OUR CLASSICS
A resto treat following this van’s retirement has taken too long but Richie finally has some positive news
1964 BEDFORD HA VAN
’T was the week before Christmas and it looked like the missus could be getting the best classic Christmas gift that she’d had in a long time. The arrival of the two wise men – Jon and Matthew – bestowed much goodness on the van which had, until three months ago, been lying dormant. And dormant it had been for many years. But let’s have a look at how we got to where we are now.
The missus bought the Viva when she had it’s been a while! a gardening business. The engine was nearing the end of its life but it still worked well enough, starting first time and getting the loaded van and trailer around Llanelli and Gower, covering up to 300 miles a week.
Then she gave up work and decided that the van needed some refurbishment. It was solid underneath but, just as with Mini vans, there was rot around the gutters. The solution? Give it a 1960s ‘kustom’ makeover. De-gutter the panels (as with a Wood and Pickett Mini), re-paint the body and tidy up the interior.
As you can see from the photos we had the paint sorted but the uneven de-guttering is nowhere near what it should be. What’s more the ‘specialist’ (this was already the second one who said they could do the work) then hid it in a barn outside Neath. Getting it back meant waiting outside the specialist’s house for a day – believe me, sitting in a Land Rover Series II on a wet and cold February isn’t much fun.
Nevertheless, we got it back. And so on to the next ‘specialist’ who took the van and a couple of boxes of parts removed by the previous one and in the space of a full year managed to… re-fit the instrument cluster. But nothing else. Happily things are now looking up, courtesy of Jon the Tec. In fact there’s been more progress from him working on it one or two days a week over the past couple of months than there was during the three-plus years that those so-called ‘specialists’ had it.
It’s great to be able to say that the van is now back on track and (whisper it) it could be MoT’d and on the road as soon as Easter.
So where do we begin with this rejuvenation? The first thing to say is that Jon is remarkably methodical. He spent an hour or so going over it, seeing what parts we had and what was missing. Then we started putting together a shopping list of parts that would be needed, Jon’s plan being to get the van properly up and running, rather than doing a few hasty fixes that would see it driving, but undoubtedly with mechanical woes not too far off.
The first thing
