Dan Wilmshurst runs monthly meetings for the Hull and East Yorkshire region of Club Triumph. He had always wanted an example of the rare Herald/Vitesse-based Bond Equipe, but could never find one he could afford or that was within reach of his home in Hull.
Then recently he saw on eBay a down-at-heel example of a GT4S from 1964 that was in York. The price was just £100, so he pressed the ‘bid’ button and was surprised that no one outbid him. A friend of a friend had a trailer and agreed to help him pick up the car.
On collection day, Wilmshurst arrived to find that the Bond had not been misdescribed: it was rough. It was pouring with rain and the owner kindly picked up the Bond with his forklift and put it in a dry workshop, where Wilmshurst removed the wheels and fitted a spare set so it could be loaded on to the trailer. The old wheels were shod with a set of tyres made in the former German Democratic Republic, all flat and completely rotten yet almost unused, still with their moulding nipples. The car’s brake calipers and drums almost fell off when tapped with a hammer.
The previous owner had bought the Equipe – for its bumper and headlight trims – for just £50 at an auction. Prior to that it had been standing for 15 years or more, having been parked in the open under a tree after it lost the use of its garage. At some point it had been buried up to its sills in gravel and vandalised. Only one piece of glass was unbroken, there was lots of moss and mould, and the rare and highly prized Microcell Contour 6 seats had disintegrated, along with the dashboard.
Once back home, Wilmshurst thoroughly jetwashed the Equipe and quickly nicknamed a previous owner ‘The Artful Bodger’, having discovered that they had covered almost every metal surface with glassfibre – which was all that was left of large areas of the floor. The spare wheel had been relocated from the boot to a carrier in front of the radiator, and the bonnet grilles had been moved, with the swage lines blended into the bonnet. The electrics were peculiar, with bits of striped earth wire running into the doors, switches on the door latches and a backlit Bond badge. From a distance the stripes and lettering looked acceptable, but up close it was as if it they been applied with electrical tape. It is going to be a substantial restoration.
BARN-FIND PICKED UP
Traditionally, a pick-up truck consists of a roofed front cab section, housing two
