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Hello it was fun to drive ,even with a Sherpa engine,but it ran well but not fast on the motorways It was quite a job,fortunately,before he died I did ask the seller what was the overall length of the body.So when it came to having a hood made,it fitted I was lucky a local farmer did woodworking as a side line and he had a few hundred 3 ft lengths of ash 2"x1/2"which he had for a couple of years Everyone else who bought a kit,managed to buy all the bits,so it was a challenge but fun I had the wheel discs turned out of sheets of alloy and the centre "nuts" were immersion heater tops the dash I turned by hand,with a bit of wet and dry The windscreen I bought several lengths of brass section and built it to fit an old windscreen I found at a scrap yard I made it to open as well Happy days. Len

Airportable wrote:

My word Len that is a remarkable transformation. to recreate a Maharaja's exotic transport of delight, or a Colonial Administrator & his Memsaab phaeton off to the Durbar, to join the Mughal Nobility & you made it out of a LDV Sherpa.If I'd been told that a week ago I'd questioned the story tellers sanity ! I've driven a Sherpa & I've driven a Bentley & the two experiences were poles apart, no that implies that in some small & tenuous way the two might equate, apart from the number of wheels they have no connection.

I couldn't agree more, taking an old truck and converting it as you did was a splendid achievement, Those of us who tinker with our cars face different problems though, often overcoming the deficiencies in the original design. In the eighties I built a Burlington Arrow kit car, a sort of MG TD replica. For about £10 you got a few pages of drawings and you could buy the "radiator surround" and the scuttle below the windscreen in fibreglass, everything else you made yourself.
As for Bentley's and Sherpa's having nothing in common, was it not Bugatti who said that Bentley produced "the worlds fastest lorries" or something to that effect .

I used a Sherpa Box van,as that was the only chassis which the Speed 4 ,was designed for .I had to remove every part from the chassis and then move the steering box to a different position. As I said it wasnt anything like a Bentley to drive,but the designer Brian Pickup designed it to give the rough shape of a Bentley Speed 4 .Non the less it was great fun to take it out for a drive ,with lots of children shouting look there`s Chitty Chitty BangBang. I wish I still had it ,but if so I couldn`t have carried on with my hobby of restoring cars as one was sold,yo finance another project .Now looking forward to taking the MG F out.The previous owner had it taxed as disabled ,so Im having to have the V5 changed Len

Hello just found another couple of photos of the Sherpley build You can see the different sections of Ash strip I used Len

Thats some considerable skill you have there.