Alistair Allen’s Kiwiana sheds in Oamaru

With the genealogy of the five generations of South Island engineers in the family, Ross Hayes thinks nothing of rebuilding Land Rovers for fun, family and farm.
Ross Hayes was 17 when he bought his first Land Rover. It was road-legal, but that was about it. It turned out that it was cosmetically covering up a huge amount of rust, so it wasn’t going to make the long haul.
Ross bunches his lips. “I got a bit disheartened and decided that if I couldn’t trust anybody to sell me a good one, I’d build myself one.”
He bought a 1954 short wheelbase Series 1 Land Rover in December ’96, just after he turned 18. “I paid six hundred bucks to a guy out of Naseby called Owen Rawcliffe, who’s since passed. I brought it back to Oamaru through the Danseys Pass and set to pulling it to bits.”
He bought workshop and parts manuals from the UK and a set of Whitworth sockets and Whitworth spanners and got stuck in.
The Mistress, as he came to call this ‘54 Series 1, spent five years, three months in the workshop – 6000 hours – while he pulled it to bits and rebuilt it.
His idea was to start with a chassis, and everything that went onto the chassis was either rebuilt or brand new. It was hard to get parts back then in the 1990s.