Quote Originally Posted by troopybaz View Post
Cheers for the info HK1837,

I will have to check for the seat seperator bracket. Did the belmonts with bucket seats not normally have a centre console? Or where the consoles fixed differently with no need to mount it to the seat seperator bracket?
Mauser mentioned the GTS wheel mounting cup, can you explain this in more detail? I assume you mean the sandmans had a GTS rim as a spare so the setup is different somehow?

Is it unusual to have a HQ sandman with a 39B trim? It seems unusual to me that someone would change the interior colour so early in the peice, however it was the 70's after all. Have you ever come across a mistake with stamping of the ID plates in the factorys at all?

All info is a great step forward, thanks,

P.S. out of interest, how many HQ sandman panelvans have you got record of?
All 1974 HQ Belmont with buckets were mandatory with seat separator EXCEPT when 4spd (so M20, M21 or M22 on BODY plate) optioned. The 4spd varieties got nothing in between the seats EXCEPT on a Sandman where they were console shift which used the same bracket. So if a HQ ute or van is a 4spd and has the bracket it is a Sandman. The iffy ones are the autos as a column shift, bucket seat M40 will have the bracket as it had a seat separator, but an M40 Sandman will have the bracket too as it had console shift M40, however there are other signs to look for on thes if one ever turns up.

39B trim is rare so far in Sandman, but it was an option on Belmont so it will exist. It is an ugly trim, probably why yours was changed a long time ago! The car close to it in the rolling schedule has 39B trim so i'd say yours had it originally.

I have 58 HQ Sandmans recorded, plus another 9 that I now believe are due to info discovered in the last week or so, so 67 total yours makes 68. 18 of the total 68 are utes. Rest are obviously vans. About a 50/50 split 253 and 308, with 2 x 202's and 1 x 173.