We have often commented in various Pylons over the trials and tribulations of selling off collections (and hoards), and now we see that it has been raised as a thread on the Barton Forum. It is a problem that is never going to go away so we have put together some of the options and attendant pitfalls that can arise. We are often asked to advise in such situations and there is no clear cut answer as so much depends on the individual situation, yet over the life of OTW we have been aware of, and even involved in the disposal of at least 12 major collections, of which four could legitimately be described as 'eclectic hoards of stuff'.

A word of caution though, tax rules and inheritance rules are very different across the world, so we can only be specific about the UK, but even here the goal posts have changed significantly in the last year and are due to the election here have changed again, and not to the benefit of those involved either.

There are two clear situations where collections are to be disposed of, firstly when the owner wants (has) to downsize, rationalize or raise some cash. The one advantage is that they usually have time on their side so can pursue whatever avenue will produce the best results for them. The more complex is where the avid acquirer has passed on and a family member or members find themselves the owners of a huge collection of assorted 'stuff', or an unconnected executor is tasked with sorting and disposing of it all. Even worse is as has happened recently on a couple of occasions where an unsuspecting distant relative is lumbered with it all as the person in question died intestate.

First of all the situations that can arise. A spouse becomes the legal owner of everything, no problem, it is theirs, and no immediate pressure, unless they want to raise money or 'get rid' in which case there is no tax liability until they come to dispose of it, as there are clear rules as to what can be sold from an estate without incurring charges but this does not include collections. In every case, the assortment of 'stuff' would have to be included in the estate for probate, giving it a finite value, probably way below its real value increasing the CGT liability?

A single legatee is in exactly the same position, again the relative luxury of no time constraints as they are now the owners. Where it gets very complicated is when the estate has to be divided between more than one person, by either a legatee as an executor or an unconnected third party executor. Human nature can be very fickle when family inheritances are involved, and most want as much as they can get as soon as possible.

So, what are the options? Well, one suggestion on the forum was that the collector has told his children to put everything in the recycling bin. This they may well do, unless they become aware of the potential value of what they are scrapping? We have mentioned before the mother and daughter who put an entire collection of several hundred engines in the bin so that the daughter could have the fitted cases. Would they have still done it if they knew what they had potentially been throwing away? We have met two large scale hoarders who have told their children that it is all theirs to do with as they like, but as none of them have any interest at all in engines, it was suspected that they might well end up in the skip? Again, if its yours, you can do what you like with it, but if two or more people involved then there might be objections to this route. After all, even a modest collection now can be worth in excess of £50,000 and who keeps receipts or is even totally honest about how much they paid?

From there on it becomes a numbers game, just how big and varied is the collection or hoard? The problem multiplies rapidly as the numbers, variety (and potential value) goes up. There has to be a note of caution as well as what follows does depend on the honesty and integrity of those involved, which sadly, has not proved to be the case on occasions.

If the new owner who has inherited goodness knows what that they have no interest in, they might just want rid, and the simplest answer is to contact existing dealers or individual and ask them to make a bid on taking everything, ie. no honey deals. The downside is that they might be offered as little as 10% of the value or even less, especially if they are totally unaware of the possible value. The dealer then has to do all the work, will probably make a hefty profit but over an indeterminate time scale, but the house and workshop are clear and there is a wodge of money. We have brokered deals of this sort and are aware of many more, sadly, at least three that we had no part in at all involved the widow being royally 'stitched up', hence our warning about honesty.

It then comes down to how much you want to be bothered, how much time you are prepared to spend, and whether your knowledge is up to the task? The simplest solution is an auction, only suitable for a finite number of items though and they will not get rid of the assorted and unidentifiable spares and bits. Bear in mind how much of the late Miquel de Rancougne's collection was consigned to a second and lower profile sale and the items that the auction house binned?  This is further complicated now by the shortage of specialist auctions and valuers, and in some cases, their insistence on a minimum value for each lot. There is also the small matter of lotting fees and seller's premium, but it does mean that they are responsible for the identification, photography, description and the entire selling process. You just sit back and get a cheque at some stage. Relatively few options now, although the BMFA does provide a good outlet at minimal cost, but they are restricted in the number of items they can process in just two auctions a year.

Otherwise, it is down to doing it yourself, if you are the main beneficiary, or enlisting the help of a knowledgeable friend, but it is unrealistic to expect them to do the work for nothing. Ebay is the most obvious route as it gives you the widest audience and will realise the best prices, but everything is down to you including the comeback if the buyer is not happy. You can of course enlist an 'ebay friend' but these don't come cheap, up to 40% of the sale. There is now a further and serious complication in the UK in that ebay, etsy and all other auction platforms have to pass sales records to the tax man as this is now regarded as 'side hustling' and rendering you liable to income tax after sales over £1800, about four good engines (or two yellow jackets) in a year. There is also the side issue of not flooding the market, say ten engines a fortnight max so a two or more year process in prospect that other legatees might not be happy with, although this will also render the seller liable to tax on the whole amount and possibly even Capital Gains Tax on top. One of our correspondents has suggested that it could take up to five years to clear what has been inherited, and that is with two of them working steadily on it via ebay and swapmeets.

