Saving a car that protected Earth from an alien invasion – the ‘SHADO Jeep’
Rescued from Spanish wasteland for €200, this Mini Moke-based ‘SHADO Jeep’ from 1970 TV series UFO demanded an otherworldly restoration effort
People believed it had been destroyed – the last sighting of it was in 1972,’ says Jim Winch of his SHADO Jeep. If you remember the 1980set Sixties sci-fi series UFO, you’ll know that stands for Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation, a secret institution investigating and repelling an ongoing invasion by organ-harvesting aliens. Jim is a huge fan of science fiction and the work of Gerry Anderson in particular, and fancied rescuing one of the series’ cars to go with his collection of props and miniature sets.
‘It was built by Space Models of Weymouth for another Gerry Anderson film, Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun – titled Doppelganger for some overseas audiences – before being restyled and repainted for UFO,’ he explains. ‘They needed it to be able to move under its own power on set, so it ended up based on a production vehicle – a Mini Moke in its case.
‘A video surfaced online, a home movie of a street parade in Tenerife in 1990, and in a clip just a few seconds long, there it was, stripped of its upper bodywork, being used as a carnival float with ten people standing on it,’ Jim explains. ‘Of course that was more than 25 years ago, but it focused my search on Spain. Then in 2015 a friend of mine out there, Luca Pedrazzi, spotted some photos on a local Minienthusiast Facebook page, with someone asking, “does anyone know anything about this amphibious vehicle?” He saw the remains of this futuristic glass fibre bodied car, recognised what it was – and that it wasn’t amphibian – knew I was a Gerry Anderson fan, and gave me a call…
Recovering the wreck
‘Luca and I spent the next day tracking down the Facebook photographer,’ Jim continues. ‘He was part of a building crew clearing some land. They’d taken an old hoarding down, and there it was, among a load of other old cars.
‘Luca offered the crew €200 for these “Mini parts”. They agreed, provided he could get it off the back of the rusty truck sitting in a hole in the ground – and it had no wheels on it. Luca gathered some guys from his village and they carried it to his house, where it was put on transit wheels, and I arranged transport to the UK.
‘Apparently it had turned up in Spain in 1982, along with a film crew who’d brought it over in order to make a very low-budget sci-fi film, but when they got there, their production company went bust – they had no money even to pay to fly the stranded crew back to England,’ Jim explains. ‘So they sold the SHADO Jeep to a local second-hand car trader in order to pay for their tickets home.
‘The first time I saw it was when it turned up at my workplace – a plumbing supplies company – on a trailer. Thankfully I have a very understanding boss who let me store it until I could find someone I could trust to restore it.’
Jim eventually settled on Classic Car Services of Harrietsham, Kent. ‘I’d spoken to other restoration companies, some of whom took one look and turned it down. Others half-heartedly said “yeah, we’ll do it” but had no passion for it and didn’t recognise what it was. John Brooker, Brian Demery and Nick Stone of CCS, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. But we knew it’d be a big job. It had no wheels, no engine, no gearbox, and the middle section of the bodywork had been missing since at least 1990. And I knew from the very first point of the restoration that it had to be made road-legal, even though that’d give John some headaches.
Structure
Says John, ‘The first job was to cut off the glassfibre bodywork to get to the wooden structure underneath. We found a lot of different types of wood – all rotten – that had been built up in layers, clearly just using whatever was around. It had obviously been a trial-and-error process – given that the car was just a prop, only supposed to look good – to build up a platform beneath the glassfibre body once it had been moulded.
‘This was sitting on top of a Mini Moke platform, which was standard except for the top of the headlight housing, which had been chopped straight through to make way for the flat platform.
‘Ironically, despite all the rot, the Moke chassis was actually quite well-preserved by the bodywork and the Spanish weather – we were thinking we’d have to order a replacement, and they’re expensive. But once the chassis was isolated, the corrosion that it was covered with only turned out to be surface rust, which was then taken off in a sandblasting process. After blasting the chassis back to base metal, it was primed then coated in the kind of black chassis paint used to protect the underside of lorries. It’s ugly stuff but none of the chassis shows once the car’s reassembled, so looks weren’t critical – protection from the British climate was!
