About
What this is
Where this archive came from, how sure we are of it, and how to contribute or ask for something to be taken down.
The Sterling is the American version of the Nova, a British kit car designed in 1971 by Richard Oakes and Phil Sayers and licensed around the world under a dozen names: Eureka and Purvis in Australia, Cimbria in Denmark, Ledl in Austria, Totem in Italy. A few thousand were built, almost all of them one at a time, in home garages, by people who are now in their seventies and eighties.
The knowledge of how to build and keep these cars ended up scattered across club sites, owner forums, photo hosts and magazine scans. That material has been quietly disappearing: forums go read-only, photo hosts delete albums, club sites lapse when the person paying for them stops. This archive gathered what could still be reached into one place, and this site gives it back.
What is in it
Forum discussions from the Sterling, Eagle and Eureka communities. The historical owner registry. Construction and assembly manuals with their text extracted so you can search inside them. Club newsletters going back to 1976. Photographs recovered from the pages they were posted on. Film found through the same sources.
How sure we are of it
Two things are worth saying plainly, because archives of this sort often do not say them.
There is no serial number decoder. Nothing in this material establishes a factory formula that turns a serial number into a build date, model year or production sequence. The site will look your number up against every car it knows of. It will not pretend to decode it, and you should be careful of anyone who does.
The guides are assembled, not issued. The garage guides are built from preserved source documents and from what owners have told one another over thirty years. They are a reference, not a factory manual, and each one names its sources so you can go and read the original.
Material was included or left out by stated rules rather than by taste. The crawl that produced this archive followed links outward and picked up a great deal that has nothing to do with these cars: a hose catalogue, a Subaru service manual, forum avatars. Records were kept when they came from a club or forum source, when they named one of the marques, or when they were linked from a club page and were clearly about building or driving this kind of car. Everything else was set aside.
Whose material this is
Copyright stays with whoever holds it: the people who wrote the posts, took the photographs, drew the diagrams and printed the newsletters. Every item here shows where it came from and links back to the original wherever the original still exists. Nothing has been relicensed, and no reuse permission has been established for the recovered material.
The historical registry lists people by name and town. That was already published on the registry it came from, but reproducing it here is a separate act, and anyone listed can have their entry reduced or removed by asking.
Contribute something
This archive is as good as what people send it. If you have photographs, a manual nobody has scanned, a magazine clipping, a correction, or the name of someone who was there, it is wanted.
You do not need to own one of these cars to contribute, and you do not need a password. Signing in is done with a link sent to your email.
Ask for something to be removed
If something here is yours and you would rather it were not, whether that is your name in the registry, a photograph you took, or something you wrote, say so and it will come off. You do not have to explain yourself, and you do not need an account.
The photographs on this site
The pictures in the page headers and section bands are not decoration bought in from somewhere; they are photographs of these cars, taken by their owners and recovered from the archive. Each one is listed here with where it came from. None of them is licensed for reuse.
Who made this
Assembled by Gearshift Garage and given back to the Sterling and Nova community. It is free, it carries no advertising, and it is not selling anything.