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Rusty Pelican

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1 hour ago, bunglebus said:

Seems very unlikely to me - the men obviously having to walk around the car don't look messed with, so unless there was a different car there that was somehow replaced (not forgetting this would be using 1960s tech) it doesn't make sense.

All just seems a lot of effort for a general street scene 

This, surely.

As mentioned earlier on, special builds were relatively common, and this one is likely to be no exception.

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Yeah it's bollocks innit, I don't care how much of an 'expert' you are you can't be certain whether an image has been tampered with unless you examine the negatives and even then it's not an exact science. The fact that people are still arguing about whether Lee Harvey Oswald's 'rifle' photos are real or not 60 years down the line says it all (although, perhaps, there is more at stake with those photos than with the unidentified car one).

Photo expert man is just adding more supposition to the already murky waters. There is no point making assumptions, because there is no way at all to verify those assumptions. This whole thing is really fascinating as a study of human behaviour (and that's why I hate even acknowledging or responding to it); People on pistonheads who think they know about cars, but actually don't know anything, try to identify a car. 99% of suggestions are inane and obviously wrong. People show non-PH members, 'car experts', magazine journalists, their mates in the pub - nobody can identify it. People CANNOT ACCEPT that there is something in the world which does not have an answer.

Now, I understand this frustration completely. I have been fascinated by one-offs, specials, low-volume productions cars, prototypes etc for my whole life, and have spent an unhealthy amount of time researchign stuff like this. I have a huge folder of 'unknown' cars which will, most likely, never be identified. This blue car is just one of them - I am a pragmatist and realise some mysteries just won't be solved. I accept this, although it is annoying, it's life. These people who are possibly paying attention to this type of car for the first time in their lives do no believe that such a 'mystery' can exist. Instead of shrugging and moving on, they invent increasingly outlandish solutions - like 'it's not even a real photograph, that's why you can't identify the car!' What a cop-out!

Remember a few years ago on Pistonheads something similar happened, with this car?

J15RmKSa.jpg

After a few weeks of 'THATS A AUSTIN METRO M8 OBVS' etc, the PHers went nuts and people were doing all this half-assed 'analysis' showing hgow this was clearly a photoshopped image to create a 'generic car' and that it was all a practical joke, all becuase they COULD NOT ACCEPT there was something out there they couldn't instantly recognise. It was nuts. The guy who took the photo was pilloried for weeks, maybe months, until he drove back there, knocked on the door of the house and got the whole story (including more pictures). The guy built it, completely bespoke, drove it once or twice but it had some teething troubles, so he parked it up and never, ever touched it again, for 40 years!

Now, nobody was ever going to recognise it because it was literally on the public road twice, was never featured in any period magazine, was never reported on anywhere, never photographed before now.

Just opening a folder of 'unknowns' at random, and I can pick any number of cars at random which have eluded identification - most of these were only caught on film by chance, either purely at random or by a curious photographer. The answers may well be out there somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath...

196776045_Screenshot2021-05-03at10_59_47.thumb.png.e36ed0d6e305b440ea6a536eb6ac0713.png

822578176_Screenshot2021-05-03at11_00_24.thumb.png.25df3fbcc4ffc9d8957906ae2f84bcc9.png

1752616599_Screenshot2021-05-03at11_04_09.thumb.png.aa463a29da45aa48f2092c3be2024c5c.png

scan0061.thumb.jpeg.3da9f7580bf49a28ff5baf90d9f7e35c.jpeg

 

 

 

 

 

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7 minutes ago, barrett said:

Yeah it's bollocks innit, I don't care how much of an 'expert' you are you can't be certain whether an image has been tampered with unless you examine the negatives and even then it's not an exact science. The fact that people are still arguing about whether Lee Harvey Oswald's 'rifle' photos are real or not 60 years down the line says it all (although, perhaps, there is more at stake with those photos than with the unidentified car one).

Photo expert man is just adding more supposition to the already murky waters. There is no point making assumptions, because there is no way at all to verify those assumptions. This whole thing is really fascinating as a study of human behaviour (and that's why I hate even acknowledging or responding to it); People on pistonheads who think they know about cars, but actually don't know anything, try to identify a car. 99% of suggestions are inane and obviously wrong. People show non-PH members, 'car experts', magazine journalists, their mates in the pub - nobody can identify it. People CANNOT ACCEPT that there is something in the world which does not have an answer.

