1971 fiat 850t one giant leap for van kind

Wow, this is very, very brave work. Should be worth it though, it’s a cool van.

I’m going to echo what everyone else has said, great work.

The Fiats of the Dante Giacosa era were really excellent.

Wow, excellent work.

As promised, some terrible pictures from about 1997 I think.

Evidence of the long lost front gutter, well on the way to vaporising even then.













This is what the foot tent thing looked like



This is the original rear badge:



And here are the instructions:








If the badge and / or the manual are of any use, let me have you address and I'll get them in the post .

Unfortunately the wooden supports and turn buckle things to secure the rear tent were well shot by the time I got hold of the van. God only knows where the "tent" part went.
Some of the veneered ply was lying in the back but is delaminated to such an extent its almost unrecognisable.

I've decided not to reinstate the rear tent section, I think it's been the cause of a lot of rot.

The white van pictured is actually in Australia and has been for several decades. Its the only other "tall top" fargo I'm aware of.
Despite living in the hot dry climate the front gutter has rotted off that one as well.

Only fiat could manage that!

Thats some great history and back ground right there.
I'd always assumed they were produced by fiat themselves though I do remember reading somewhere that they were never produced at the site in Turin.

I guess that explains it.

Other points of note about fiat in the late sixties is that the spot weld operators were clearly machine gunners in a previous career and fiat must have visited Nestlè at some point and raided the bin marked
"Metal too thin to wrap kitkats in"
To scource the metal for these vans.

Some or the original unrusted roof skin came in at .64mm.
Thats not even 22 gauge!

They do seem to be masters of pressing very thin steel though, I don't think there is a section of inner skin that hasn't been "ribbed" for strength.

I've just noticed this dent is already on the van. In all the repairs and paint jobs it's had it doesn't look like anybody has ever attempted a repair.

It's going to be a swine to sort out as it runs over two swage lines and it's under the quarter light frame.

I don't suppose you can shed any light on how it happened?

Great stuff!! super fabrication skills!! please continue !

As we started to get into summer I knew time on the van would suffer due to a garden project that needed completed.
What I didn't expect was two months of zero work.

I had imagined that the roof and gutter sections would be long finished by now but there were still several smaller jobs being held up by other things.
I didn't want to pit the closing plates on the post tops until i sprayed an encapsulator inside.

I did manage to repair the b post top and add a reinforced seat belt mount.
As ever I had to do the outside before I could do the inside so as not to lose the door fitting



You can see how bad the pitting is on the inside here



I replaced a good 50cm of the back plate with a heavier gauge steel to support the seatbelt but I've also added a box section and mounting nuts for a roll out awning in the future

I was finding get going again to be much harder than expected.
The more I looked at what was next the further down the road I got pulled.

I couldn't mount the doors as the A and B posts were flapping in the breeze at the sills and there was a long way to go before getting there.

For those unfamiliar with these older fiats the front and rear ends sit in chassis leg type structures and are "transplanted" from one model to the next.
This rear end appears in everything from the feather weight two seat 850 spider to right up to the 850t familiare, which is basically a minibus.

Once welded into the shell they are in fact amazingly over engineered, its what allows this kind of thing with very little additional support



Wouldn't that guarantee rain at every show you turned up to.

The issue is that fiat decided these structures only needed to be joined together by the sills and a bit of floor.
All of which mine has questionable integrity.

I pottered on fairly aimlessly in September, trying to get ready to go underneath but there was very little enthusiasm.
I bought a set of large axle stands that were cheap and local.
Trouble is I don't have anywhere solid enough to hold the van up on them.
I found a set of adjustable ramps the kind with the bottle jack in, they were cheap but a three hour round trip away.

I played with the bead roller to recreate some of the pressed structures underneath




Lots of people will tell you that the cheaper bead rollers need a lot of modification to work.
I did clean the dies up a little and then produced this



Slow, but still progress, though I could feel the project starting to stall.
I was considering putting the van on the back burner for a while and hoping some enthusiasm would manifest itself when the next door neighbour knocked.

What happened next changed everything