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A club for Tatra owners and those with an interest in the marque
COTSWOLDS
TOUR 2009!
...see
our updated Events Calendar for
news of our 8th Annual Rally - 31 July - 2 August
2008
NEC Classic Motor Show Success

Show images copyright D Richards 2008
Our
first official club presence at the NEC show for thirteen years involved a
huge effort and, for a small club like ours, considerable expense, but what
a result! ...the award for 'Best
medium-size Club stand'
when we currently have less than 80 paid-up members around the world!
For
anyone who's not been involved in a project like this, there's a surprising
amount of work behind a display of six vehicles in a relatively simple setting.
Dave Richards concentrated on assembling the best, and most varied selection
available, involving the shipping of two exhibits from the Czech Republic,
one of which was en route to the US.
Many
thanks to Dave, along with Vita Hinner and his Ecorra
team from CZ, Jeff Lane in Nashville
for enabling the inclusion of his V855 re-creation, the providers of all our
other exhibits, and the impressive number of our members who attended as active
'staff'.
...and
if you were one of our visitors, a big thanks
to you for coming to see us, and for your interest in our vehicles and their
history! We're not just an owners' club. Annual membership costs little more
than a day pass to the Classic Motor Show, and all our members were able to
join us FOC - you'd be very welcome as a member!



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'T3-603'
Sill Mouldings now available - Price Kc3600 (c. £90.00)
The
late T603 is the most accessible, numerous and widely campaigned Tatra, so a
new initiative like this is to be celebrated and supported. Long-time member,
and now Mládá Boleslav resident, John Shelley is developing a
range of rolled trim mouldings for collectors' cars - the sharp-eyed may have
noticed the perfect aluminium gutter trim on a well-presented blue Škoda MB1000
at Crich in 2007. Most 603s' sill trims are either damaged or missing, so here's
a timely opportunity to put things right. These items are in stainless steel.
Says
John: "We borrowed or were given patterns from three different 603-3s
and every piece had a slightly different profile or section to the ribs,
including on the same side of the same car! Most evident is where they
meet under the B-post at the line between front and rear doors, where
some were not even the same overall height/depth (and the join isn't covered
with any similar-profile clip), something we have attempted to eradicate,
being as we're so clever! Here they are - as you will be aware, the odd
end shapes are where they have to be folded round the wheelarch lip through
90 and then up to 180 degrees during fitting."
" Another point - it appears each moulding was drilled onto and through
its sill individually and without a pattern, thus it isn't possible to
pre-drill or punch the trims to suit a car which is already drilled for
trims being replaced."
See the Skofast website
and/or contact John at: skofast@yahoo.co.uk
Click
here:
... for over 200 Tatra-related videos
and
here:
... for one of our favourites
a
delightful animation from Cenek Strichel at www.cenda.cz
We're
a car club, but many of our members are as interested in the rich
culture and often traumatic history of the former Czechoslovakia
as they are in its engineering. Anyone sharing that interest should
have member Ivan Margolius’s latest book.
Wiley,
ISBN 0-470-02219-1, 320 pages, 58 illustrations £16.99
available from bookshops and, at a substantial discount, from amazon.co.uk
“A
poignant and vivid mémoire of a child searching for traces of his
father, lost in the murky ideologies of post war Central Europe. An engrossing
book.” Sir John Tusa
"A
remarkable book. This archetypical story of the twentieth century is intertwined
with an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative of the history of the
Czechs, of Prague, interspersed with samples of exquisite poetry by great
contemporary poets. So the narrative flows like Eliot’s sweet Thames full
of the debris of tragic lives, of horrors, of moments of beauty and testimonies
of love – all against the backdrop of man’s inhumanity." Josef
Škvorecký
Go to www.margolius.co.uk
for more details of this and other work by Ivan and his family
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