The
RedNemesisDog-Mobile
Of
course you have to get to the water with all that kit, and as we are not Kite-
surfers it won't all fit in the boot of a car. A 4x4 is good, but a van
is often the favoured vehicle as all the kit can be thrown in the back.
Corwin
tells the story...
So,
our van is a big part of our lives here at RedNemesisDog.com. Here is a little
more info on what became known as…..
THE
TANK
In
the beginning…
Our
Land Rover Defender 110 was built in 1996 and originally used as a Land Rover
Show vehicle, so it was fitted with air brakes and a tow bar to cart around the
old Land Rover Bumpfmobile. The people there treated it very nicely as far as we
know and never made any changes to it.
At
that time we had a Subaru Impreza Series McRae Special Rally Edition, one of 200
made, which had been to ProDrive (The Subaru Rally Specialists) to have a few
electrical, exhaust and brake modifications, to get it above 280bhp but, as the
leader was approaching another mid-life crisis, he decided it was a time to move
on…..
The
Purchase
So
one day I came home to find the beautiful Rally Car replaced by a farm vehicle.
After
being resuscitated, I soon came to love the eccentricities of this amazing piece
of machinery. Of course, it had to undergo some changes before it was worthy of
RedNemesisDog work.
Firstly,
we fitted a roof rack to take the windsurfing boards. We also redesigned the
interior side panels to add new speakers and a fire extinguisher mount (The new
speakers were a good buy as it is hard to hear anything over the engine). To
carry sails, booms and other paraphernalia, there are now ceiling and wall hooks
with elastic binders. The original bench seats were a tad dangerous (Not to
mention uncomfortable) so we had new, more conventional back seats put in. These
have the added advantage of seatbelts, which come in handy from time to time.
The
second phase included the installation of a new horn (by yours truly), steel radiator
grille, A-Bar, Spotlights and headlight protectors. This gave it a bit of a
beasty front end. To aid people loading equipment on top of the vehicle, we had
aluminium panels affixed to the ‘flanks’ of the bonnet. The spare wheel was
also moved to the front as it threatened to rip off the back door. The Monster
look was completed by fitting new, bigger tyres. A good way of describing these
would be to hold a tankard in one hand and make a side-to-side sweeping motion,
while exclaiming ‘ARGH’! loudly.
Still
though, we felt it needed something more…..
The
military Defender Wolf Land Rovers have storage space behind the bulkhead. This
is the kind we wanted, but we could not find anyone that would fit them to a
civilian vehicle. We eventually solved the problem by having lorry ‘cubby boxes’ put in the same position, and they do the job rather
well, and open up more space in the back.
We
had some RedNemesisDog decals made for us, and tried them out on the vehicle.
The originals had the suffix ‘Windsurfing’ but this was dropped when we
expanded our operations.
Now
an extra roof rack was installed on top to make it double-deck, so, you guessed
it, MORE boards and sails can be carried! To complement our driving music (A mix
of Rammstein, The Prodigy, and Offspring) we got a CD player, because, quite
frankly, tapes are rubbish.
A
lifelong dream of our leader, after having watched ‘Robocop’ and ‘Mad
Max’ in his youth, was to one day have a Matt Black car. The trouble was ours
happened to be gloss white….
….
A couple of re-sprays later (And one ill-fated session with a paintbrush, which
had the annoying habit of embedding bristles in between the coats) and we are
nearly finished with a customised Land Rover!
However,
this will hopefully not be the only RedNemesisDog vehicle, there are plans in
the pipeline…..