‘But then the really tricky bit began – we had to build up a wooden inner framework, based around what we’d had to take off. Because the original rotten frame was basically made of offcuts and guesswork, we used plywood in long, solid planks to replicate it, which was both stronger and much quicker to put together. The plywood was brushed over with resin, to give it a plastic coating before the glassfibre went on top. It shouldn’t rot now.’
‘I knew from the beginning that it had to be made road-legal’
‘The glassfibre bodywork is heavier than anything the underlying Moke was designed to cope with, so it needed a more powerful engine’
Bodywork
‘I decided I wanted it restored with its bodywork as it was in UFO, rather than
Doppelganger,’ said Jim. ‘The only other surviving example – which lives in Italy – is in the Doppelganger style, with sidelights set into long coves in the sides of the bodywork, and a curtain arrangement over the rear seating area. They were restyled for UFO and because that’s the last moment in this car’s time with Gerry Anderson, that’s what I wanted to retain.’
But this meant a headache for Brian Demery. ‘There were no doors with it at all – they had to be made up using old photos of the car in the Sixties as a guide,’ he says. ‘At least we had the shape of the roll bar, rear louvred section and windscreen hoop to get the shape right, so we cut some beams of plywood out to form doorframes, skinned them in glassfibre, then cut holes in them for Perspex windows to be fitted.’
Although the most complex parts of the original glassfibre had survived their ordeal in Spain, the bubble-like cockpit housing had weakened in the sun and cracked, leaving a big hole across the roof and windscreen. ‘The whole upper front section was Perspex, with the bodywork sections just sprayed over with paint,’ Brian explains. ‘We cut it into three pieces in order to repair it – the top of the roof, the windows and the rest of the housing.
‘The roof is actually largely the original, repaired with glassfibre matting and filler before being resprayed. The rest was intact and just needed the original sidelight channels refilling. But the Perspex windows took a lot of phone calls!’
Jim had to decide what to do next, otherwise his car wouldn’t have a windscreen. ‘I’d show various Perspex specialists photos of the project, and a lot of them just said, “we can’t do that.” The windscreen especially was just too large for many of them to work with – they’d say they’d need to construct an oven specially for it, and bend the Perspex over a bespoke wooden former. One firm quoted me £10k just for the windscreen.
‘Thankfully, eventually we found Fibresports, a motor sport Perspex specialist based in Basildon, which was able to do the job for £1500, effectively using the original Perspex moulding as the former, and splitting the windscreen into three sections for strength, the joins covered up by authentic-looking Plastichrome strips. That £1500 ran to two sets – I wanted a spare because there’s no way I wanted to have to get another one made if it got broken.
‘I sourced the remaining parts needed to finish the bodyshell off. Thankfully the bumpers – shortened Vauxhall Viva HB items – were intact and just needed rechroming. I found a Viva HB grille, which John cut and shut as per the original, and fitted complete with Viva headlights, but the indicators were bespoke to the SHADO car. To make these, I found some orange Perspex sheets online with the right frosting pattern for Sixties indicator lenses moulded into it, and John and Brian cut them to the right shape and size for the grille.
‘The rear lights are from a Hillman Hunter, which is what you have to search for. They were shared with the Aston Martin V8, and as a result people market them as Aston Martin parts and charge £100 per set for them. If they’re advertised as Hunter parts, they’ll be less than half that.’
Running gear
‘There was no subframe, engine or brakes – we had to weld in a subframe from a scrap Mini just to move it,’ says Jim. The sourcing work began at home, while the remains of the car were still at Jim’s workplace. ‘I decided I wanted to upgrade the brakes from drums to Cooper S discs, and by the time John picked up the car, I’d found a 1275cc A-plus engine and gearbox from either a Metro or a later Mini. It was good, but I still stripped it down and rebuilt it with a new cylinder head and hardened valve seats to take unleaded fuel.
‘It was all about making it usable – the new glassfibre bodywork is much heavier than anything the underlying Moke was designed to cope with, so it needed a more powerful engine and brakes if I was to use it on the road as intended. Metros and Eighties Minis are a good source of A-series parts. Not only are they improved over what went in the Sixties cars, with electronic ignition and a 1¾-inch SU carburettor, but they’re also a lot cheaper.
‘I’ve also included a new aluminium radiator, and am using chemical coolant – given how difficult it is to remove all the sections of bodywork to access the engine, the last thing I wanted to deal with was old-fashioned Mini overheating issues – especially by the side of the motorway!’
