Vents or no vents

[b-rock-05]

Hi all did all hq sandmans have vents adjacent to the doors, as my 4/74 resto does, any feedback would be great

[ozbox]

no they didnt...my 7/74 hq sandman i just sold had no vents and was a brisbane build.
i have seen a 4/74 with vents and if you look at will.co aquamarine van in the hq sandman found thread it has no vents and its 5/74..
also it has nothing to do with the fact that they may or may not be sandmans..all hq vans got the vents deleted around the same time which was just prior to hj production starting.
(the change probably had something to do with the old tooling wearing out and the new tooling for hj being there to use.)this last comment is not fact but is a high probability.

[HK1837]

Probably more likely HJ pilot production was happening around 5/74, so the running change was made to HQ at the time. You see the same sort of thing with all series change, with early introduction of next series changes eg HJ trim and paint in HQ, RTS geometry in late HX, HX trim in late HJ etc. By around 5th or 6th month 1974 probably only Acacia and Elizabeth were building vans anyway. I've never recorded a Dandenong HQ van (which would have used Elizabeth bodies anyway), and Pagewood should have just about stopped van body building by May-June (they used Elizabeth bodies for HJ).

[GNW1974]

I would agree with those comments. I looked at a late 74 build HQ holden ute (9th month I think) in Adelaide in mid 2009. It was originally a 308/M21 combo but was running a 253/auto. I checked off all the details on the compliance and one of the issues which caused me to not be 100% certain was the original paint colour, which was Absinth Yellow (it was now a white ute). I had a bit of a look and couldn't see any yellow anywhere so I went a bit cold on it as I my son was going to buy it as a project car.
After reading many articles on this site and others it now is clear in my mind it was probably a genuine Sandman or at least the plates were. They were asking 7K for it and it was pretty straight with what looked like the original guards. Interior was poor and it needed plenty of TLC. Grill was from a Kingswood.
I kick myself now as I had written down all the Vin numbers etc and threw them away. It was originally a Belmont base ute.