A day at the auction
IRECENTLY attended the disposal auction for a well-known local Land Rover specialist following the retirement of its owner. Mark Peacock Land Rovers has been a familiar name in this part of the world for some 30 years now, and the sale catalogue looked tempting with a good variety of garage tools, secondhand Land Rover parts and a splendid assortment of Land Rovers, old tractors, motorcycles and mopeds, army surplus trailers and a huge Leyland Martian tank recovery vehicle.
I have far too many oily old bits of Land Rover cluttering up the place already but I thought it would be a nice day out so I hitched up the trailer to my old Peugeot dog carrier and headed off with a limited budget and a determination not to get carried away.
Needless to say, I got carried away. The general workshop equipment looked to be fetching good money, but most of the buyers seemed to be there for the tractors and implements, and I soon found myself wishing I had brought a bigger trailer and more cash. As it was I came away with a haul that included three good transfer boxes, two 200Tdi cylinder heads, a load of power steering boxes and pumps, starter motors, carburettors and much more.
All good usable bits of the kind which I am happy to have on the shelf as I know I will find a use for them before too long. I also bought an old twin-choke Weber carburettor, nicely-machined manifold adapter and four-branch tubular exhaust manifold for a Series 2.25 petrol engine, which I am rather less likely to put to good use but found interesting. I wonder who made this conversion?
The sale lot which attracted me most was a box of assorted Churchill service tools for older Land Rovers. These are the tools used by Land Rover main dealers for many years, of high quality and very expensive to buy new. Many of the tools in the box are duplicates of items that I already have, but I can now retire some of my more dubious home-made special tools, such as the scrap injection pump I have been using for years to set the pump timing on 2.25 diesel engines. If I had to go out and buy all these tools brand-new it would set me back somewhere around £2000. As it was I paid rather less than that for them.
I missed the end of the auction as I was busy trying to fit about a ton and a half of spares into my car and trailer: the two star lots were an ex-norfolk Fire Brigade Series IIA fire engine and a (possibly unique) Townley six-wheel drive conversion of a 109 V8, freshly restored on a galvanised chassis. The Series IIA, fabulously original but getting close to needing a new rear crossmember, made a healthy £7000, but the Townley beast failed to reach its reserve.
Acquiring such a large quantity of parts finally forced me to clear and tidy my parts store which had got into a terrible state. It took me two full days to get everything squared away, and in among the parts I had bought I found a nice little surprise. One of the lots included what looked like a box of old seatbelts. I started emptying the box and found at the bottom a small collection of rare parts including Series II / IIA windscreen demisters which always sell well, and not one but two Series I fuel filler caps (still available new at £180 plus VAT, but very hard to find secondhand at any price). I haven’t had that much luck since I bought unseen a job lot of old Land Rover spares some years ago, and found that they included a brand-new SIII bulkhead.