This week we have had some urgent work to do on our vans and trucks. So Yogi has spent a few days welding and repairing those and makes a short term change to looking after Mustangs. We like to refer to it as ‘looking after’ these cars for our customers. In fact we treat them as if they were our own.

Customer Cars

We have a ’67 Fastback with us for a rather nice upgrade. One of our Holley Sniper Kits straight of the shelf.

The car has had some fuel and wiring upgrades in the past, so it wasn’t exactly stock. It took a while to figure out what goes where and what could be unplugged under the dash and unbolted. We placed all the old bits into a container for the customer in case he wants them back. A fair bit of kit here, but to be honest a little dated and cumbersome under the hood.

The first step was to remove the old carb and intake manifold ready for the substantial upgrade. The car has already had some mods such as the serpentine belts, pullies and a number of billet parts as well.

The Sniper EFI kit gives the fuel injection starting reliability with controlled fuelling via a carb. The system control and setup is via a small display screen which can be tweaked for your driving style and learns as it goes along. The LCD screen is placed inside the car where it could be hidden or just loose mounted for when it’s needed. One of our customers has the screen on a clever hinge system then he just flicks down from under the dash, and folds up out of the way when not in use. The ECU is mounted on the carb itself, so again no additional boxes around the engine bay.

The under dash has seen some modifications and looks a bit of a mess at the moment.

So rather than sort all that out now, we will pass through the wiring for the EFI and then tidy up the cabling once we are happy that everything is working as expected.

Other News

We have the UK’s postal service, ‘Royal MFail’ striking yet again which is all out of our control. When we posted about this in the past, we got some flack over it, even some abuse! When we don’t advise of the strikes we got even more flack over it, as customers didn’t know of the strikes.

Royal Fail were on strike 31st September and 1st October with much more to follow as noted below. So if you didn’t receive your parts that’s the reason. If you want more up to date information from Royal Fail click here.

• Thursday 13 October 2022
• Thursday 20 October 2022
• Tuesday 25 October 2022
• Monday 28 November 2022

Further dates which impacts parts of the Royal Fail’s ‘operation’ are on the following dates & services:

• Processing, Distribution, International, Collections, Admin: 3, 9, 15, 24 November and 1 December 2022
• Delivery: 4, 10, 16, 25 November and 2 December 2022
• Network: 2, 8, 14, 23, 30 November 2022

Important Announcement – Our Postage

It’s fully understandable that people are trying to make savings were possible with the cost of the postal service (when they’re not on strike), costs of living and business costs escalating exponentially, a difficult decision has had to be made from a business point of view.

We have seen a significant increase in the number of people ‘abusing’ the free postage we offered on orders up to £50 over the last couple of months. Our customers asked us if free postage was something we could do, we obliged with the caveat we will review the service if it’s abused. What we have clearly evidenced from recent sales analysis was larger orders were being broken down into smaller chunks to get the free postage service. In some cases on multiple orders to the same customers, we were effectively giving away our parts that were equal to the cost of the postage that the customer had saved. Great if you’re the customer, but a bad business model. If you go supermarket shopping, you don’t get free products if they give you free parking. If the supermarkets offer a delivery service, they won’t give you free products and free delivery.

Over the last couple of months we have carefully monitored the sales/postage trend which had resulted in a number of meetings with Adam and his WebShop team. The decision was not taken lightly, this trend just can’t continue. For that, we are very sorry.

What we have done about it?

We have now introduced a single fair ‘Flat Fee’ of £5 per order up to £50, then continue with the standard costs after that for the larger orders which hasn’t changed. The heavier items will still cost more than the £5 flat fee, so you are in effect getting a subsidised postage rate. It now makes sense to order multiple items for your order up to £50 rather than smaller orders. that way you will save on postage.

You can still collect yourself, make your own arrangements for collections, just let us know what you want to do and your order will be ready for you.

Is this permanent?

This £5 flat fee will be reviewed fairly on a monthly basis. Once we can see the costs of living and services have returned to more manageable levels, we would revert back to the “Free Postage” options again.

We also output a Facebook message yesterday about the postage change on our group pages to advise our customers as well.

We hope that our customers understand the difficult decision that has had to be taken. In fact it was a simple decision from a business point of view, but we kept postponing. It was a very difficult decision whether we should pass the costs on to customers.

Stay Safe & Take Care!