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"Doris" - 1964

Series 2a (1)

This is Doris, my 1964 Series 2a after 2 years hard work.

 

She was bought in May '06 after having originally being found on eBay.  She had no M.O.T., and was in a very sorry state of disrepair.  Some of it's 16 previous owners had performed various "repairs and modifications", including a "rewire" - mostly with mains flex terminal blocks and a door bell push as a starter!  It had also been re-painted twice, first in black then in green, both times by hand - lovley artex-like finish!

 

There were however a couple of redeeming features that made it worthy of purchase.  First of all it had it's original engine, which with a little coaxing started and ran quite smoothly without smoking, and was driveable.  The gear box and transfer box were also in working order.  The second point, all the important parts, body panels etc. were present, not too badly worn or damaged, and original.

 

My original plan when I purchased it was to make it roadworthy, and use it for greenlaning and general tom-foolery.  There was however a flaw in my plan, when I started to undo some of the previous "repairs", and look at what work was needed to make it roadworthy I discovered that the original chassis was unfortunately beyond repair.

 

During the journey home, the right hand rear spring hanger had collapsed into the chassis, this was just an indication of how far advanced the rust in the chassis was.  The only sensible option was to replace the chassis, after a lot of searching around, I chose a Marsland heavy duty galvanised one.