Mk2 Zephyr
Wagon
By
Paul Bretherton
I
must admit that at the start I knew nothing about Zephyrs. Having grown up with
Holdens (an EJ Panel Van was my first car), the
Zephyrs were something new to me.
My
other hobby apart from old cars is surfing, and about 13 years ago I started
surfing again at the ripe old age of 35 and decided that I needed a surf wagon
to be cool. There was a car yard at the start of the Tullamarine freeway that
sold old cars, and I was looking at an Holden EK wagon when I noticed an original
MK2 wagon also for sale. After telling one of my surfing buddies about it, he
very nicely went down and bought if from under my nose.
A
couple of weeks later I found another one advertised in the paper. The lady who
owned it used to drive it daily, but it had beed
sitting in the tree lined driveway for a liong time.
After putting some petrol in it, I drove it home to study my great putchase. The car was covered in a nice layer of moss, but
after a bit of cleaning it seems to come up reasonably well. All the door
rubbers on the side where the trees were had persihed,
and the paint was falling off, but I thought I had a good deal.
Pictures of how it looked after the first owner restored her, before it was ruined by sitting under a tree for years
Next
step off to get a roadworthy. Apart from all the normal rubbers and bits of
pieces to replace, the list wasn’t too bad. Obviously at some stage someone had
done a very thorough job of restoring a repainting the wagon, but the last few
years had ruined all that work. The biggest problem was we found some rust in
the bottom sill near the back of the front guard, which would not pass the
roadworthy.
Here
starts the saga. A good mate is a panel beater, and he took the car to his
work, and was going to fix it after hours. Well the offending section was
sanded back, only to find more rust. More sanding, more rust, until we discided the only way to do it properly was to strip the
whole car back to bare metal, so off to the sandblaster it went. Over the next
four years, the car did more miles on the back of a trailer than it did on the
road, as my mate quit that job, worked from home for a while, then finally giot his own factory. But after nearly five years, and lots
of doubts if it would ever be finished, I got the car back looking a million
dollars.
When we first started sanding, notice the amount of sill that needed replacing as well as the bottom of every door.
This is what it looked like after being sandblasted
I
then moved the car to the garage of our holiday house down the beach, where I
started to put the car back together. As it was a holiday house, this task then
took at least 12 months, and because the car had been moved so many times, and
it had been so long sonce we pulled it apart, finding
all those bolts and brackets took longer than expected. All door rubbers,
bailey channels, etc all had to be replaced, and I have had all the upholstery
replaced.
In the carport ready to be put back together
Mechanically
the car runs Mk3 discs on the front, with the standard 6 and what I believe is
a Ford transit 4 speed. All these were in the car when I purchased it, but I
had the four speed rebuilt just before the car was stripped, and just about everythg either reconditioned or replaced. I am about to
start building a new Mk3 engine, and when that gets dropped in, the engine bay
will be the final job to be done.
Going back to
The car was oringinally only meant to be a car to keep my surfboards in, and to cruise around the beach in, but it eneded up a bit more tha that. Whilst it is not and never will be a show car, it still looks good enough to attract a lot of attention.
This is what the car
looks like at the moment.
