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Richard C. Large | For The New Mexican

4/2/2008 - 4/3/08

If the the enemy is in the details, then Louis Straney owns one hades of a Land Rover.

“I wanted mine to be representative of a safari-equipped conveyance so it would look at abode in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria,” reported Straney, 61, who worn out a month chase with a camera in Kenya over the 2002-03 new year.

What he’s got is a original 1965 Land Rover Order IIA in bronze virid on Birmabright material substance panels, the same aluminum-amalgam skin that the British used for their Creation War II aircraft. It’s attached to the build with rivets, and the dimples were left showing for genuineness.

Straney bought his two-entrance Land Rover on eBay in 2002 for $11,000. He didn’t have much reinstatement to worry about because, according to the selling executor, the previous holder parked it in the existing room of his Pennsylvania home for 17 years. The canvas-roofed carriage on an 88-twelfth part of a foot wheelbase has 108,000 miles on the clock.

“I always liked Land Rovers, ever since I knew about them in the ’60s,” related Straney, a Kentucky natal who just moved to Lamy from Columbus, Ohio. “I always liked the chasteness of a four-speed, four-cylinder metal box.” Those gasoline-powered four cylinders chug out 77 horsepower and can take the Land Rover into off-passage worlds.

“It’s very moderate, very torquey — not made for freeway speeds,” Straney reported, adding he gets it up to about 65 mph on Interstate 25. But it’s very tumultuous, with the canvas top flapping. “It’s made for the soggy British countryside or the forsaken,” he reported.

His Land Rover is one of 15,000 exported to the United States in 1965, and today, Straney related, it “may be the nicest one in the land. People who have seen a lot of them say they’ve never seen one in this situation. To me, it represents a distinct time, a separate attitude toward vehicles.”

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