Sunday 8 June 2014

Land Rover rebuilds - part 3

 My final Land Rover (for the moment) is this '90', so called as that is it's wheelbase (the real one, that it) in inches.  This and the '110' took over from the Series III '88' and '109' in the mid-1980s, making this one a bit futuristic for LCW but I can live with that.
Distinguishable from the sIII by one-piece windscreens, flush front end and flared wheel arches, early versions of this new model were notoriously unreliable.  I remember speaking to a senior NCO who ran the motor pool in, well let's just say one of the Scottish infantry battalions, who claimed that of the first three '110s he'd received, two had to be part cannibalised to keep the third running!
Things soon improved though, and I subsequently heard from a fairly senior officer that during an exercise in Germany in the 1990s a US Colonel (admittedly the worse for drink) had offered to swop for his Humvees - at the rate of 2 Humvees to one Landie!
Final Landie anecdote.  The aforementioned Scottish battalion returned from a NATO exercise in the '80s with one less Landie than they'd taken.  Apparently a vehicle camouflaging exercise in a German forest was a little too successful....

1 comment:

davidcrawford19 said...

Excellent work Tim... all very impressive!