Our Cars

[steven mandell]

Thanks for the simple explanation.  I guess that I should have realized that a simple web search was all that was needed.
The link that Malcolm posted was extremely interesting to me, as it shows the former owner of the Petite and Nobel in apparently good health enjoying his imports at least several years before I flew from LA to West Allis Wisconsin to purchase the vehicles.
Come to think of it, this all came about because in 2009 I was frantically web searching for "Nobel 200 for sale", having fallen in love with the make at a transcontinental outing to Bruce Weiner's museum.  But all i could come up with was a two year old obscure reference from a non Microcar  blog where someone was asking how much an AC Petite and Nobel 200 should sell for.
A bit of detective work and follow up, got me in touch with the author, and low and behold- the question never got answered, and the cars still needed to be sold.   After establishing their price, I mailed along a small good faith deposit based on just a couple of pictures and a description as neither car  had run in years.  Still it was primailly a verbally secured  deal with the daughter of the now deceased owner.
Sometimes you have to trust your gut, and fortunately for me, this time was an example of that.  The daughter was quite honorable and did not take advantage of the fact that I would not have wanted to have waisted the trip, and stuck with the agreed price, drove my girlfriend and I around to see the local sights, and even  put us up in their own house for the stay!
Very friendly locals.
Which made it all the more surprising  to find out  that she went to the same high school as Jeffry Dalmer, the infamous apparently reserved but actual canabilistic mass murderer that they made a film about.  A couple of other mass murders also came from this sleepy town.

All in all an adventurous and very productive trip that started with a desperate search and succeeded as a result of my betting on a good hunch.

[Rusty Chrome (Malcolm Parker)]

I often wonder if there are any Nobels in the US from the 1960's. When it was on show in New York in 1960, they boasted of an order for 3000 cars - which obviously never came to pass, likewise plans for the Satellite Corp of Wiscasset to assemble (and later manufacture) the car in Maine.

[steven mandell]

Unfortunately, I have not heard of many that have made it to the US in period.

When I visited West Allis in 2009 I was shown a picture of a fully grinning prowd new owner standing in front of an open 20' shipping container that contained the AC Petite, Nobel 200, and a Messerschmitt. At that time the picture looked to be at least a couple of decades old.
The cars were all basically longitudinally oriented, but the tapered ends of the Messerschmitt and Nobel faced each other and the vehicles were both canted and offset from centerline of the container's longitudinal axis- this plus the narrowness of all 3 cars allowed their combined length of approximately 30 feet to be accommodated in the 20 foot container that was shipped from England.
I used a similar strategy a few years later to bring in what turned out to be Nobel 200 parts car, Frisky Family Three, and Trojan 200.
That success emboldened me to hatch my plan to some day find eight Sans Permis vehicles short enough to be fit sideways in a 40 foot container.   After 14 months of frantic searching and emails I realized that dream in 2015.
Now the last load of eight is accommodated in a longitudinal tandem orientation in a  12' x 32' long end section of my barn, and I am about to petition my city to hopefully become allowed to lengthen my barn another 20' to  become enabled to get it to contain the greater percentage of my collection.

Most of the cars are unfinished projects, and I do good work, but very slowly.  As it turns out, I am now finally enjoying the process of coming up with creative solutions for getting everything that is not a vehicle off of the barn floor so I will have greater access and space to enjoy the views of my unusual lots.
Most rewarding solution so far has been my deciding to store a large pile of long unused antique redwood floorboards in the rafters, thus creating storage space for many more lighter wieght items without blocking ambient lighting from the 4O' x 2' long skylight that I created by replacing the rotted sections of corrugated galvanized roofing panels with very hard to find translucent fiberglass roofing panels with identically dimensioned and spaced corrugations.
I still have about 100 of these 3' x4' 40 year old panels that have never seen sun, but we're intended for green house use to find space for.  So I will continue my project of replacing the remaining 5 of 8  solid metal windows with 4 panel thick stacks of them, and then hopefully find a way to tuck the large number of them remaining up inside the perfectly matched corrugated surface of the barn's interior walls at a height that keeps them off the floor so as not to unnecessarily consume more useful interior wall storage.

I'm nearing retirement, but will certainly never have want for things to do.