1949 Series I 80" SoftTop
The majority of our Rover purchases were
active -- we searched for the cars, found them, bought them, and then towed
them home. The yellow 80 is different because it found us.
This cheery little car's story began back around 1990. A friend of
a friend introduced us to a man named Peter who made custom metal furniture
-- much of which was formed in the roman campaign style of all things.
We were introduced to him as a fellow Rover enthusiast, and drove over
to check his scene out. Peter was rumored to have won his sand colored
109 5 Door Station Wagon in a poker game. It is a beefy car with
souped--up springs, diamond plate galore, and air-lift public bus seats
installed.
Anyway, Peter calls us one day out of the
blue and says he has found a banged up 80” and do we want it? What?
An 80 Peter, are you sure? Peter is originally British but we still
couldn't believe it could really be an 80”, and in Ross of all places?
80's are rare in the US and since we already owned two, we figured that
we had corned the local market and there couldn’t be that many left.
Ross made the story even more unlikely since "Ross" is an amazingly expensive
and posh suburb, and who in the hell would have a beat up and abandoned
80" there? The whole thing was absurd, but when you have two 80's
you really need a third... Right?
After getting a phone number from Peter
and calling we arranged to check out the car. We were still in disbelief
and like so many other times figured that we would humor the owner and
see what they believed was a Rover-- in this case an 80”. To our
total disbelief, Da and I rounded the corner around a house and there it
was! Thick with yellow peeling paint sat a particularly old, real
right hand drive 80" complete with a badly made roll bar.
Guessing from the little information we
could uncover, the current owner had found the vehicle at a ranch in the
Sierras and realized only after dragging it home that it might be too big
of a project for him. The head had been removed and placed in the
back, and the entire car was filled with leaves and strange non-rover autoparts.
A serious frame hit had folded the left-front outrigger down and back about
3 inches, puckering the spring up higher. The car must be a late
‘49 or early ’50, since it once had lights behind the grill (now someone
had cut in fender mounted headlights). An original English one military
engine rebuild plate was found bolted to the firewall. Da picked
up the car. I think we arranged to buy it for something like $100.
Sometimes we think of turning it into a trailer, but there are not enough
80’s left to cut it up.
