1954 Long Wheelbase Land Rover Series One Prototype Station

I love listening to these reels, a time when people spoke proper like .

Why is it always the left one that is offered for sacrifice? As a left handed man I find that somewhat discriminatory.

Thanks for posting this, I have seen this picture before and I think that my vehicle is the last in the side on line up outside the factory building. The reason I think this is because the others have lighter tropical roofs. The tropical roof on mine started out grey, the same as the rest of the vehicle and that last vehicle seems to have a darker roof. Jet One was a fantastic looking car. I forget the occasion of this line up of vehicles, must look it up.

In other news, the Blasted Bear has visited again,



to remove 50 odd years of grot and paint. Rather than using Soda which is generally thought to be the only way to go with Aluminium, we have been using a refined, very fine coal slag product, which works just as well, but the media is cheaper.




I now have plenty of aluminium panel work to repair, before I can get paint on, which I am hoping to do before the end of the summer.

It's been a while since I updated this, a got a bit daunting sorting out photos and then I lost a load that were on my phone when it died. As usual progress was not as rapid as I would like, but there is progress.
Finally the front wings have been assembled, this involved bonding the new inner wings I made to the wing tops, riveting the front panel to the inner and then bolting the outer wing to the inner/top assembly.





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The wings were then fitted and lined up. This took quite a while as there are so many variables to juggle,plus the welding to the wings have caused them to distort a bit, even though I did a trial fit and make adjustments prior to spraying. To try and get everything square by leveling up the chassis as a starting point and then getting the wing tops level. A pet hate of mine is lopsided wings on a series one restoration. They are seldom perfect but at least I have original pictures to compare against.









You might be wondering why the front right panel is black : Vehicles up to late 1953 would have had a black plate riveted to the wing, the idea being the vehicle registration would be painted on to this. In reality most plates were purchased and attached to the plate! By 1954 this plate was eliminated and the wing front painted instead, whilst this might have made a saving on material, wing construction and painting would have become more laborious, by early 1955 the whole idea was dropped and the whole wing just painted body colour.

There were splits in these corner bracings which  I solved by making new ones and riveting into place. 








End of the bulkhead prior to reskinning.

Lovely to see this coming together. Some nice outside the box thinking to save the bulkhead.

PHUQ and diesel max thanks for the comments. The chap who has been doing my welding has been using Mig.

As promised a short update, hopefully next year will be a lot better.
So I eventually got to spray the rear bulkhead I was rebuilding back in January.


I also got some of the parts galvanized a couple of months ago including the frames I built back in 2021, these turned out well and thankfully didn't fall apart in the galv tank. Still plenty of stuff I need to get prepared for the galvaniser, but these were critical bits that I needed to get done to move the project forward.