4/2/2008 – 4/3/08
If the devil is in the details, then Louis Straney owns one hell of a Land Rover.
“I wanted mine to be typical of a safari-equipped vehicle so it would look at home in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria,” said Straney, 61, who spent a month hunting with a camera in Kenya over the 2002-03 new year.
What he’s got is a pristine 1965 Land Rover Series IIA in bronze green on Birmabright body panels, the same aluminum-alloy skin that the British used for their World War II aircraft. It’s attached to the frame with rivets, and the dimples were left showing for authenticity.
Straney bought his two-door Land Rover on eBay in 2002 for $11,000. He didn’t have much restoration to worry about because, according to the selling agent, the previous owner parked it in the living room of his Pennsylvania house for 17 years. The canvas-roofed vehicle on an 88-inch wheelbase has 108,000 miles on the clock.
“I always liked Land Rovers, ever since I knew about them in the ’60s,” said Straney, a Kentucky native who just moved to Lamy from Columbus, Ohio. “I always liked the simplicity of a four-speed, four-cylinder metal box.” Those gasoline-powered four cylinders chug out 77 horsepower and can take the Land Rover into off-road worlds.
“It’s very slow, very torquey — not made for freeway speeds,” Straney said, adding he gets it up to about 65 mph on Interstate 25. But it’s very noisy, with the canvas top flapping. “It’s made for the soggy British countryside or the desert,” he said.
His Land Rover is one of 15,000 exported to the United States in 1965, and today, Straney said, it “may be the nicest one in the country. People who have seen a lot of them say they’ve never seen one in this condition. To me, it represents a different time, a different attitude toward vehicles.”
It won first place in seven shows and best of show in an eighth, all in Ohio.
The original Land Rover was introduced in 1948, and the Series IIA was produced from 1961 to 1971, when it was redesigned. The British army bought them in huge numbers, much as the U.S. military relied on Jeeps.
Straney spent a mere $3,000 over 18 months restoring the electrical system, getting it repainted and adding the details that make the Land Rover look as if it’s ready to set out for Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park or the New Mexico wilderness.
“Places around here remind me of places in Africa,” said Straney, who first visited Santa Fe in 1994 “and just loved it.” “There are places in Africa very similar to the scrub I walk through in Lamy, going down to the train station.”
Then there are those details.
Land Rover built the vehicle for export with the idea that the end user would customize it, whether it would be some Third World army, police having to patrol rugged regions, scientific explorers or hunters and tour guides on safari in African lion and rhino country.
To get his Land Rover into safari mode, Straney bought a 1960s British military shovel at a vintage-gun collector’s show, made a leather sheath for the blade and bolted it to the tire that sits on the vehicle’s hood — or bonnet, as the British would put it.
“A British military shovel is usually mounted on the fender, but I couldn’t stand the idea of drilling holes in the fender,” Straney said. He didn’t bother installing a shooter’s seat on the fender, a typical East African aftermarket addition, he said.
At a flea market, Straney bought a World War II jerry can from a German BMW motorcycle, painted it red and mounted it to the forward wall of the rear passenger compartment. Behind the can, which is empty, is a fold-up U.S. military shovel, a lug wrench and a tow strap.
A rope the thickness of a man’s wrist that came from a batch of ranch gear is looped around the front bumper. It imitates the sisal hemp that was wound around the bumpers of off-road vehicles of that era for use in emergency towing; there were no nylon or steel cables then. Straney never has had to use it.
“I don’t drive it off-road because I treat it as a show car even though it’s capable of doing things off-road,” Straney said.
Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail drive@sfnewmexican.com.