The final options all involve producing a detailed list with all items identified, condition and any defects clearly noted. One Swedish seller actually produced a full colour A4 folder with every car and engine for sale, two photos of each and prices, an enormous amount of work. Once the list is complete then there is a choice, to price, or not to price, depending on the next step. Over the years we have become aware of two interesting variations, the 'silent auction' where the list is circulated, either widely or to a restricted group who are then asked to bid, the highest bidder wins, unless the seller did not consider the bid high enough or derisory as was the case with another Swedish collection. An extension of this is the concept of the 'Nazareth style auction' where the highest bidder does not win, as all other bidders are given the chance to improve their bids, which can go on for ages, time consuming and hardly appropriate if you are trying to shift 500 motors.

We are firmly of the opinion that items should be priced, which brings us to the route we favour and that has been used by a number of sellers in the last few years. Price every item, circulate the lists, used to have to be done by post but can now be online, wait to see what sells and update lists regularly. Of course, prices do have to be realistic, especially if you are looking to clear as much as possible. Like the auctions, this will leave you with a lot that there is a very limited market for, bits and pieces and the assorted detritus that can be acquired over a lifetime of collecting (hoarding). Then it is down to the swapmeet or sadly, the skip.

Swapmeets are not great for disposing of collections in one go, turning up with 1500 or even 500 engines will not endear you to other traders and neither are there enough punters to make a dent in that number, and that applies at auctions as well. A table full of odds and ends, priced to sell will clear what can be, but after a couple of goes, the skip is the only other option. When engines that are being offered for free are still in the box at the end of the day, that is a clue as to their desirability.

Ultimately, unless you are prepared to identify, describe and photograph anything up to 4,000 engines or more, deal with the sale, pack and post said number and deal with post sale problems, then the options open are very limited. Also it very much depends on the personal relationship with the engines, and ultimately who gets the cash, especially if you are a non benefiting executor or acting on behalf of more than one legatee when it can get very messy.

What does help immensely is a bit of forethought where what can be put together is, correct engines in boats and cars and everything labelled. If it is yours, then you will probably know exactly what it is and the history behind it, but if it 'aint written down then its guesswork or worse for whoever is sorting it, which can affect values considerably.

It is a sad fact that at present the quantity of items awaiting disposal is absolutely staggering, especially as some of the very largest collections are already on the market via various means or will be so in the very near future. Difficult to believe but OTW is aware of over 15,000 engines alone that will have to be sold or otherwise disposed of.

Tight Lines Special. Tyres The vital component.

We have been approached by a regular contributor and runner at Buckminster who has become concerned with the number of tyre failures that have been experienced recently, both on and off the track. Unfortunately, this is all too common, right from the fastest FEMA car through to the most pedestrian of retro cars.

Unusual FEMA failure	Raylite style that failed	Solid tyre failures

There are essentially four styles of tyre that are in current use. The flat and very thin, vulcanised rubber FEMA style tyres, moulded solid rubber, moulded hollow rubber and rubber bonded on to a steel core, Raylite style, also used commonly in the eastern bloc and for much larger wheels. What each of the first two relies on totally is a bead or groove that matches the wheel halves to keep it on the wheel, very much like a full sized car tyre that relies on air pressure. In the case of the hollow tyres either a perforated ring was inserted into the tyre to stop the bead coming out or the tyre was designed so that when the wheel halves were tightened up the two beads of the tyre were clamped together so securing the tyre within the bead groove.

Similarly with the solid tyre, but many of those being produced or used by British companies in the late 1940s did not have any bead at all and just relied on the integrity of the rubber on a hub to keep the tyre in place. Often a tyre would have to be stretched over a rim to get it to seat, not an easy job and one would assume that the tyre was there for keeps? Usually the tyres were solid enough to maintain their shape at the speeds of the day, but as speeds increased, there was absolutely nothing to stop the tyre expanding and either cracking or coming off the hub completely as contemporary photos show, with complete tyres or longs strips of rubber exiting the circle.

A tyre intended for a FEMA car is going to be more than adequate for any car likely to run at Buckminster, but there is a limit to the minimum size available and matching wheels are required, a solution that is being used regularly here, Australia and the USA

The alternative is to use existing vintage tyres, but these can be of very varying quality. Of the thousands of tyres made for ZN and 1066 some are rock hard and would probably break or disintegrate, some are perished beyond salvation, but others are seemingly soft enough to run safely up to sensible speeds, especially on non driving wheels.

