Drawings from past to future

Happy New Year, Bennku! You’ve been a bit quiet lately.

In a gentle way, I’d like to remind followers of this thread just how ‘switched on’ Bennku, our resident artist in Finland, is. This time last year I posted a daft bit of fantasy on one of those ‘why did Leyland fail’ type threads. Bennku picked my comments up and produced EXACTLY what I had in mind, complete with leather seats; as follows.

I had written: The talk of buying out Rolls Royce earlier, reminded me that I used to think it was a shame that Rolls Royce didn’t build their own lorries. If they’d built a strong chassis in the early-ish '70s and put their Eagle 290 or 305 in it, they could have used the tall version of the Motor Panels Mk 4 cab, worked out a way of tilting it (like ERF did) and given it a rugged but majestic-looking front end. It could have had the split-windscreen of the Crusader and the full sleeper depth (like the ERF 7MW and French Mack). The interior cab quality could have been based on Continental practise (as the 7MW was). The centre-piece of the Crusader grille leant itself perfectly to the incorporation of a proper ‘exposed’-style Rolls Royce radiator, which might have looked slightly dated if regal, but then the Atkinson Borderer had a similar radiator well into the '70s when the SA400 came along. Then just add a decent sun-visor (for the export and ‘colonial’ look) and make sure that it exudes a bit of affordable quality (like Volvo did) and hey-presto: there you have your Rolls Royce Oriental, ready to hit the 1973 Brussels Show and the TIR-trail!
And naturally, it has a 9-speed Fuller. Good, now I’ve got that off my chest, I’ll go back to bed. Nighty-night! Robert

EPSON760.JPG

FANTASTIC! :smiley: