Visiting British Motor Museum

[Tatong]

Hi all
in a little over 12 months I will be in the UK for a few weeks and was planning on arranging a visit to the British Motor Museum archives to see what I could glean about my bn7.
I currently have copies of the Heritage Certificate and warranty card but I am keen to see what else is available.
If anyone has tips or strategies to making this opportunity most fruitful I would appreciate the push in the right direction.
All the best,
Tatong

 

[simon1966]

I may be wrong on this, but I was under the impression that the Heritage Certs have all the information that is available from the build records. So not sure that you would find anything additional about your specific car.

 

[BJ8Healeys]

I was fortunate to visit the museum and archives in February 2003. At that time, the public was invited to research the records for themselves with prior arrangement with the BMIHT staff. I think that is still true. Before leaving the USA, I did this via e-mail, letting them know the date that I intended to be there. The records were in the form of large hand-written ledger books that were apparently transcribed from earlier sources (perhaps the build cards, but I don't know for sure). The ledger books didn't always have exactly the same data as the certificates, and vice versa. The chassis numbers were rubber-stamped in sequence down the left side of each page, with the details of the car written in by hand in columns to the right, and sometimes continued to other pages. Sometimes codes were used that I had to ask the meaning of.
Recently, because the wear and tear on the books was becoming of concern, the books were put out of reach of the public. Instead, microfilmed records are available for viewing. Those may be scans of the ledger book pages, but I don't know that. As the BJ8 Registrar, interested in the original manufacturing details of all BJ8s, I have been fortunate to make contact with someone who lives near the museum and archives in Gaydon and who was willing to go there for me several times a year and research lists of BJ8s. He has done this since 2003, and via that route I was able to document the original manufacturing details for thousands of BJ8s. He tells me the new format slows him down quite a bit, and makes it almost impossible without a lot of searching to research backwards from something like a gearbox number to the chassis number that it belonged to. Researching a single car shouldn't be a problem, though.