Now, I understand this frustration completely. I have been fascinated by one-offs, specials, low-volume productions cars, prototypes etc for my whole life, and have spent an unhealthy amount of time researchign stuff like this. I have a huge folder of 'unknown' cars which will, most likely, never be identified. This blue car is just one of them - I am a pragmatist and realise some mysteries just won't be solved. I accept this, although it is annoying, it's life. These people who are possibly paying attention to this type of car for the first time in their lives do no believe that such a 'mystery' can exist. Instead of shrugging and moving on, they invent increasingly outlandish solutions - like 'it's not even a real photograph, that's why you can't identify the car!' What a cop-out!

Remember a few years ago on Pistonheads something similar happened, with this car?

J15RmKSa.jpg

After a few weeks of 'THATS A AUSTIN METRO M8 OBVS' etc, the PHers went nuts and people were doing all this half-assed 'analysis' showing hgow this was clearly a photoshopped image to create a 'generic car' and that it was all a practical joke, all becuase they COULD NOT ACCEPT there was something out there they couldn't instantly recognise. It was nuts. The guy who took the photo was pilloried for weeks, maybe months, until he drove back there, knocked on the door of the house and got the whole story (including more pictures). The guy built it, completely bespoke, drove it once or twice but it had some teething troubles, so he parked it up and never, ever touched it again, for 40 years!

Now, nobody was ever going to recognise it because it was literally on the public road twice, was never featured in any period magazine, was never reported on anywhere, never photographed before now.

Just opening a folder of 'unknowns' at random, and I can pick any number of cars at random which have eluded identification - most of these were only caught on film by chance, either purely at random or by a curious photographer. The answers may well be out there somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath...

196776045_Screenshot2021-05-03at10_59_47.thumb.png.e36ed0d6e305b440ea6a536eb6ac0713.png

822578176_Screenshot2021-05-03at11_00_24.thumb.png.25df3fbcc4ffc9d8957906ae2f84bcc9.png

1752616599_Screenshot2021-05-03at11_04_09.thumb.png.aa463a29da45aa48f2092c3be2024c5c.png

scan0061.thumb.jpeg.3da9f7580bf49a28ff5baf90d9f7e35c.jpeg

 

 

 

 

 

Very well put, it is telling how people are spoiling for a reason to disagree, but I am glad that there are some who try to get down the bottom of the Rabbit Hole. As for that YNH 849S thing - Did someone save it? It looked like it could drive again tbh

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3 minutes ago, Asimo said:

Before this homogenised era of highly engineered mass-production, cars were a different kind of thing completely. Mysteries are fundamentally interesting.

I still have got  nowhere closer with this. 

 

Do you have a hi-res scan of the photo - preferably the whole thing, if that's cropped?

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5 hours ago, MisterH said:

As for that YNH 849S thing - Did someone save it? It looked like it could drive again

I put two and two together (and probably got five) and worked out it was very local to where I used to live. I hunted for it for months but never found the car or the house

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22 minutes ago, bunglebus said:

I put two and two together (and probably got five) and worked out it was very local to where I used to live. I hunted for it for months but never found the car or the house

I just spent five minutes on maps and found it, but I am a finding-cars-on-google-maps-NINJA

300973441_Screenshot2021-05-03at17_19_36.thumb.png.9de1d9264c08c45ca52fd26dcbc77fa5.png

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On 5/3/2021 at 2:47 AM, Pieman said:

Or maybe it's a ghost car, and this is the only time it was caught by a camera.  Maybe it's still haunting the streets of London to this day, taunting any attempt to make its phantom driver pay congestion charges by vanishing as it passes the cameras.

Ghost cars haunt the streets of London every night.  This Landcrab 2-door was captured on GhostCCTV on Monday night.

Zz7crTJ.jpg

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8 hours ago, bunglebus said:

And a Routemaster that went under a low bridge?

RM1368, victim of an Arson attack that cost it its upper deck (but helped release RM8 into service by releasing RM8 from the role of the Chiswick test bed)

image.png

(perhaps Mystery car was made out of the remains of the upper deck and haunts enthusiasts to this very day? LOL)

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  • 1 month later...

Just read this lot re. this car .
 

