1967 Devon
This is the story of my '67 parts bus.
I bought the bus form a friend of Mark Titterton - a surfer called Neil!
He had bought the bus for a grand with the full intention of restoring the
bus and using it for trips to the coast. Neil and Mark had driven the bus
all the way from Taunton to Bristol with very little braking power and of
course the trusty hand brake.
When Neil got the bus home he
started to enquire about having it welded back together, with quotes
coming in upwards of a £1,000 plus parts (and this being 6 years ago),
Neil did not proceed any further and the bus sat for over a year in the
rear of his Dad's pub.
This is where I enter the story.
Knowing Mark through work and having just purchased my '66, I came to hear
about the bus. I went to see it and after some bartering, bought it for £450
- the only things I wanted were the original front seats, rear bumper and
full set of original 14 inch wheels. I had already decided I would part
out the van, as I did not have the skill and time to restore it, nor
did I have the need for two buses - how things have changed!
Here are a couple of pictures of the
bus on the day it arrived at my parents home (click
on image to see full size picture)
We towed the bus from Neil's Dad's pub
to my parents home a journey of about 4 miles. After about 200 hundred
yards from the pub the steel cable towing the bus snapped, so I ended up
just driving it behind Dad's car so it looked like I was being towed! This
was quite an interesting journey as the brakes packed up and I was left
with just the hand brake!!!
The van was a 1967 Microbus with a
Devon camping conversion (exactly the same as my '66). Within an hour of
the bus reaching my parents home, I had completely stripped the inside of
the bus and on closer examination noticed that quite a few parts of the
Devon interior were better than that of my '66, so I set about swapping
them over.
I had the bus about a month and a couple of people had
been interested in buying it but, on closer inspection they all decided it
needed too much work. This is when I decided to advertise it in the Split
Screen Club Magazine. I received loads of calls from people desperate for
parts. The first thing to go was the pop top, I sold this to a guy called
Martin, he and his crazy friend came up from Weymouth in Martins '63,
which he had completely restored.
This continued and each week more and more parts
went to happy new owners. I don't know if I was lucky or selling the parts
too cheap, but the only thing I had left from the bus was the front beam
(which I still have), the cab front floor (scrapped), cab wheel arch floor
(now fitted in my '66) and the rear floor/chassis (scrapped).
We had one old fella who came down from
Gloucester to buy parts, he marked our a section of the cab roof,
including part of the passenger A-post and asked us to cut it out and
deliver it to him at a service station the next week, which we did - see
below He also bought the side loading doors and a cab door, then out
of the blue we get a call from the guy who is restoring his van.
Apparently, the old guy had turned up at the restorers house with his van
(which was a complete shed and had been leaving loads of spare parts on
his drive ever since, what's more the part the old fella had marked out on
the roof, was wrong so he need more of the roof, so this meant another
trip up to the service station!
We sold absolutely everything, from the
walk-thru metal to the window surrounds - making a handsome return on my
£450 investment. Which sat in my bank account for 6 years until a certain
'54 Barndoor came onto the scene!
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