"Bev" the Series2A Landy (A farmgirl goes to the city): RECONNOITER MISSION

In early July 2017 after looking through some old photos I came across the shots I had taken of an old Land Rover. I thought it would be pretty cool to restore it so I decided to convince my husband, Garry, it would be a good project to work on together. He wasn’t overly keen at first having other commitments on his mind like running our building business. I worked on him for a week or two and printed off a couple of articles from the online back issues of Land Rover Magazine so he could read about what other people were doing.

"Bev"

I sent a message, with a copy of the photo, to the WA Land Rover Owners Club facebook group to see if they could help with identification. A quick response told us it was a Series IIA and a few Google searches provided us with a bit more information but we didn't have a chassis or serial number. We didn't even have a photo of the front end as I was more focused on a photo of the dogs at the time. I'm sure my priorities will soon change!

After a quick conversation with John the Landy owner, it was to be ours free of charge. He was happy for it to be gone (hmm, I've heard the same comment before) and said it had been parked up for about 5 years because of the brakes and most importantly it had a motor. I suspect it may have been parked up a bit longer than that but I’m not going to argue. John originally got it from a local guy after he bartered it for some drawing work. John is a drafty.

On the road into the farm.

We’ve just taken a quick trip out to the farm to carry out a recce in order to determine what steps need to be taken to get “Bev” onto a hire trailer. No point wasting our money hiring a trailer, driving 1 ½ hrs out there only to discover that the wheels don’t turn.

It was also an opportunity to take the new work ute for a run and after cleaning that off when we got home, we've now realized it's not going to be practical for us to high pressure clean "Bev" at our yard as we initially intended. We not only need to clean the buildup of mud off "Bev" when we bring her down to Perth but we have to clean up the hire trailer and the ute too. Granted there wasn't a lot of mud on the ute last time but the gravel dust is still on the road outside our house.

We've managed to organize a more suitable area in which to conduct the cleanup op., so now we need to organize and plan the retrieval.

For the trip in and out, we now know that if we take the same route in to the farm we have a 14.6 km drive along a not so good gravel road. Or we can take another route and drive 9.1 kms along a different gravel road that is in better condition but adds a little extra travelling time.

Ready to pump up the tyres. Note the red Falcon hiding behind the Landy. That's Shirl's Shaggin' Wagn'

As you will hear in the video, it was very windy and bitterly cold when we were pumping up the tyres. The sky was heavy and ominous with dark clouds threatening rain at any moment. We'd just managed to get all the tyres pumped up when the rain hit. You could see it working it's way across from the west. Luckily we had taken a thermos and were able to sit on the verandah sipping a hot cup of tea, hoping the rain would soon stop. The break for a cuppa also gave us a chance for a bit more Googling as we now had a chassis number.

The stamped aluminium plate attached to our body has the code 25323636D. It's very badly faded and looks to be riveted in place as opposed to the many we have seen that are screwed into place. We found that by altering the filters you are able to see a little more clearly what was originally printed in the background. Only just.

Here is a link that we found very helpful. You can enter your chassis number after you click on the yellow LR vin button on the Left Hand side.
http://www.clifton.nl/

253
Model: LR Series 2A
Body Type: Basic
Wheel Base: 109 inch
Eng: Petrol
Model Years: 1962-71
Destination: Completely Knocked down (CKD) r/h drive (RHD)

23636 = Serial No.

D = Desgin. 3 significant design modifications. Suffix used from April 1967 till Mar 1968.

A little more eye candy. Note: the high lift jack was only used to take the weight off the tyres while we tried to get some air in them as we only had the small compressor.