About six years ago a member posted this photo. Despite the picture being discussed on numerous forums and magazines worldwide nobody has managed to ID the car, until today. This is from the Pistonheads Forum. https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=140...
"
I know of this car, dating back to when it was first built and I knew the person who built it, so hopefully I can help to fill in a few gaps. Unfortunately, it was a very long time ago, so some details may be a little hazy, but I will endeavour to do my best. I haven’t read all the pages, just had a quick look through the first page and the last one, so I don’t know too much about what is known and what isn’t. I’ve just heard that it was effectively unidentified.
The car was built between 1961 and 1962. I was built very quickly I hasten to add, by a guy called Clive Bowers. He would have been 25/26 at the time and I was 19/20. He and his dad were both massively into aeroplanes and the RAF. They had both worked has aeroplane body builders, hence the ability to build this car. He was highly skilled at quite a young age as he had been in and around doing this from a child really.
The story of the car’s origin stems from their obsession with the RAF. In those days you couldn’t just buy a private registration number off the internet, so when Clive’s dad saw a virtually worthless old car for sale with the registration number RAF 33, he bought it. It was a decrepit Ford 7Y, which was subsequently parked up somewhere at the family home, which was a smallholding, hence no shortage of space and pretty much forgotten about.
Clive used to look at this vehicle with disdain and wondered why they kept it. I was a youth with a major thing about cars, but in those days I wouldn’t have known how or even if you could transfer a registration number, so I assume that it was just fixed to the car it was on back then, so Clive asked his dad if he could take the car and make something special out of it, so that was that.
The body was stripped off the chassis and scrapped. What was left of the car was subjected to a nut and bolt strip down and rebuilt, so it was like new and then Clive built the body which you can see in the photo. It was made from aluminium, it had small gullwing doors and the windscreen was the rear screen from a Nash Metropolitan. I can’t remember exactly why, but apparently there was a building at RAF Mildenhall which was full of Nash Metropolitan parts and he thought it made a good feature for the car, which he wanted to incorporate certain touches from the aerospace world.
He took me out in it on a couple of occasions, but that was only because I was a car mad youth and used to approach him about it. He wasn’t into showing it off or going to shows, rallies or anything like that. I wouldn’t say he was a reclusive type as he was quite sociable, but generally aside from that he kept himself to himself. I’m surprised that no one else appears to have recognised the car, but not surprised that only very few people might have done.
I know the engine was tuned to some degree and the suspension and brakes had been altered, but I can’t remember any details beyond that. The only other thing that stands out in memory was that there wasn’t any interior at all to speak of. The seats were home made and looked unfinished and nothing else had been trimmed out. It was very much unfinished on the inside, but on the outside it was pristine. The paint colour was Cambridge Blue, which was taken from his dad’s MKVIII Jaguar.
As for Clive, I lost touch with him around 1964 and only got back in touch with him in 1993 when having other dealings with a member of his family, which lasted until 1999. I hadn’t seen or heard any of them since then. I remember talking about the car in around 1995 and was told that it was still around and was kept in one of the outbuildings at a property their family owned somewhere just outside Bournemouth. All that was said was that it had been off the road since 1977, he had only ever done a couple of thousand miles in it, but he had swapped out the engine for a more powerful Ford engine he had built. Can’t remember what he said spec-wise, but that it was still in virtually pristine condition at that point, but had still never built any kind of interior for it.
I believe Clive passed away around 5 or 6 years ago now, but not entirely sure. He had no children, so not sure what would have happened to the car if it was still around. He had a couple of sisters who all had children, but didn’t know anything else about them really.
Hopefully that is something to go on anyway. Not sure if you will trace Clive as I believe that it wasn’t actually his real name, think it was a nickname something to do with Clive of India, but only what I was told and that was the name that everyone knew him as, even his parents called it him and his surname was definitely Bowers."
A bigger help may be the registration number of the car, which was definitely RAF 33 and would have shown up as a Ford.
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someone just posted that on  the other thread on this car where I noticed a bit of a whole in that story sadly!

8 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

the only problem is RAFxxx was issued in May 1953, but the Ford 7Y according to Wikipedia was only produced from 1938-1939

so that does not quite add up as that would be some 14 years late registration madness!

(unless the registration mark itself was already a private registration mark by then, but im not sure why someone would transfer it to such an old vehicle then abandon it) 

 

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