Spares partner

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What do you do when spares for your beloved classic car are getting harder to find? There are several options. You can sacrifice the weekend by going to an autojumble, spend hours in muddy fields and hope you’ll find that obsolete part you need so hard for a couple of pounds/dollars/euros (giving you a tremendous amount of self-esteem). You can also surf the web just as long until you found the part in question - often in a remote part of the world - have it send over to you, hope it is indeed the correct bit and use that (slightly less self-esteemish, but still pretty good). You can also order a brand new part with one of the many specialized companies who remanufacture and sell rare parts for classics now (not quite so good).

But there is a fourth way. You can simply overcome all the trouble above by buying a second (donor) vehicle and keep that in case anything goes wrong. We have seen it more often (last May we bumped into one), and we saw another last weekend. The tank of our project car needed welding, which is not an everyday job for an everyday welder. Eventually we found a craftsman of the old type who was happy to take care of it. His workshop was one that exists no longer in everyday motoring life, more that of a classic blacksmith with proof of his old fashioned welding abilities in every corner. There was no doubt that this man had nothing up with modern stuff in the widest sense. And thus drove a Peugeot 304 pick-up as an everyday car. Not the one in his front garden, which was slowly being overgrown with ivy and seen here. That was the donor vehicle, just in case anything broke on his daily driver... Love it.

Words and photograph Jeroen Booij

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