More photos!
Photo gallery here
http://www.tbitc.com/photos-of-my-mini-traveller/
Not to get to soppy about it but this is getting hard for me. I am getting such great interest (look at the views count here, and in for sale and over at mk1-forums) and assistance, and it's put my mind back to the time I got this car. Every hour or so I stop and think about not selling - but I have to. Yesterday it was difficult cutting a seat cover off knowing that it was my grandfather who tied the knot. I was very close to him and I hadn't been in the car for 20 years - memories came flooding back about riding in it with him etc. This is getting to be like days of our lives so I will stop here.
I rang my mother and best we could work out was that my grandfather purchased the car in his retirement at age 60 and then only used it to go shopping and visit us and my uncle. It was his first and only car - he travelled by bus right up to that point. We think this was about 1970. It never carried more than pensioner's shopping and 2 pensioners. My grandfather was a fitter and turner/ mech engineer who designed precision lawn mowers for Scott Bonner. Precision lawn mowers? - for bowling greens. His mowers were designed to cut every blade of grass to the exact same height - and they did. He died in 1982 and my last registration was in 1984. When I got it - it was a clean road worthy car. I feel bad now knowing what it is. Did he know what he left me? Argh - Sigh.
As you can see in the extra photos uploaded -the floor was inspected by emptying the car out and pulling back the carpets. It was whilst doing this that I found the M-AW plate carefully sealed in a zip loc bag and placed under the drivers seat. The drivers window is busted - I had an issue with a shed break in 20 years ago by a 13 year old #@$%@^%.
You can see a lot of litter in the photos - the plastic shopping bags and garbage bags I used are lying in a thousand pieces every where - except for the one on the gearbox. This is a different plastic to the other stuff. The gearbox has nothing to do with the wagon.
We are planning another visit to clean her out properly and take some more photos - we were a little time pressured yesterday and an empty house has no tools.
As a general comment I noted that what had been removed internally seemed to be lying around near by. Little things like battery hold down clamps were there. Even the battery box seems pretty firm in the bottom. I initially described the car as heavily rusted and it is rusted but the worst rust seems to be the passenger door, most of the rest is large stains. The rusty gutters for instance are very solid. The whole car is covered in 25+ years of dust.
Grill - I don't think this is the original grill. Ok I guess I know it's not. I think it was exchanged a couple of years into my Grandfather's ownership as he was having big problems with car reliability in the wet and he was transporting my sick Grandmother and breaking down. For what it's worth the car died in my possession from over heating and now I wonder if this grill modification might have been responsible. The day it died it was very hot and my Grandparents would never have left the home in that kind of heat. Oh I fitted a new dizzy cap and leads and she was fine in the water.
Missing radiator vents - guilty! I did this. There was this overheating problem and I had a thermostatic fan kit (still do have it), you can guess the rest.
In the passenger door, right where the rust is the worst I found the original owners manual and it's of no use - stuck together and very frail.
I found at least 3 screw drivers I have been missing for 25+ years!
Why the pictures of the rear tyre - one of my potential purchasers noticed in the photos the the drivers side rear wheel looked like it was leaning out. All it turned out to be was a dead tyre
For example I thought that there were only two until last week. I've heard rumours of others. There could be heaps hidden away waiting to be discovered. Just to clarify, that's 3 early internal tank ones. There are dozens (ok a handful) of later external tanked Travellers and Countrymen.
