.... the old invacar depot.... so I will stick my head around the door and ask for all the old siba black boxes.
Too late, the ICR has already been there & there's nowt left....
Bear in mind also that there were very few Villiers machines left in service into the mid 1990s, certainly less than 100 in the whole country at that time, so those repairers in areas which didn't have a Villiers vehicle in their catchment area would not have bothered keeping ANY Villiers spares at all even at that time. Whilst those that DID have a two-stroke on their books would only have kept a skelition parts stock for it anyway. So in reality, the Villiers spares stock was actully long gone a long time ago.
Also, a repairer was not actully permitted to keep vast stocks of large, expencive items such as black boxes, gearboxes etc, they may have had a float of two or three, but the legend of repairers holding hundreds of black boxes etc. is just another of those half-baked legends doing the rounds. The only place that actully did hold parts in that quanity was the Central Store at Heywood, from which the repairers had to order whenever such parts were needed, purpously to stop the repaieres being pestered by folk thinking they were a cheap source of expencive parts. Heywood was cleared of all Villiers items in 1996, so you can work out the timescale for yourself......
