My Mk1 Zephyr
Convert
By
Mark Dunn (Magoo)
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Sometime in the early 80s I
travelled to Masterton to look at a Mk1 convert that was advertised for sale for best offer.
It was basically complete and I offered $1000 which I thought was the top offer.
Unfortunately someone else offered more about an hour later. The good news
was the buyer had a worse convert and planned to make one car out of the two.
I managed to track him down and reached an agreement that I would buy the
left over shell and any surplus parts. After about a year of waiting he rang
and said he was ready to sell me the shell and I could buy the surplus doors later.
The agreed price was about $300. I got the body towed to my
workshop The tow truck driver offered to take it straight to the tip as it
had few usable parts and several people burst out laughing when I told them
it would soon be back on the road. It had a diff a rear bumper and a boot lid
as well as brake and clutch pedals. Every other nut bolt and screw had been removed.
Sounds good, read on. One sill was missing the other was mainly composed of
rust and fresh air The lower rear guard was missing on one side, the other
had had the wheel arch cut with tin snips to clear the wheel. There were
large rust holes in all the floor sections and most of the boot floor was
rusted out. The radiator mounting panel had been completely cut out and an
old tow bar was holding the inner guards apart at the front. But it was a convertible I never did get the doors for it
,but was lucky to track some down in Christchurch from Grant Lousich who also sold me two front vent windows front and
rear seats and the front hood bow I bought a
mk1 that had been cut into a Ute and stripped it. That got me a wiring loom
gear box .accelerator linkage steering box and about a million little bits.
I took the skin off the bonnet and used that for the boot floor. I had
already wrecked several sedans as I had a sedan as my every day car so
I had several front guards to choose from as well as taillights grills
and all the common parts I was fitting lots of sun roofs to
cars in those days so had lots of pieces of panel steel from car roofs These
were cut to rough size and pop riveted into the floor. You could get away
with a lot in those days.
After about 6 months of nights and
weekends I got it registered .It was brush painted in gray primer and had no
glass in the doors and had only the top latches in the doors. I drove it
regularly for several months until we moved to Levin, even driving it from
Wellington to Levin. On the day after the 1987 Zephyr convention I started
stripping it down to fix the floors properly as well as strengthen the
chassis cross members and inner sills since WOF regs
were becoming much tougher and it was obviously not safe I thought it would
take 6 months or maybe a year. How wrong I was |
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