Yeah, it is usually a bummer to ship from England to the U.S. But I am struck by the variation in pricing. I have bought stuff from private vendors, e.g., eBay UK, and found them to be often pretty reasonable. By that I mean sending those sill dress plates for example, for say 20 BP, seems reasonable. To charge $60 seems fishy to me - sort of like the eBay folks who have give-away prices on items but charge you $30 "shipping and handling" for something that costs $15 and then the item shows up at your house in a USPS mailer that you can get at any Office Depot for $7. I recently bought some posters which were shipped in stiff cardboard tubes from the UK. These tubes would have easily accommodated a set of sill plates and I think the shipping was around $18. Sill plates aren't heavy, just long.
As far as sill protectors go, I just went with black generics when I renovated my '89 - which I got here in the old U.S.A. I did some trimming and they look just fine. I actually prefer them to the previous metal ones I installed when I first bought my car. The metal quickly dinged and scratched - the vinyl are rugged, don't show much wear, and clean up easily. I drive my car a lot, near daily, so the sills get a fair amount of ingress and egress traffic. I've attached a picture (they are from Auto Ventshade). I trimmed off the return, which was simple to do with a sharp blade and a straight edge and installed them in my Esprit.
If you think about it, if someone knows this business I wonder if you could get these metal plates fabricated here in the U.S. in a bulk order of say 100 pairs or so and get them for a quite reasonable cost. As suggested - a group buy. I have done this with some Lotus special tools and the group idea has always worked out rather well.
