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Richard C. Great | For The New Mexican

4/2/2008 - 4/3/08

If the arch-enemy is in the details, then Louis Straney owns one shades below of a Land Rover.

“I wanted mine to be representative of a safari-equipped carriage 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 former 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 Universe War II aircraft. It’s attached to the construct 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 re-establishment to worry about because, according to the selling actor, the previous proprietor parked it in the alive room of his Pennsylvania habitation 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 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-lane worlds.

“It’s very moderate, 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 turbulent, with the canvas top flapping. “It’s made for the soggy British countryside or the desolate,” 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 region. People who have seen a lot of them say they’ve never seen one in this circumstances. To me, it represents a separate time, a distinct attitude toward vehicles.”

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