Winter Vehicle Prep
Alisdair and James are buoyant as the SI nears completion, but not everything goes to plan
Winterise your Land Rover to face the worst that cold weather can throw at you
Finally, we’re doing what we envisaged. When you think of restoring a car, you imagine fitting new parts to the clean basis of a vehicle. Thankfully, after months of looking at a stripped-down carcasse, surrounded by grinding dust and metalwork tools, we’re now at that imagined point. When anyone comes to the workshop, we no longer get shocked enquiries about “what are you going to with that pile of scrap?”. Tellingly, they now all make the same cooing and ahhing, enthusing about the “proper Land Rover looking good”. Amazing what a bit of paintwork can do.
There are still plenty of problems, checking and judgments to make, but thankfully they now involve components that bolt on, with the chassis and drivetrain merely the base for the items we now have to fit. Being largely cosmetic parts, they have to look right, so correct alignment on the new bulkhead was the main item on the agenda.
We even got to see the car looking like a Series I again, as the wings and bonnet went on in a trial fit.
It was important to remember the aim of the project, too. I’m not doing a reborn car, perfect in every sense. Instead, it’s more a case of preserving a car with an interesting history, keeping the character of its 60 years. Modern technology, two-pack paintwork with a finish like glass just wouldn’t look right. But what is right? To get the old and new to blend, I cleaned up a vent panel, which the bodyshop then scanned using a spectrometer, then had paint mixed up to match. Fully briefed on what I needed to achieve, the paint shop also did all they could to match the finish to that of the aged, original cellulose factory paint. A cracking job they did too, on both colour and finish.
To avoid a glossy, high-end restoration look, I’ve used as many original parts as possible. Original fixings, switches and blanking plates all went back on the new bulkhead where feasible, to blend new with old, creating something that looks more 1950s factory than modern day. The aim being to keep the character of the car, rather than erase it.
Does it work? Well, I think so. Progress is fairly rapid from now on, so this is the last of our dirty work, and odd headache. There was just a simple water pump change, then the exhaust manifold to connect. Or so we thought. Things never quite go to plan, do they?