For a while there was a growing market in reproduction tyres of many sizes and configuration from small Raylites up to the largest balloon tyre for 10cc cars. The late Ron Bernhardt in particular produced a range of ten tyres that were fine to run but no longer available. Endre Bogden also moulded a huge range of different tyres, but with the advantage that the name or logo of the original manufacture was included in the moulds.

Rock hard McCoy and C&R	Dooling & Rowell with ring	Solid moulded with metal core

Endre sold up his entire stock in 2018, but has now passed the moulds on and so new tyres are already becoming available, particularly Raylites with the correct lettering. Similarly, Arne Zetterstrom had dozens of tyre moulds, that we, collectively, tried to acquire after his death, but they have now disappeared.
 

There were a huge range of reproduction tyres being manufactured in the US, but there was a clear warning that these were 'for display only' and not to be run, and herein lies the problem. There are two stages to moulding tyres as Steve Turley gave us chapter and verse on, the composition of the rubber and the vulcanisation process. Both have to be right to avoid failure, and unfortunately, recent attempts to reproduce tyres, not in the UK we add, have led to substandard tyres, liable to burst at speed. Using thermoplastic material is a quick route to disaster, which was what occurred in the US. Even more problematical was an entire production run of reproduction tyres and wheels that had been designed with no bead or bead groove in the wheel, so that at any realistic speed, the tyre just pulled out of the wheel 200 wheels and 400 tyres again for display only. Left: Reproduction ZN tyre and wheel with no bead or groove, tyre expands off the wheel at modest speed.

What is happening is that the rubber expands, but not equally, so that the tyre goes oval creating huge vibration and pulling out of the bead. If this happens when the car is not under load then the tyre will explode sending shrapnel everywhere and probably causing injury. The tyre failures we are experiencing in the UK are down to using tyres past their sell by date, allowing engines to run up with no load and failures due to fault in the manufacturing. Most worrying have been the failures of seemingly perfect and new twinshaft tyres where there was no bond between the steel washer and the rubber or any signs that the rubber had flowed through the drilled holes. Jan Huning has experienced this on more than one occasion and when it happened again at Buckminster it was possible to peel the rubber away from the washer completely. The entire washer was removed from the tyre with no sign of it having been bonded anywhere.

 Here it is important to point out that these do NOT include the new production of Raylites being supplied by Oliver Monk.

The current situation regarding tyres that can be run safely is not wonderful. There are new production Raylites available in one size only and a selection of Raylite and 1066 'style' available in the UK from Bill Bannister. Pavel Sarigins can supply fronts and rears in limited sizes. Mike Francies and Nigel Bathe have been making tyres for their own use for a while, but are hoping to make these available, with wheels, when the final spec has been arrived at. FEMA tyres are available from Michael Schmutz, but as yet he has not got his sales site up and running, so apart from that it is what can be sourced from existing stocks held by enthusiasts or from collectors that might not require all they have.
 

Oliver fitted with beaded tyres	Moore #11s with FEMA wheels and tyres

We recently unearthed around 130 pairs of reproduction tyres, but all of them were by then twenty years old. Some were eminently useable, others with caution and inspection and a large number that were either so hard, so soft or incorrect design that they again were suitable for display only. It may seem difficult to believe, but at any international meeting, dozens of tyres are thrown away or freely available as the have been cut to a specific size and then discarded when worn, perfect for our use. Why some tyres can last seventy years and be fine is something of a mystery, but compare with the tyre on the right that now has the consistency of toffee fudge yet is fitted on a SMRU car being used until very recently.

In the early days of running tethered cars in this country there were no tyres available, so it was often rubber rings glued to wooden wheels, heel rubber, conveyor belt or railway rubber clamped between wheel halves.
 

FEMA 10cc tyre	1066 and ZN repro, Grenwyn	Repro Moki and small FEMA

Some may remember the lovely ETA powered car that appeared on Find It fix it Flog it with Henry Cole. The tyres had perished, but they declined our help and advice so they had dummy wheels made up with rubber strip glued round the outside, you can imagine how long they lasted? This is not the only tale of woe as a newly built car recently came on to the market where the tyres were again just rings of rubber, albeit with a tread pattern, but just rolled on to a plain wheel, and on a car with a potential in the high 80s, imminent disaster? This is another example of how a shortage of useable parts can hold back progress, but those we do have might not be safe to use. Seventy years ago, Jim Cruickshank built a tyre testing rig just to see what did happen to the tyres he had available at the speeds he was anticipating, and that was for running at very modest speeds. Note that Jim is well removed from any danger.