Although the use of new parts to replace the non-existent originals saved the team a great deal of bother when restoring the car, the extra row of wheels created its own issues. ‘They just trail along – there’s no drive or braking system,’ explains Brian. ‘What’s more, there’s no adjustment possible on the subframe they’re mounted to, and we don’t want them to scrub the wheels and create drag. So once the subframe had been fitted with new bearings, fitting it was a precision job – it had to be lined up deadstraight with the main chassis.’
Coming together
‘We had to choose to bond the rear doors into the bodywork,’ says Jim. ‘The original design featured four gullwing doors and a piano hinge running all the way down the roof. However, in order to brace the hinges, they had to fix the front section in place, which left no way to get to the engine without removing the entire body – not that this was a consideration on a film set.
‘Instead, we made the decision to go with a single pair of hinged gullwing doors. With the rear doors forming part of the structure, we could attach single-ended hinges to it for the front doors that just clipped into the front section, which could then be removed more easily. It was the only viable solution.’
Devising the structure and mechanism was another of John’s jobs. ‘The main body panels were in three sections – lower body, rear doors and louvred section – which we had to get to fit the car properly, before bonding them all together as one. It was only then that all the surface refinishing and paintwork could be done. We painted the inside first, in Satin Black, and the doors and nose cone were resprayed separately.
‘Getting everything aligned was difficult – we kept having to take the front doors on and off until everything was straight. Although we’ve worked a lot with glassfibre before, this project was unique. Unlike working on most cars, where you can refer to marque reference works, for this job our reference was Jim, because he was the UFO fan. A lot of the time, in order to get it right it’d be a case of “stop! Call Jim!”, and we’d work from photos he’d have, taken on the film set in the Sixties.’
Once completed, Nick Stone resprayed the bodyshell in the original colour Space Models used for UFO – Rootes Group Tahiti Blue – in Classic Car Services’ own spray booth.
Interior
‘The interior looked easy to start with, because there wasn’t any!’ said John. ‘It all looked like simple black rubber matting rather than actual trim, so that made life easier, but the seats were another matter. The original – which didn’t have to be road legal – used old plastic garden chairs covered in vinyl padding, and they were long gone. We fitted Moke seats – standard ones in the rear, but at the front, to replicate the original design, we extended them with another glassfibre Moke backrest bonded on top of some low-backrest Moke originals. Then bespoke foam padding was cut, and the whole things trimmed in black vinyl. All the standard Moke seat parts came from Run Amoke in Maldon.’
The dashboard, however, needed reworking mid-build as Jim explains, ‘From how it appeared on TV, you never got a decent look at the dashboard, so I just fitted a basic three-clock section from an early-sixties Wolseley,’ he says. ‘But just as the restoration came to an end, UFO was released on digitally remastered Blu-ray, with a crystal-clear picture for the first time. I freeze-framed a shot where the interior was visible, and could see the original gauges I’d have to track down – they were from a company called AC, an instrument company, not the car firm, and were used in Rileys in the late Forties and early Fifties. I found a set in a breakers’ yard, and added the dymo-printed labels over the top myself. Gerry Anderson was a big fan of dymo-printing, it looked very futuristic at the time. Although in order to pass the MOT, it’s got a Mini instrument cluster tucked underneath the dashboard.
‘On completion, the car was was very noisy and hot – ventilation was never a consideration – so we covered the bulkhead in a sound-deadening and heat-reflective material, Xtreme Dynomat.
‘We were worried it wouldn’t pass an MOT test with a Perspex windscreen and we’d have to apply for an exemption, but it turns out so long as there’s a clear view through it, it’s fine. We had to add a wiper and washer, although they’re a formality really – using it often would scratch the Perspex, so instead it’s coated in Rain-x.’
Complete!
‘I clock up around 800 miles a year in it now,’ says Jim. ‘The odd classic car show, like the Bromley Pageant, and this year we appeared in the Mini 60th-anniversary display at the London Classic Car Show. But mainly it’s a big draw at science-fiction conventions and Gerry Anderson-themed events. My next project is to restore one of the futuristic sports cars also used in both Doppelganger and UFO.’
‘Just as the restoration was finished, UFO came on high-res Blu-ray. We had changes to make’