The Van

The story of the van is a tale of trials and tribulations, albeit a glorious story regardless. The Van, a high top long wheel base LDV Convoy was purchased on the 15th of December for £550. She had only done about 80,000 Km and had been sitting at a friend of a friends yard for some time. Anyway, the friend couldn’t afford it at that time so we snapped her up, we did know she needed work doing on her to pass the MOT but we were far to excited to really consider how much work needed doing because she was a beast and we knew we had to take her. So we drove her home, on the way the battery went flat and we broke down.

Here the trials begin.

Angus in the Van!

The next day we bought a new battery and drove her home, we asked a few local garages if they would have a look at her for us, to see about the work but she was to big for them, they couldn’t handle her. So we took her to a sort of commercial, specialised garage to see about the MOT and find out what work would need doing and how much it would cost. The garage got back to us with the list of doom and politely informed us it would be an outrageous price…stumped we took the van away and had a rethink about what to do. We were looking at a minimum of 800£ to get her road legal. After some time deliberating and trying other garages  to see if they could give us a better price but failing because they were too busy or did not have a ramp big enough for her.We took her back to the original garage where they had to MOT her again to find out if more work needed doing. We had sort of committed to spending the money and getting her on the road because we had already missed out on many van shaped opportunities – well, mainly collecting firewood. When we went back to the garage they informed us we were in fact looking at a minimum of £1,500 to get her road worthy. This was because of all the welding that needed doing apparently.

We took the van away regardless, not willing to fork out the serious poundage and became resigned to the prospect of selling her and starting again with another van… We went to the extent of putting her on ebay and finding a buyer, but because I am pretty basic at ebay I had my address in Sheffield so fortunately the buyer did not want to travel the extra distance to North Wales to pick up the van and then sell fell through…woo. During this occurring a dear friend of ours, ‘Handsome Mike’ suggested advertising on facebook for a welder to come help us out, turns out a friend of a friend had just finished doing up his LDV Convoy and knew exactly what to do, yessir. Steve the Welder enters the picture and the van gets some serious TLC. All the minor fails got fixed right away and then a new back door with a window was put in, a load of welding got done on the front step, a window on the sliding door was put in, we changed all the filters, cleaned up rust and treated it. Finally we took her in for another MOT…only to fail again…on more welding! So Steve was back and went into mega weld mode, we all got on with work with the van together and then covered the welds with underbody seal , filled the holes with body filler and sanded it all down to make her all nice again….she passed and is driving now!

Rob