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Richard C. Large | For The New Mexican

4/2/2008 - 4/3/08

If the satan is in the details, then Louis Straney owns one realms of pluto of a Land Rover.

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

What he’s got is a original 1965 Land Rover Series IIA in alloy of copper green on Birmabright material substance panels, the same aluminum-metallic compound skin that the British used for their Nature War II aircraft. It’s attached to the put together 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 replacement to worry about because, according to the selling operator, the previous holder parked it in the live room of his Pennsylvania dwelling-place for 17 years. The canvas-roofed conveyance 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,” reported Straney, a Kentucky of birth who just moved to Lamy from Columbus, Ohio. “I always liked the naturalness 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-path worlds.

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

His Land Rover is one of 15,000 exported to the United States in 1965, and today, Straney reported, 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 predicament. To me, it represents a distinct time, a not the same attitude toward vehicles.”

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