LDV Pilot 2.2

This is a strange story

Why I ended up with this Pickup. It’s not for its looks or rarely or value, nore did I ever look at one and say I need one of those! Ive got a 1951 Austin FL1 London Black cab and thought about upgrading the engine and running gear to something more modern. A friend of mine runs these LDV’s and loves them, but he is an eccentric crack pot! I measured the height and length of engine and gearbox and they are nearly the same, the axle width, wheels and wheel base are all nearly the same, all that needs doing is shorten the prop shaft. Even the steering box is in the same place!

Now it just so happens another friend of ours had this pickup, which only had 48’000 miles on the clock which had come from the Humber bridge where it had spent it’s life driving up and down, hence the low mileage!

For some strange reason it was lent out to some painting contractors who thought it would be fun to have a paint fight with it! So it was wrecked, but the parts I wanted were all good with a little rust and no rot. The cab was painted by the person I got it from to clean it up, so it doesnt look so tatty. Inside its had a bucket of paint slopped around, the seats are all paint so has seat covers, but non of that bothered me.

What I wanted was perfect, and cheaper to do this swap than to totally overhaul all the running gear of the Taxi. And the bonus was – this has disc brakes!

To make sure everything works, we gave it a MOT and taxed and ran it for a year doing the farm food run and moving tons of Yorkshire stone for the farm.

It’s ran perfect, starting on the flick of the switch even in the middle of the winter.

If you read the write ups of the day it is quite shocking. A gutless, slow, marbling sounding engine with a hard bouncing ride with uncontrollable leaking cab.

And they were bang on, it’s just like that, but I don’t care I’ve come to love driving it around and occasionally seeing frustrated drives in my rear mirror. It will do 70mph down the motorway as long as youve got an hour to wind it up. Speed wise its perfect for the Taxi which may be used as a wedding car.

An on going project, like many I have.

This is now no longer with us except it never got collected so is rotting outside the building!