Here I am again. Suckered into paying too much for a vehicle I took a liking to for no sane and balanced reason. Once it was a Nissan with a geriatric racing stripe on the rear quarter. Another time a Volvo with disintegrating door handles. An now, a ven.
It’s rubbish and seems to have spent most of its recent life moving rubbish. A ex-Royal Mail van in poverty spec with flintstones foot wells and a gearbox made of beach stones. Despite a brave attempt to fix it with a 5p the radio doesn’t work. Most of the door locks have been admired by a passing trader and his screwdriver. The words “He liked to take care of it” were uttered during the sale. It’s since become clear that means developing a new engineering innovation known as ‘welding with expanding foam’.
Just like those other banger boxes I am going to need to lean heavily on the experience, wisdom and warnings of the excellent people of the internet. Coronavirus has given a stay of execution on the MOT it would certainly fail so first step is to make it seaworthy. An excellent time to actually use that marketplace MIG welder I also paid too much for.
Despite the sizeable problems I’m actually pretty excited about all the space for activities and the huge rack. Activities such as transporting little electric racing cars, carting around bicycles, cheap weekend adventure accommodation and picking up those Facebook bargains (stop me/don’t stop me). Not to mention all the spare time I’ll have when I’m not sawing up sheets in the Wickes car park to scratch along the never big enough estate wagon seats. I’m already enjoying being able to see over double parked taxis at junctions and not having the acceleration to care about speed cameras.
Now it’s day 4 of ven ownership. Day 1 was spent unsuccessfully haggling more off after it was clear the side door had run out of steam. Day 2 was a steep learning curve when I discovered the right indicator doesn’t work and the back doors would prefer not to stay shut anymore (when driving up a hill delivering charity veg boxes). Day 3 was spent absorbing TFR and wire brush bristles while trying to clean an ecosystem out of the cargo bay. Anyway here’s some pictures and please help me: