Already four SF50 BER airframes
That’s amazing…
Destroyed and Non-Repairable Cirrus Aircraft
This used to be done with cars. You got two Vauxhall Vivas, one front end collision, one rear end collision, you cut them down the middle, and welded the good halves together, then transplanted the chassis numbers… I used to know a gypsy guy who was doing that full-time in the 1980s 
RobertL18C wrote:
Already four SF50 BER airframes
Interesting.
010 was a fire in Santa Monica. It caused an emergency AD which grounded the fleet.
137 got squashed by a collapsing hangar. Can’t fault the airframe for that.
032 was destroyed by a tornado. Ditto to 137
Could not determine what happened to Nr 092.
Peter wrote:
This used to be done with cars. You got two Vauxhall Vivas, one front end collision, one rear end collision, you cut them down the middle, and welded the good halves together, then transplanted the chassis numbers… I used to know a gypsy guy who was doing that full-time in the 1980s
I’ve always tended to think the ‘cut-and-shut’ phenomenon was far less prevalent than rumours might have suggested.
Creating a sellable vehicle in this way, whilst theoretically possible, would be a huge amount of effort and I can’t see how it would be worth anyone’s time and effort to try and make a buck this way, especially when there are many other simpler ways of ripping people off in the motor trade. You also need to work with a matching pair in the same colour, or else spend a lot on painting.
Descriptions of the process tend to focus simply on welding the bodyshells together, but you also have to consider the various functional aspects of the car that pass from front to back: propshaft, brake hydraulics, handbrake cables, exhaust, electrics, etc. all need to be ‘joined’ – not to mention making the interior and exterior trim line up so that it wasn’t totally obvious. It’d be like trying to re-attach a limb! And while it might be simple to weld two shells together, I’d wager it would be really quite difficult to weld them together straight enough so that the car didn’t drive like a total pig that you couldn’t sell to even the dumbest buyer.
With modern vehicles and their complexity, I’d suggest the prevalence is approximately nil.
I’ve never seen a cut-and-shut, but (and I appreciate I know quite a bit more about cars than the average consumer) if I did then I think it’d take me approximately 3 seconds to spot it.
I think the chop shop is prevalent in many countries. I would agree it is less likely with low value vehicles like the Vauxhall Viva but for Mercedes, Jaguars, Porche, and Ferrari it is still a hugely profitable business to criminals.
gallois wrote:
Mercedes, Jaguars, Porche, and Ferrari it is still a hugely profitable business to criminals.
I would find that very surprising. Apart from anything else, the number of a given luxury model in circulation is far lower than for ‘cooking’ models – meaning it is that much harder to find a matching pair of the same model in the same colour, one front-ended and one rear-ended. They are also far more complex with much more gubbins that you’d have to splice together somehow.
The higher selling prices in theory make it more worthwhile, but I’d also have thought higher selling prices meant buyers look a bit more closely. I’d defy anyone to produce a cut-and-shut car (of any model, luxury or cooking) that wasn’t easily identifiable as such with the most cursory of inspections. I don’t doubt there is a profitable semi-criminal market in poor quality but superficially passable repairs of badly-damaged luxury cars, but I would be skeptical of it involving true cut-and-shuts.
The (rumoured) prevalence of them on UK roads was always said to be at the lower end of the market, where people were paying small amounts of money for something to keep them mobile for another year and, perhaps deliberately, didn’t look too closely.
Yes; joining up two halves died out many years ago, partly as a result of it being much easier to check serial numbers etc, but probably largely because you can buy a new “car” now for peanuts for 3 years and then get another one…
30+ years ago the UK road scene looked like today’s GA scene
A friend of mine discovered his mother’s car was a cut and shut when he crashed it. This was in the early 90s, the car a Volvo 3 series. I’m also about 50% certain that the first car I bought (a Ford Sierra) was a cut and shut. Over the time I owned it, I noticed things that seemed to suggest a history of accident damage, such as water leaking where it never should possibly leak.
Cars from this period weren’t all that difficult to cut and shut, especially when things were done “off the books” so normal business overheads and VAT were not a concern. There’s not more than a day’s worth of work in connecting the stuff that goes from front to back in a mk.1 Sierra or a Volvo 340. If some dodgy dealer can buy a couple of write offs for a couple of hundred quid and turn it into one working £2000 (in early 90s money) with off the books labour, they’ve made a fairly good profit.
I remember some fun constructions people came up with with those old cars. The 2CV used to be quite easy to cut and shut or to do even funnier things with it. Incidently,it appears that those people literally got away with a lot of “modifications” with the road safety folks than others in conventional cars.
from minute 26…. (sorry could not find this scene isolated but it is re-occurring). For the German speakers and VW fans quite a fun old movie to watch…
and if you want it more crazy, the mod seen at 1.02 is one I’d love to have :)
alioth wrote:
Cars from this period weren’t all that difficult to cut and shut, especially when things were done “off the books” so normal business overheads and VAT were not a concern. There’s not more than a day’s worth of work in connecting the stuff that goes from front to back in a mk.1 Sierra or a Volvo 340.
Hmmm. As I suggested before there’s a difference between doing it such that the cars are attached, and doing it sufficiently well that no-one would notice with a quick look in the right places. The workmanship in terms of cutting, welding, grinding, smoothing, painting and finishing would need to be absolutely exceptional.
A Google image search does not produce many examples of the geniune article, which gives a clue as to how prevalent it is. Most images are ‘comedy’ cut-and-shuts – hybids of two very different kinds of car or silly stretched cars. The one I did find looked like this – hardly difficult to detect.
