yesterday afternoon the big day, the Nation Road/Safety test to get a license registration in NL to drive the car in Holland.
It has multiple layers since the car was never registered in Europe before, so some extra tests are required to make it road-legal here.
Paperwork, ID check, check if it is not build out of more than 2 cars, structural integrity check (rust), length, width, determine weight of the car, and then enter the technical area.
The Technical Area was the part why I was a bit nervous. They check everything really strict and since I did a lot to the car, a lot could come out of it...
did I do a good job ?
Click to view attachment
this is the scale where they determine the weight of the car, one of the checks/tests
Short sad version : it failed the test.
Emotional version: why fail it over such small defects ?!?!
Optimistic version : it only failed over 2 easy thingies, easy to solve
Everything was in great order, also the brakes (that cost me a lot of money, time and energy), lights, tires, electrics, play, steering, shocks etc etc all in good order.
It failed because of two things:
1) damaged rubber dustcover of the steering balljoints
2) left windscreenwasher nozzle was not effective enough (it worked, but not good enough)
So, at first I was disappointed the car failed (actually it meant that I failed), then I realized it is actually roadworthy and legal after those thingies are fixed !
But that will take some time, since due to Covid19 the earliest re-check will be about 6 weeks from now.
This gives me some time to find and replace the dustcoverboots and fix the nozzle defect.
It was a day filled with different emotions, and I slept good last night (better than the night before the test )
PS a good thing to mention: I was not allowed to drive the car on the Dutch roads, because it is not registered yet. That gives some challenges if you want to test stuff like the brakes.
Yesterday, at the day of the test, you get a license registration for the day to drive it so you can come to the teststation.
This means I really drove it for the first time since I bought it, which was also exciting.
In the end this day was a good test for man and machine....