The Frame Hunt Ends In Success!

After five false starts over a period of about 15 months, I was building up my comfort level with buying a new galvanized chassis.

Still, I continued to search with a lot of assistance from Google's Advanced Search feature. If you have not used it, you should. I am sure I am not using it to its full potential, but here is the way I use it.

1. In the box marked "all these words" I insert "Land Rover Series"
2. In the box marked "any of these unwanted words" I insert "directory discovery disco range freelander LR2 LR3" to filter out anything about these other Land Rover models and focus the results only on the Series Rovers. Apparently "directory" is included to avoid car dealer ads. Not quite sure I understand that part.
3. Because I am impatient, I change the "results per page" box to 100
4. In the "search within a site or domain" I insert "craigslist.org"
5. all other boxes are either left blank or in their default setting
6. Click the "Advanced Search" button and in about a second you'll have lots of focused reading to do. Many of the results will be for expired or flagged posts.

Then, the stars and planets all lined up.

But first, a small detour in the story. On the weekend of September 27/28, my family and I took a trip to stay a couple of nights at the Out 'n About Treesort (www.treehouses.com) near Cave Junction, Oregon, just north of the California border. This is a great place to go whether you are single, a couple or have kids. Your rooms are in treehouses--some of them 30 feet off the ground! They also have a great zipline course. Anyway, it is a 7 hour drive (9 with traffic) each way and on the drive home, my wife began to lament about how she wished she could drive her 109 more often.

For the next couple of hours, we discussed what she would like done to the 109 to make it her daily driver and I arrived back home with something that I believe is extremely rare in the Land Rover Series community--carte blanche from my wife to improve her 109! And with an added bonus--she did not want it repainted and she did not want any body work done. She likes its current nicked, dinged, dull, orange peel, "presentable from 20 feet" look.

Within a couple of days of returning home, a Google Advanced Search turned up a partially rebuilt 69 IIa 109 5 door in Sonoma, CA sitting on--but not even bolted to--a brand new galvanized chassis! Sales price: $4000 including a Chevy 292 engine, Scottys Adapter/flywheel, three Series transmissions, four total axles, two radiators, an extra prop shaft, five pairs of leaf springs and hundreds of fasteners, u-bolts, etc. The owner of this IIa had not paid his bill and lost the truck to the mechanic who held the lien.