Hi Everyone,
I haven't posted in a while, or worked on my car in a while because I've been living and working in Saigon since the end of June. It's looking like I'm going to be here for at least the next two years so have a bit of a dilemma with regards to the kit. My parents are soon to be retiring to France and won't be able to house my (part-finished) car for me (when I say part finished I mean an optimistic pile of parts, that would probably be called 99.9% on ebay).

I'm toying with the idea of sticking the kit, my bike and maybe some furniture/speakers in a container and getting it shipped over here. Does anyone have any experience with this? I guess I want to know how dificult it would be to organise and how much it's likely to cost me. There's a (very) outside chance that my work may fund it in part as part of a relatively favourable expat package. So chime in with your comments.

If I can't ship it, I'll be looking to friends to house it (not overly hopefull on that front though) and failing that will have to sell, but I really don't want to do that.

What is it you wanting to do?

a) Use you spare time to complete the kit?

b) Once built, register it in Saigon? Is that easy to do?

c) Complete and then ship back to UK?

If it is the first one, then can you not start from scratch, buy welder, steel etc; make chassis, buy toyota 4ge (or other commonly avaialble engine), maxda mx5 as donor and off you go.

Sell the pile you have in UJ to fund this.

Then you need to ship it back.

Doesn't sound like you have got very far with what you have at the mo' so the cost to ship it over to you may not make it worthwhile and it'd be cheaper doing the above.

Hopefully when company repatriates you, then hopefully they'll pay for the fully built car back to UK.

One of your problems is always going to be customs duty.

I have seriously looked into shipping a complete kit of parts out to Yemen, to give me something to do, while the locals shoot each other. Trouble is, I would have to pay 20% duty on the parts with little or no likelihood of getting it back when I re-export.

Ask the local customs what they think.

In the pile of bits 'here', what would you struggle to buy 'over there'.

If the answer is nothing, flog it all and buy the bits over there.

If it's bits like GRP panels, get those bits sent over.

I buy piles of junk all the time from the USA shipping is usually very easy to organise and surprisingly cheap. Customs duty can be a bit painful - approach a local agent I suspect that container traffic in your direction would be very reasonable. When you re-import you should be duty exempt.

Hi guys, thanks for your comments.

Funny you should mention customs duty, I'm working as a tax advisor. In a lot of jurisdictions you can import "personal effects" free of charge if you have the right work permits.

I think I want to pull it over, finish it and drive it. Cars here are very expensive due to the 100% tax rate on cars. The only way I could afford to drive a car here would be if I could import that tax-free and drive it.

I guess what I would look to do would be to either rent a container, or rent part of someone's half-empty container to get it shipped over. Where should I start looking with regard to people that might have half-empty containers, or whole containers, and what is a reasonable price to pay? Anyone have any ideas?

ETA: Starting from scratch isn't really possible out here, the steel is cheap, as is some of the equipment required, but car parts are also subject to 100% tax, so seeing as I have most parts needed it would be far better to pull everything over if I can get it tax free. The other problem is that there are NO donors here. If it's considered worthy to be a donnor, it will already be being used as a normal daily driver.

[Edited on 16/10/10 by tomprescott]