Looking back . . .
IWAS on my way to deliver a vehicle to a customer a few weeks ago when it occurred to me that it was 30 years, almost to the day, since my first Land Rover “restoration” gained an ill-deserved MOT certificate and took to the roads, trailing smoke and leaking oil from every seal and gasket. AFE 562A – a 1960 Series II 109 inch truck cab with the 2.25 petrol engine – wasn’t my first Land Rover, but it was my first project, and one which taught me a great deal in a short space of time.
In the summer of 1990 I found myself living in a caravan on a farm, on the waiting list for fairly major surgery, with plenty of time on my hands and not much money. The farmer was a Land Rover man who ran a Ninety with an Isuzu diesel conversion (quite a novelty at the time) and readily agreed to my request to use his workshop and welding equipment, so I set out to find a suitable project vehicle. A few miles away was a small, one-man Land Rover garage of the sort that seemed to be everywhere back then – an old barn behind a bungalow surrounded by the heavily-stripped remains of several dozen Series vehicles.
I was looking for something reasonably complete that would move under its own power. The proprietor gestured towards a
pair of 109s – a red one for £450 and a grey one for £300. Back then that was about the right money for an old petrol Series vehicle needing some love. Diesels were still in demand as workhorses, but a Series II or IIA with a petrol engine was hard to shift unless it was very cheap. I had a good look over the pair. Both were truck cabs, the red vehicle being a bit newer than the grey. I can’t remember exactly why I ended up going for the grey one: probably just that it was a bit cheaper. We struck a deal involving transport to the farm and a few spares thrown in the back, and a couple of days later I was having a good poke around my new acquisition and wondering what I had let myself in for.
The vehicle was a former recovery truck, with big holes in the rear floor where a Harvey Frost crane had been welded to the chassis. Most garages at one time had a crane-equipped Land Rover or something very similar, and back in 1990 every village garage and filling station seemed to have a derelict recovery truck on four flat tyres dumped at the back of the yard. For many years there was no requirement to register such vehicles: they could be driven on trade plates while being used for recovery work, and my new acquisition had only been registered with DVLA in 1988. Why would someone go to the trouble of registering a Land Rover, only to sell it for scrap shortly afterwards? I was about to find out.
Basically, the chassis was rotten from the gearbox back to the rear crossmember. The footwells were non-existent, brakes seized solid, the seats had disintegrated and the engine barely ran. AFE 562A was a very original example of an early Series II with the correct “151” engine, wide-tank radiator, all-aluminium seat box, deep sills and so on. These days if someone offered me a vehicle like that for sensible money I would probably bite his hand off, but by 1990 standards this Series II was beyond economic restoration. With all the enthusiasm of youth I set about trying to rescue it on a budget of about two pounds fifty.
My first port of call was the scrap pile behind the farm which yielded a substantial length of steel channel, some offcuts of 3mm sheet and various lengths of angle iron. I fabricated a rear crossmember of sorts and set to with the farm welder. Does anyone use electric arc welding any more? Thirty years ago MIG welders were a rarity: the choice for most DIY restorers was arc or gas, and arc was much cheaper. It required a certain technique to get the arc started, and it was very easy to burn through the metal if you did not keep the welding rod moving fast enough. But with a bit of practice you could get lovely strong welds, the process did not require any gas bottles, and the flux-coated rods were very cheap. By the time I bought my first MIG welder a few years later I could arc-weld a rotten silencer box, but compared to arc welding, using a MIG was like drawing the welds onto the metal with a felt tip pen. I haven’t touched an arc welder since.
Looking at the photographs I took at the time, I can see that even then I knew there was no point in welding patches over rusty metal. Having lifted the rear body off the chassis I cut so much metal out of it that I am surprised the poor old thing did not fold up like a penknife. The footwells got the same treatment, with 3mm steel plate cut up and stitched together in situ with the arc welder to form something which was at least roughly the same shape as the original. New footwells were probably available to buy, but I couldn’t afford them.
I worked on the Series II through the autumn and into the winter whenever the weather was kind. I stripped the seized brake cylinders and rebuilt them with Girling seal kits from the local car accessory shop, cleaned 30 years’ worth of rust and scale out of the radiator with caustic soda, cobbled together an exhaust system from Ford Cortina bits and fitted a set of seats from a Mini which left me perched so high above the seatbox that I could barely get my legs under the steering wheel. I worked my way through the electrics, bringing the vehicle back to life one light unit at a time, and by mid-february I had something which started, stopped, steered and bore at least some resemblance to a roadworthy Land Rover. Then the snow came.
The winter of 1990-91 was a bad one, with some of the heaviest snowfall seen in eastern England for many years. The snow fell heavily and then the wind got up and formed the fresh snow into deep drifts. The farm was cut off from the outside world. Some people would see this as a bad thing: I saw this as an opportunity to test my new Land Rover. For a couple of glorious hours I drove it up and down the farm tracks, the narrow 7.00 x 16 Michelin truck tyres biting deep through the snow to the solid ground underneath. It was unstoppable (until it ran out of petrol).
After a few days the snow melted. I attended to the last few jobs, took it for MOT (which it passed first time) and celebrated by spending my last few pounds on a secondhand rear canvas and hoops for it. The “three-quarter canvas” – hard roof truck cab with a canvas hood over the load area – is another bit of Land Rover history which seems to have faded from view in recent years. When I was growing up in rural Lincolnshire, just about every Land Rover on the road was a truck cab Series III, either green or blue, with a tatty khaki canvas flapping in the wind and a couple of gundogs or a collie in the back.
That configuration has fallen right out of fashion: I took a look at a popular auction website just now, and of the 75 Series vehicles offered for sale not a single one had the three-quarter canvas.
When the weather warmed up a bit I sanded down the original Mid-grey paintwork and gave it two brush coats of dark green “Woco” tractor enamel, the same sticky, slow-drying paint I had used on my first Land Rover. The stuff attracted every small flying insect for miles around while it was still tacky but the end result looked quite smart from 20 feet away. But shiny paint could not hide the death rattle from main bearings worn down to the backing metal (and probably half-way through it): EP90 gear oil in the sump kept the racket down and the oil pressure light out, but by now I had the use of a Cortina pick-up truck with a tuned 2-litre Pinto engine, so I parked the Land Rover on the verge outside the farm with a “For Sale” sign on it and within two days had sold it for £650 plus the services of the buyer’s Labrador dog to get my bitch in pup. Happy days.
Thirty years on, and I found myself strapping down a Land Rover onto a trailer ready to return it to its owner after some major repair work. By happy coincidence the vehicle was a 109 inch truck cab petrol, an early Series IIA with twin wiper motors, Smiths fug-stirrer heater, push-button start and all the other features that fans of these magnificent old ladies will know and love. I hope I have learned a little, and picked up a few skills, in the 30 years since I returned AFE 562A to the road: but one thing which has not changed is my taste in Land Rovers. A farm-specification 109 is still close to the top of my list of vehicles I would like to own, alongside a Lightweight, an early One Ten V8 and a two-door Range Rover.