B8/5

B8/5 was the first Nagari I had ever seen. It appeared in Adelaide early in 1970. At the time there were 3 Mark 5s and at least twice as many Mk.7s. Just about all of these cars were built by their owners and a factory built car was unimaginable. The SA Bolwell club didn't come until 2 years later. By then we were quite familiar with the Nagari because a dealer was established and our early meetings were held at the dealership, which happned to be Daryl Siggs' Shell Service Station on Grange Road. Meetings were conducted in the lube bay, often with a Nagari on the hoist and we sat around on oil drums underneath.

Anyway, in 1970, I was working for the Motor Vehicles Department and its one and only office (no branches had been established then I'm pretty sure) was in the Railway Building next to Parliament House. (When we moved out of there the tenancy was taken over by another den of iniquity - The Adelaide Casino). Part of my job as an assessor was to establish standards for new vehicles to enable subsequent similar vehicles to sail through the registration process with a minimum of fuss. I can assure you that my bosses didn't think this Nagari thing would catch on and I'm sure they couldn't erase the mind-set that associated Bolwell with one-off kit cars, so it took a second one to appear in SA before we got around to weighing one and establishing all the other criteria. Incidentally, RAC horsepower ratings were some strange calculations that took into account bore diameter and number of cylinders and divide by the number you first thought of but the length of the stroke was not considered. Well, to cut a long story short, which I don't seem to be good at, one day this orangeish-red Nagari coupe turned up out the front for its Police inspection. This inspection was required because the car had come from Victoria on a permit and involved looking at the engine number and seeing if it appeared on a list of not yet recovered stolen vehicles, nothing more, nothing less. You can't be too sure about those crooks over the border. As I am very good at digressing, I'll do it one more time. I had a police inspection for one of my own Nagaris a few years later. The policeman assigned to this job had been in the force for a long time and he hadn't caught too many bank robbers lately so they gave him a clipboard and a pencil and a white lab coat (he looked just like a goal umpire before they tricked them up with colourful shirts) and off he set to demand visitors to the MVD (it became MRD later) to raise their bonnets so that he could do his stuff, i.e. look for engine numbers. His other tools of trade were a torch and a magnifying glass. Anyhow, I had bought this nice deep yellow Nagari in Melbourne (no.26) and of course it needed to have its inspection. Now the Ford Motor Company issued a special set of numbers (with the prefix A1E) to all of the engines that were off the shelf and supplied to outside customers, e.g. not destined for their own vehicles. For some reason they stamped this number underneath, on the lip where the bell housing bolts on. I explained this to our friendly policeman who wasn't prepared to believe me. Besides, he wasn't getting down on the ground to get his white dustcoat dirty for anybody. So I lifted the bonnet and he went about his work poking his torch into all the nooks and crannies, but to no avail. This one had him really stumped. His decision was that I should go away and find the engine number in my own time instead of wasting his and come back when I had found it. Tony Cullen had an engraving tool at his workshop in Blackwood so I went up there and we engraved the appropriate engine number in about eight different places. Back I went for my second inspection and this time he found one of the eight or so engine numbers. His comment was "I can't believe I missed that last time, I'm usually pretty good at finding them". I just remembered his first name was Russell. My son had little Jack Russell called Russell and he was an angry little terrier too. I must remember to ask John Davies if the car still has the original engine whether he has seen the engine number in more than one place. Getting back to B8/5, it turned up out the front as I said, and when I heard about it I raced downstairs with this crappy old camera that I kept in my top drawer for such an occasion and snapped off a picture.
It was an amazing site and you can see the driver of the Valiant taxi is amazed too. The car was so new that the side windows were fixed one piece jobs like the ones on the drag car in a recent post. You can also see te early Nagari mags that had alloy centres but steel rims. The car was purchased new from Bolwell Cars, Seaford, Victoria by Michael Kuhn, a builder from Plympton.
A year later, in 1971, Michael and the Bolwell moved to Darwin as the building industry was booming there by then. By 1979 it had found its way to Melbourne and in that year it was purchased from a Melbourne car yard by Bob and Kerryn Hampton of Emerald. They used this car for many years, only selling it to buy the Howard Ellis yellow sports. Later, Bob and Kerryn moved to the Gold Coast taking the yellow convertible with them. I really don't know much about the ownership of B8/5 after the Hamptons but it did go to NSW and a subsequent owner was Craig Wade. It is now owned by NSW member, Gordon Ross and here are a few pictures of it at a club event up there.

As you can see, it has a very distinctive bonnet bulge. I'm not sure I've seen another one like it.
It has also gained some new wheels. Most people would say thank goodness because those very early Nagari wheels were a bit of a worry. However, if anyone has any of them laying around, I might be interested in purchasing them, especially if the price was something like what an old pensioner like myself could afford. Talking about Nagari wheels, I remember Peter G saying the other day that the Commonwealth Aircraft Factory made them for Bolwell. Well, a long time ago, I was at a place called J. Swift Diecasters Pty. Ltd. on Ferntree Gully Road, Clayton North who offered me the dies for the one piece Nagari wheels. They were way down the back, out in the weather, and had been for many years. Unfortunately they were beyond redemption, otherwise I would have bought them on the spot.