A couple of recent questions about Alvis cars for sale remind us that careful enquiries about provenance are often readily answered by Model Secretaries and the published Model Registers.
The Registers record the original coachbuilder and configuration. As long as you have reliable numbers to work on you can verify if a tourer or drophead was originally a saloon. A devious seller may provide documentation to support originality, or even alter numbers. The fact that Alvis themselves also altered numbers adds to the doubts that might surround a particular car. The advice is therefore to do your research before you buy, especially if originality is what you seek.
The copy build sheet shows someone added the words Tourer. Suspicion was aroused because of the different type face. The Register shows the car was a saloon.
Photos have been added to the Speed Models page to record the current bodies on two original saloons, 14626 and 13687.
Meanwhile as an update of these desirable Cross & Ellis tourers, one of the four Edinburgh Police cars (BSC 307-310) has now been imported to the UK by Richard Proctor from an Australian restoration and reunited with its BSC 310 identity.
The vintage and post vintage cars are often restored with new bodies – here is one recent example….
The later cars are also subject to alteration or decapitation. For those needing to know how the original hoods should look here are the Park Ward archive pictures of their construction.
More entries have been added to the Photo Competition page and more are welcome. A few new photos have been included on other pages.
Alvis Archive 
Picture number 19 looks like it was taken in the old Glebe road site, the chap in the Brown coat is David [forgot his last name] he ran the photo club at PW of which I was a member. Do not remember the trimmer, I can only recall Sid Phillips as the only one who constructed the hoods on the coupe, he might be a guy who stood in for the picture. I think it was most lightly a picture set up by Dave, as he was one of the first to own a 35mm camera in those days. The reason I can remember all this is, that Sid would be besides my bench when he did the trimming, while I made up the windows ect, and would often give him a hand, stretching material, and setting up the hood bars. The trim shop was at the far end of the line in a clean room area, Good times to remember look forward to seeing other pictures of the Alvis line. Regards Vic Johnson