Surrey Off-Road Specialists Limited

It turned out to be a Common House spider luckily, rather than a Funnel Web or suchlike. This did however give us a wake up call, that the treatment that Paul had been forced to pay for before shipping that is supposed to kill these things off, obviously hadn’t worked. We decided we had better have a closer look and see what else was living on it. We lifted up the front carpets to find it crawling with ants and there were a mass of cobwebs under and behind the seats. The website had shown some examples of how you could identify the various spiders by the design of web. There were signs of there having been some Wolf spiders in there at some time and probably worse. The decision was made to fumigate the whole vehicle before anything else escaped into our yard. We got a company in who encased the whole vehicle inside a giant bubble of plastic and gassed it. This appeared to do the trick; nothing appeared to be moving afterwards.

We proceeded to crack on and get this little gem MOT’d. Paul registered it and that got it on the road. It proved to be very useful and was constantly trundling about with body parts for painting etc. Having finished that one, an HJ60 suddenly materialised in the yard on a trailer! It seems that Paul had found this and wanted the 6-cylinder diesel engine and 5-speed transmission to use in either the 45 or the other project ticking over in the background, a 40 short wheelbase. So we broke the 60 up for all the parts we wanted and scrapped the rest. Our yard was starting to look more and more like a Toyota scrap yard (there was another early 45 he had bought for parts at the bottom of the yard as well as another 40!) The Toyota enthusiast title doesn’t really do Paul justice, it is definitely an illness! Anyway, after that interruption to progress it was back to the original project.

The axles were painted and rebuilt with new bearings, seals and gaskets; a good second-hand diff was fitted in the rear. It had all new brakes on the rear. The front axle was rebuilt and we upgraded the hubs to HJ60 (from the breaker) and fitted the bigger stub axles, hubs and disc brakes. All the steering rods and joints were replaced. Once the suspension materialised we were able to turn it into a gleaming rolling chassis. Les meticulously worked his way though everything, replacing all the brake lines and hoses, using all the original clips etc. It was starting to really look nice. There were problems starting to surface though. The original budget had been long spent and Paul was getting upset at what the final costs were starting to look like...

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