Van helsing new member intro

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Come on over Goobak, we can " chuck a shrimp on tha barbie for ya " ....... so Paul Hogan said in those '80's " visit Australia " ads on TV they had over there. Actually we call them " prawns "down here ,........................... " shrimps " are fresh water VERY small Prawn's to us here.........

Roadworthiness............. a lot of fellas that import cars to here from the US find that even though they were running/driving legally on road cars there, when they arrive here there is A LOT of work to get them up to an acceptable roadworthy condition for on road use here.

I do think our laws for road worthiness in most states are somewhat anal regarding some laws but most are there for good reason.


With my 59 Dodge, I have some smog emission testing reports here with some of the paperwork I received with the car and it passed all those tests, what the " test " involved I don't know, nor how it could pass Californian testing as I was under the assumption that California had pretty much the most stringent emission controls in the world.

Maybe like you said, my Dodge was exempt though it didn't say that on the emissions report.

Insurance ??............... I just " registered " my XR8 V8 Ford Foulcan " Sprint " ( Australian built performance Car ) here and the insurance to cover personal injuries to anyone in this car and anone it may hit in an accident was just short of $600 annual , then the on road cost for one year was nearly $500, so my annual cost is just short of $1000 to drive this car legally on the raod here in my state.

Then there is insurance to cover the cost of damage to my car ( not compulsory but you'd be stupid to not have it here ) , and anyone elses car and 20 million in property damage .......... about $800 or so.

Not sure what the costs are to drive cars in the US, would like to know as a comparison ??

Cheers,

Terry.

Hey Terry, Registration fees per year here in North Carolina are about 34 bucks a year plus then you get insurance, runs me about umm 500 bucks a year on my truck? that covers everything too. here is a pic of it pulling an RT Challenger home ;)
MY NEW BABY.jpg

MY NEW BABY.jpg
 
Hey Terry, Registration fees per year here in North Carolina are about 34 bucks a year plus then you get insurance, runs me about umm 500 bucks a year on my truck? that covers everything too. here is a pic of it pulling an RT Challenger home ;)
View attachment 27791


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That's about 1/2 the price I pay here for on road rego and a truck that size here would be about $2000 a year to keep it on road ( including insurance )

I am so envious of you Wollfen being an ex Aussie and over there seeing,doing and living all those American things that I dreamt of and saw on TV when I was a kid ( and still do )

How long you been there for ??

It took me a lot of getting used to driving my left hand drive 59 Dodge on our right hand drive roads here when I drove it from Ballarat in Victoria to my place in the Hunter Valley NSW ( ABOUT 800 MILES ) , loved the trip but, something I'll never forget, was like livin' the dream sort of stuff for me.

Can't wait to get my Dodge on the road after the rebuild.
 
VAN HELSING;154582 Even though our cars are on heritage registration they still have to pass an annual safety test just like any year/model daily driver car would have to.This includes a brake test which isn't really fair to ask for vintage cars to have a braking efficiency of a modern car. Most inspectors are aware of this and usually fudge the brake figures by using a modern car for the brake test. Hope our state authorities aren't reading this said:
so would a brake upgrade render a car unregisterable? Ive heard different stories about what does/doesn't and im wondering...

And one more thing (this should be my catchphrase) How come in the first Mad Max theres a functioning society, and all the other movies are post apocalyptic? WTF happened?
 
so would a brake upgrade render a car unregisterable? Ive heard different stories about what does/doesn't and im wondering...

And one more thing (this should be my catchphrase) How come in the first Mad Max theres a functioning society, and all the other movies are post apocalyptic? WTF happened?

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In the state I live in we are permitted to modify the braking systems as an owner approved mod ONLY if the modification was an option for the particular model car.Example:- if a car had an option of drum brakes all round or front disc/drum rear then we are permitted an owner modification using the optional OEM braking system for the car AND that model.

Anything else has to go to a government approved engineer and depending on the modifications depends on the costs, simple mods might be a few hundred dollars for approval ranging up to many thousands for multiple mods. It's there to stop idiots from destroying themselves and others but like most things there is unfortunitely always collateral damage and that is the guys that modify their cars correctly and yet still have to pay through the nose and be scrutineered by an engineer costing lots of $$$ and time.

