Restoring the First Production Range Rover !!!!

The famous British firm of Land Rover has been going from strength to strength in recent years, and is the stronger partner in its current Jaguar/Land Rover partnership under the Tata Group. Formed as an offshoot of the Rover Company in 1948, Land Rover 4×4 trucks were England’s answer to the Jeep–basic, rugged, go-anywhere vehicles that were more suited to navigating unplowed fields than they were on the dual carriage motorway. Rover engineer Spen King devised a more accommodating, road-worthy vehicle in the late 1960s, which became the Range Rover. After 25 pre-production examples–badged “VELAR” to disguise their true identity–were built and tested on British roads, Land Rover started building a small run of early production models, which were used to introduce the Range Rover to the media during the June 1970 launch event. The first production Range Rover, chassis number 26, received the license plate number NXC 231H. 

Andrew Honychurch, a noted restorer and classic car specialist in Biddenden, Kent, has been a Range Rover enthusiast for decades, and he’s especially fascinated with the earliest models. He found chassis 26 in 2000, and will soon complete an extensive nut-and-bolt restoration of this important vehicle.

Andrew explains:

“I bought my vehicle as a lifelong Range Rover enthusiast; I understood the importance of the car.  It had been largely unmolested, but like so many utility vehicles, had been used hard and was suffering from severe corrosion.  The vehicle also had not retained its original V8, rather one from a Rover saloon, but I was lucky to find a new crated engine of the correct age and series to replace the engine fitted.”

“The chassis required welding at the rear end where they all suffer corrosion, and the body shell is now like new. Finding parts for these vehicles is extremely hard, but I was lucky to be searching many years ago when there was not so much interest in the accuracy of a restoration, so I sourced most correct parts over 12 years ago. I don’t think I could restore a vehicle to this state of correctness now, purely due to a lack of correct parts. Unlike, say, the E-type restoration industry, very few [Range Rover] parts are remanufactured to correct specification, so one is left searching out good second-hands, which others are doing also. I recently paid £350 [$573] for a correct fuel cap!”

 Chassis 26 was recently featured in the book, The First Fifty.

Upon the completion of its restoration, this Range Rover will find a new home; “The vehicle is really fit for a museum, and it seems a shame to use it, but it is for sale, and the next owner can, of course, do with it what he or she likes,” Andrew says. ”I suspect as the Range Rover brand continues to grow, the value of this vehicle–the first registered Range Rover ever–will grow with it.”

Source:blog.hemmings