1970 SIIa Ex mod Marshall Ambulance

Good day from Canada!

I took delivery of my Marshall-bodied Series IIa back in May, and have been focussed on getting it safetied and road-worthy since then. Now that I'm able to drive it around town, I thought this would be a good time to start my project thread. Here is my Hello thread with pictures of the vehicle delivered "as found" - running but not yet safetied nor cleaned up in any way. This was after a cross-country trip of about 3,200km on a transport truck.

As I purchased it sight unseen, I spent a couple days familiarizing myself with the vehicle and christened it "Winnie" (because, let's be honest with ourselves, coming up with the right name is one the most important things to do, if not THE most important). I started making a list of things that I could easily see were needed for the all-important safety certification here in Ontario, Canada. Shocks, right-rear turn signal wiring (bad ground), wiper switch, front anti-roll bar links, and new tires.

To my surprise, not all MOT-licensed inspection stations here will inspect and certify a classic vehicle, but I finally found one and dropped it off after fixing the known issues. I was a bit anxious about it, but the list they came back with was not all that bad - u-joints on rear propshaft, transmission mounts, spring bushes, windshield washer switch (they didn't realize it was a plunger rather than an electric pump switch ) and a jack. I ended up replacing the rear leaf springs with 1-ton units, which made things a little simpler and also fixed the rearward lean. Everything else fixed, and she's on the road!

Here's how it looks all leveled-up and with new 30x9.5 BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2 tires. The rims are LP861 6x15, which I've since found are not so common a size/part, and I'm struggling to find a matching 5th rim for the spare mounted on the hood (currently a 16" military rim). If anyone knows of one available, PLEASE let me know.



Just for fun and to be a completionist, I bought a vintage military stretcher that was for sale locally. Comes in handy while working on Winnie in this hot summer in Southern Ontario. It remains a few degrees cooler in the "patient compartment" due to the roof and cabin vents, sliding windows, etc., and I can lay back and enjoy a beer.



Speaking of beer, I want to give a shout out to Mike at Britannica Restorations. Not only has his YouTube videos been very helpful and entertaining, and that he's located in Sherbrooke Quebec (about 1 hour from where I grew up), but he also put me on to Partake non-alcoholic beers. I've been looking a long time for an even marginally passable brew that doesn't have high gluten content, and Partake's brews actually taste really good. I'm still trying out their offerings (they have 8 different ones), but so far am happy with their two IPAs, Blonde and Red.

First real operational issue this past weekend...

Winnie did not come with a water temperature sender, and the Jaeger combo instrument had the old style capillary tube gauge (with the tube cut off). I installed a new electrical gauge and sender, and found during a country drive the engine was overheating.

After getting the vehicle back home, I started troubleshooting - drained, flushed and refilled coolant, checked for leaks, checked the fins, etc. There's certainly crud in the top of the radiator, but water is still flowing down and out the bottom connection so it's not completely blocked. I also drained both heater matrices. A Marshall ambulance has two heaters - one in the cabin between the seats, and one in the patient compartment - and both have their own pair of coolant pipes.

I have an IR temperature sensor but the batteries are shot and they're an odd size that is difficult to find around here, so I haven't measured the temperature differential between the top and bottom of the rad yet.

After flushing and confirming flow, I lifted the thermostat housing and found....nothing. There's no thermostat at all. My theory is that the coolant is taking the path of least resistance and mostly going through the bypass circuit, and very little is going through the rad itself. A skirted thermostat should fix this, so I ordered both "summer" and "winter" thermostats (I'll be driving Winnie year-round) from my local shop, along with a new gasket and o-ring. Hopefully that will resolve the immediate overheating issue, though at some time I will want to pull the rad out and do a full reverse flush to clear out any remaining blockages.

A bit of history about 30FJ11 "Winnie"

Based on a 1970 Land Rover Series IIa LWB, Winnie is officially an "Ambulance 2/4 Stretcher 4x4 Rover 11." The vehicle arrived to me with the original UK army military vehicle registration plates (30FJ11) attached, which is cool but due to local rules cannot be visible alongside my Ontario license plates. I'll likely re-mount them on the inside of the cab or patient compartment.

When I was first doing some research on the vehicle before purchase, I found this picture from the 70s of a sister vehicle located in Belfast with reg plate 30FJ16. I'm not sure if military plates were assigned sequentially - if so then these two vehicles are very close to each other.



I requested info from UK MoD and received a copy of the Vehicle Data Card which has been really helpful. After the ambulance body and other modifications were made by Marshall Engineering of Cambridge, the vehicle was received at Central Vehicle Depot Ashchurch in May 1971. There is a hole in the service history at this point; perhaps it sat in the depot during this time. By the end of March 1972, 30FJ11 landed at the British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS) in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada where it served with distinction (my words) until being sold off to private ownership in October 1979.

From there, very little has happened. According to the previous owner, Winnie has spent most of her post-army life in a covered storage barn in Medicine Hat. At some point in time someone started to make changes to the wiring (replacing wires in the engine bay, cutting all the wires to the patient compartment), and replacing some of the rear glass and windshield. I'm not sure when it happened, but it looks like Winnie was shot at a few times, judging by the holes in the couple of windows that I still need to replace. Then again, it was stored in Alberta...