Mad Max, gotta be honest, I haven't watched it since it first came out in the '80's , pre apocalyptic and post apocalyptic , well, we can probably blame the governments for I guess ??
 
Terry,
Back in 1969 I had a friend from Australia, Sydney ... I think, who was living and attending school in Detroit. He was a real car guy too and we became good friends. While in the US he bought a brand new 1969 Pontiac Trans-am, beautiful car. (I had a new 1969 A12 Roadrunner at the time).

He had the car shipped to Australia when he went home, but had to pay a serious amount of money to have the car coverted over to a right hand drive. He told me it was a requirement to make the car legal there. Is this true.....?
 
Terry,
Back in 1969 I had a friend from Australia, Sydney ... I think, who was living and attending school in Detroit. He was a real car guy too and we became good friends. While in the US he bought a brand new 1969 Pontiac Trans-am, beautiful car. (I had a new 1969 A12 Roadrunner at the time).

He had the car shipped to Australia when he went home, but had to pay a serious amount of money to have the car coverted over to a right hand drive. He told me it was a requirement to make the car legal there. Is this true.....?
Any car less than thirty years of age still needs to go through the RHD conversion process , plus having the lights changed and seat belts changed. Plus baby restraint mounts fitted to the rear parcel shelf,. It costs a huge whack of money to do it all too. Oh and amber lenses fitted into the rear taillight assemblies too if they dont have them. Im sure Im forgetting stuff too, its been many years since i did a conversion. Any car over 30 years old now only requires an LO2 conversion to drive it LHD on the road. This means changing seatbelts to ADR specs and changing the headlights. Thats the main stuff.
 
Any car less than thirty years of age still needs to go through the RHD conversion process , plus having the lights changed and seat belts changed. Plus baby restraint mounts fitted to the rear parcel shelf,. It costs a huge whack of money to do it all too. Oh and amber lenses fitted into the rear taillight assemblies too if they dont have them. Im sure Im forgetting stuff too, its been many years since i did a conversion. Any car over 30 years old now only requires an LO2 conversion to drive it LHD on the road. This means changing seatbelts to ADR specs and changing the headlights. Thats the main stuff.

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Gee, you have a good memory there Wollfen and your pretty much on the mark with the answer too.

There have been some recent changes and I'm not up to date with them but here is a link to importing a car into Australia.

http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/vehicles/imports/

And if reading all that doesn't send you to sleep, this is the code of practice that most light vehicle modifications have to go through

http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/vehicle_regulation/bulletin/vsb_ncop.aspx


Will,

Yep, the import costs are still high even now, as an example, my 59 Dodge would have cost around the $5000 mark for shipping, import approval, port charges, cleaning, and other money-for-nothing things that the authorities can think of.

The government relented it's LHD to RHD requirements on some imported cars a few years back now mainly because there were so many " backyard " unsafe conversions being done it seemed best to allow cars to remain LHD.

I think ?? the requirement to convert newer imported cars from LHD to RHD was 1989 and newer ( not 100 % sure on that though ) so post '89 cars need RHD conversions.
 
Wow when is your gov't going to require you to wear a bubble-wrap suit so you guys don't hurt each other when you bump into one another on the sidewalk JK but some of that seems extreme.
 
Wow when is your gov't going to require you to wear a bubble-wrap suit so you guys don't hurt each other when you bump into one another on the sidewalk JK but some of that seems extreme.

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Yeah, I'm hearin' ya there Dave.

Bubble Wrap 2014 legislation has just been introduced into the senate for review !! JK LOL.

Some of the rules are common sense but others are just ridiculous.

A few months back, maybe a year back ? ( in my state ) we had a gathering of confederated car clubs and a meeting at a park near Sydney to discuss publicly our concerns in the way our modification approval process was heading.

It was a huge gathering with some success.

Basically we had all had a gut full of all the hoops our registration authorities had placed in front of us to jump through to allow us to modify cars.

So, what you read is probably a watered down version of what they wanted to actually happen.

You fellas seem to have much more freedom than we do down here, we're quickly becoming a Nanny state. !!

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