HQ Sandman found!!

[jennie285]

Great story about Fate....its a good thing you got hold of it as you will love it, and treat it like it should be treated....

Similar story for us last year after looking for a yellow HZvan for 12 months, finally got onto one by default, drove halfway to Melbourne leaving at 9.30pm. Drove into "Barnes Street", (our surname is Barnes) and when he opened the shed, there she was, yellow, HZ, and a Sandman....(you need to see our thread on the resto....)

We too found this forum to be a great place to find out info, and have made some very good friends through it too....

[will.co]

Nice story & van too buddy, that feeling you must have got when that garage door came up is one we can all relate to...lucky buggers we are...The Barnes bit too is classic...meant to be!
Ill be checking your resto story right now!!

[HK1837]

I have a beauty too. I'll elaborate later by editing this post when I have more time as it is a long story. Involves a HT and a HG GTS350.

[will.co]

I have a beauty too. I'll elaborate later by editing this post when I have more time as it is a long story. Involves a HT and a HG GTS350.

Eagerly awaiting that one Byron...

[will.co]

Well this helps verify all the bits are original too...far out someone took good care of this lovely lady

[HK1837]

OK, here we go.

I have a head on in my HJ Kingswood ute. Pretty nice ute, 350, TH400, LSD, WB Caprice nose etc. Destroyed, not worth fixing. So I go looking for a cheapy to keep me going until I find another good car. Find a HZ sedan with rego cheap, go and look. Absolute bogged up sh!theap, but we get to talking about Monaros and bloke shows me pictures of 2 x cars up the bush. Stripped bare body is a "Bathurst" apparantly but ID has been stolen. 12 months go by, and I find the paper with the ad for the HZ in the shed. Ring the bloke up again about the Monaros. He isn't going to do anything with them, but he tells me where they are (Inverell). So another 12 months go by and I find a rust free but stripped bare HQ Sandman van shell in Gilgai. Mate and I go to look at it, and decide to look for these Monaros in Inverell. We find the place, meet the bloke (relative by marriage of the original dude). So we walk to the back of this guy's property and here are the 2 x Monaros as they were in the pictures. I walk up to the bare body and immediately see it is a HG GTS350 manual shell. I walk over to the other car (a Daytona bronze HT), lift the boot and see it is also a GTS350 shell. Hmmmm. Neither have tags. So we decide they are worth having for body sections and buy them both off the owner (ex son in law of the guy who owned the property, and brother to original guy). Take HT up to my in-laws at Emmaville, bring the HG back to mate's in Manilla for a garden ornament for now.
A year goes by, I consider cutting up the HT one Xmas at in-laws when visiting but wire up the shed instead. Car has a word - Oppy on one door.........

Backtrack a while, when we go back to pickup the HQ Sandman shell my mate out of the blue asks the kids at the place if the work Oppy means anything to them. "Yep, that is ______". So me being a sleuth finds the guy 12 months later, rings him and finds out he has the tags off the HT on his wall. My mate swaps him some bits for them and we now have a semi-complete Daytona Bronze GTS350! Tags align perfectly with the chassis number.

Forward again, probably 18 months after the HT was stuck at Emmaville. We decide to go and get the HT and take it back to Manilla. Once we get to just west of Glen Innes we have a choice to turn right to go back to Manilla, or left and 1kM into town. Both of us are hungry so we go into Glen Innes. Big car show in the main street, so we park in a side street with the trailer and a very ugly HT Monaro on the back. Funny thing is they all flock around the old Monaro and ignore all the rods! Guy approaches us and says "my son has a beauty of a HT in his shed, come and look". So we drive 1 minute up the road, son doesn't want to show us the car. However after I talk to him about his WB Statesman he realises i'm no idiot thief. so he shows us the mintest HT GTS I have ever seen, a really low mile Platinum Metallic with red trim 6cyl GTS. He says he was going to make a 350 out of it using tags off an old wreck he found in the bush. Both my mate and me get curious. He points to the tags on the wall, we look at each other and recognise the HG chassis number (VERY easy one to remember). So after some chatting and telling him we now have that car whose plates were supposedly stolen he gives us the plates (in nice good gesture as he realised long ago the HT was better as it was, and was happy for the HG to go back together, plus he obviously recognised the HT)! Now we have both cars re-united with their tags.
HT was sold recently, mate concentrating on his 2 x HK's. We still have the HG.

How's all that for co-incidence!

[Absinth]

Byron, tht's one of the best car stories I've read in quite a while...

[Vombil]

magic

[jennie285]

Rodney said you guys have done a lot of miles to get all those items back together.... great story

[Robbo]

That is a great colour Will.co, Aquamarine, haven't seen it for year's. Worked with a tiler many year's ago, who bought a SLR 5000 new in that colour, looked great.