Classic Ford – September 2019

74 September 2019

It’s been a confusing month for Gavin, as he buys a fake Woody

Cortina with real fake wood, and fi ts fake, fake wood to it...

’m going to have to admit something

to you now — I’ve bought (yet)

another Cortina. This is my therapy, a

sort of Cortinas Anonymous — if I sit

down and tell you all about it I’ll feel

cleansed!

I’ve owned a woody estate for some

years now, a genuine woody which lost

its original ‘wood’ panels some time

ago. Many may not realise that these

original panels were made from a

material they called Di-Noc, a kind of

GRP. As you can appreciate, fi nding

original panels is near impossible so

since owning my car I’ve added replica

ones made from real wood, to recreate

the original look. It’s a car I had every

intention of selling a couple of years ago

but building works followed by the birth

of our fi rst child meant I didn’t quite

fi nish the odd jobs I wanted to do before

selling, so it’s been forlornly sitting in the

garage since. This was going to be the

year that it was moved on but then a

couple of things happened. Sadly, my

I

“THE DELUXE IS WELL-KNOWN,

HAVING BEEN BUILT BACK IN 2007”

father passed away, and given the

woody was the only car of mine he

really showed some attachment to, it

became more precious to me.

Secondly, a Cortina Deluxe was

advertised which just happened to have

originally woody panels fi tted to it. I was

faced with my genuine woody with fake

panels on it and a fake woody with

genuine panels. It seemed like destiny

and obvious to me that I should use my

inheritance to buy that car, take the

panels off it and fi t them to my car. I

justifi ed it by saying it’s a wise fi nancial

move to make my car a genuine woody

again, but it was also just something I

thought was simply the right thing to do.

More fake

The fake woody was quite well known

on the scene some years ago having

originally been built by John Russell

back in 2007. He’d happened to buy an

original set of woody panels and fi tted

them to his Deluxe estate (woodies

were all Supers). The car had been

through a few hands since but those

panels were still attached. I was

strangely excited taking the panels off

and fi nding the genuine Ford 118E part

numbers on the reverse. The plan was

to remove the panels, and get the holes

welded up and the sides resprayed, but

the quote I got was a fair bit more than I

wanted to spend. At this point I found a

guy called Gavin Bhurji advertising a

repro set of panels. He’d taken moulds

off panels from a friend’s genuine

woody (the car which Jon Hill is

restoring which makes an occasional

appearance in his bodywork how-tos).

So I snapped up the set he had (he can

make sets to order if anybody is after a

set). They came as plain brown

fi breglass so I’ve had them wrapped by

a local company in a wood grain effect.

They look great and fi x onto the car

using the original holes so were a

straight swap for the original panels that

came on the car. So the car remains a

fake woody, albeit a bit more fake than it

was before!

I have made a few other changes,

such as having the roof painted Spruce

New ‘wood’ freshly wrapped and ready to fi t.

Gavin’s Mk1 Cortina

ecie nottose

my original woody

Estate with fake

wood, then bought

another fake woody

with real ‘wood’

Next on the

to-do list:

Get the fake woody

ready for sale, fit the

real ‘wood’ to my

original woody

Thanks to:

Gavin Bhurji,

retrospeedshop@

gmail.com