Len's Garage

Len lives just down the street.His garage is an ever changing scene.When he first moved in a few years ago he had an everyday car which was so forgettable that I cannot remember what it was plus a real oddity-a Brazilian made VW beetle powered MGTF replica.Yes really.MG enthusiasts must have been horrified.He also had a motorcycle.
Every so often Len heads out into the bush,camping and prospecting with his metal detector.He often does this on a motorbike but to make life more luxurious he sold the weird TF like machine and he bought a VW Kombi campervan powered by a Leyland P76 V8 4.2 litre motor.It had a Porsche 911 gearbox.The conversion had been reasonably well executed -it was a serious piece of shoehorning-but it did have some major shortcomings and the transmission was its weakest link.Len bought it from a guy in Bondi who had kept the van on the street.Len bought it for a good price and cleaned it up and covered a lot of kms in it but it was far from troublefree and I often passed his garage and saw his feet sticking out from under the rear end of the Kombi as he worked on the clutch or the gearbox or the exhaust system or the driveshafts or the waterpump or the whatever.
During the Kombi's tenure Len bought and sold a bewildering number of big motorbikes.He seems to have a knack of finding mint bikes with great specs at bargain prices.
At the end of last year he sold the Kombi for a very good price-I hope the buyer is mechanically minded-and started looking for a "special' BMW.
A couple of weeks ago he found a 1985 M5 3.5i up in Queensland at a good price.Len will travel across Australia for a good buy.He'd previously been about to jump on a plane to Perth to look at a BMW.This model M5 was never officially imported into Australia as the duty on cars at that time was 57.5% and the retail price would have been exorbitant.Len's is an ex-UK car.It still has the BMW-Holland Park sticker on the rear window.Again he seems to have found himself a bargain and he is now flat out sorting out a few things which need rectifying and polishing up the rather tired paint.The BMW currently shares the garage with his everyday Subaru and a Harley Davidson but that may well be gone next week and replaced by another mint bargain bike.Life goes on......

Len smiling at the thought of another great buy.

The M5

M5 and Harley.When I took this photo Len was working on the Harley and the BMW and fixing the tap on his shower.-moving between the three tasks.