Is it one particular thing not working on yours?

Hope it does turn out to be something simple but abs pumps are failing on these cars.

In my experience some new tyres have less tread depth when new than before. There does not seem to be an industry standard depth, and the actual depth is not stated. Also some have less depth at the edges meaning you might still have legal depth in the middle but it will fail as it’s not over 3/4 of the width. Of course they want you to buy new tyres sooner, but if you feel mileage was not good you won’t buy that one again so they shoot themselves in the foot with these ‘tricks’. I’m talking about budget tyres as that’s all I buy for mine and my wife’s car

Mot testers putting advisories on is hugely inconsistent. Some put loads of advisories down, some put none . None of us can say without seeing the car, how bad or minor it might be. But if you buy a car which does not have any advisories, it could still be rustier than the one with the advisory due to the inconsistent way advisories are done.

and more, earlier on I had mentioned that I had previously put araldite on my silver metal pulse damper. That leaked because it appeared to have a manufacturing defect where it had been crimped. my replacement one does not have the same visible defect. some of them i can see for sale 2nd hand do have the same visible defect. I have shown a picture here where the crimping is not even all of the way round. pic is not good quality but you should be able to get idea of what I mean. taken from internet. I can't show it on pic of my old one as all covered with araldite. I know it doesn't look that serious a defect, but mine leaked and had the same kind of thing where the metal was rucked up