I think I paid $2,500 for my first Land Rover — a 1970 Series IIA 88″ — in about 1987. It had no top, the transmission wouldn’t go into third gear, and the carburetor gummed up every 20 miles or so.

I drove it from Venice Beach to Claremont, about 50 miles across downtown LA, on surface streets at about 30mph, stopping now and then to let the carb rest. As I recall it took about four hours.

I knew very little about auto repair and restoration. Before that I’d had a Jeep CJ5 and an Isuzu Trooper. But there was a good Land Rover shop in Pasadena — British Pacific — and I had some money to burn, which I did. I swapped out the carb and rebuilt the transmission on my dorm room floor. Didn’t do something right with the trans; it grenaded itself after a couple hundred miles, and I put in a good rebuild.

Probably should have stopped there, but I ended up doing a complete frame-off restoration. Re-galvanized the body cappings. Rubber-coated the frame. New top, new instruments, a new wiring loom. Almost lost the body when the aircraft place I left it for bead-blasting changed hands and they didn’t know how to contact me.

I drove it for a short time after all that, and realized I’d made it “too nice.” Sold it and bought another beater Rover. And another, and another.

It was the start of an addiction.

Over the years I owned a 1972 88″ soft top, a 1966 109″ 12-seater station wagon (which was an utterly awful restoration job though it looked okay from a distance), a professionally restored 1965 109″ station wagon with a swapped-in 6-cylinder Chevy engine (drove it from California to Colorado and back, took it to Baja, it appeared in a Four Wheeler Magazine article), and a very early IIa 1963 2-door pickup that had gone from England to South Africa to Costa Rica to Port Hueneme, with not a straight body panel in the bunch. I drove that last one for several years without restoring anything and I think it was my favorite.

Also a gray market 1984 Range Rover. Two Discoveries. Those were all solid vehicles, expensive to fix, expensive to fuel, and not as much fun as the Series trucks.

The aluminum-magnesium alloy used for Series Land Rover bodies was called “Birmabright.” It was used because steel was in short supply after World War II, and had the side benefit of being rustproof. That’s the kind of thing you learn when you rebuild a transmission on your dorm room floor.

Was it worth it? I certainly didn’t get back what I put in. But I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. The first one especially — the start of it all — was great. The best $2,500 I ever set on fire.