“He was actually quite glad that I was blunt with him because apparently the MoT garage wouldn’t test it and they gave him his money back. Anyway, he then asked me to weld it all up.”

    One thing though leads to another, and soon enough a bit of welding had grown and grown into something a bit more involved, Mark explains: “In the first instance it was ‘can you weld up my Morris?’ then it was ‘can you weld up my Morris and paint what you’ve welded?’ that then became ‘actually can you paint it nicely if I’ve had all that welding done?’ and finally it was ‘can you scrape off all the underseal and paint it where is should have been undersealed?’ So now it’s got to the point where it’s probably one of the fullest rebuilds you can do without acid dipping the thing and rebuilding the engine.

    “We’re painting the insides and the outsides of all the panels, inside the cab, underneath the treadplates, the engine bay, behind the grille – we’re painting inside, outside and underneath of everything,” says Mark.

    Given its rotten yet rare status, dismantling and repairing the Woodie had to be carried out with considerable TLC. It needed new front wings, sills, treadplate and outriggers, but things got quite tricky when it came to that bespoke rear. The good news was that the timber was still in rude health and re-useable – especially given that most of it is unique to Wood. The bad news was a puzzle in the shape of: how do you rebuild the rear without damaging the timber which was needed as a jig?

    Luckily Mark had a rotten Traveller lying around which had donated a few parts to the project Woodie and its timber was sound enough to act as a stand-in.

    The wheelarches are factory-spec Traveller as is the horizontal timber which runs parallel with the sill from the bottom of the B-post to the wheelarch – after that, things get very different. The piece of timber where the rear door hinges are mounted is cut-off and the top horizontal timbers don’t have any channels for Traveller side windows to run in. The frame is then panelled in with 5/8th inch thick plywood.

    “When we refitted the pick-up bodywork every screw-hole lined up and I was happier with that than usual! I can’t remember a Triumph Herald going back together like that...” says Mark laughing.

    So what would 'Dep-O' have done to this Woodie pick-up if it had been up to us? Given that we were casually following the rebuild of this Mogster – we have seen it in when it was a rotten old bus and as an in-progress rebuild, as well as in its fully-finished Sunday best splendour – we were really inspired by when the Morris was edging toward completion.

    All that really needed to be done was fit the glass and it was in its glass-less state that this pick-up spoke to us, because we thought it was amazing what a lack of quarterlights did for its lines. It became less fussy and instantly more stylish – it really would have made a fantastic little surf pick-up.

    So the rest just fell into place: lowering a Minor is relatively straightforward, so down it went. Those standard Traveller steels (passenger car wheels are narrower than Morris’s commercial OE rims) would be banded and, to give it a dose of Cal-look, painted orange. Then to finish it off, how about a tuned A-series, a K-series conversion or the old skool favourite, a FIAT twink? Yep, that would have done us nicely.

    The only question we have now is: what would you do given enough time to kill and a handy working knowledge of Photoshop? Let us know at the usual email address.

All this stock clobber gets the juices flowing. What would you do?