SAVING THE LIBRARY
To those inveterate ‘do it now’ obsessives Ken and Ray Walsh, tomorrow means today. And today doesn’t end until whatever part of a restoration they’re working on is finished. Back in May, with no serious project a prospect, the brothers were agitated. The ‘Den’, their lockup – so secret you wonder if their other halves know about it – was empty. They’d just completed a four-month showroom-finish restoration of a scrapheap-rescue mid-1970s Sherpa van.
They admit that as a vehicle, the Sherpa didn’t exactly excite. But on the strength of its truly dreadful condition – and with nothing else on the go – they took it on for the sheer rotting hell of it. Quips Chris Kershaw, the brothers’ number one helper, has a knack for balancing running his crane truck business with being with the Walshes whenever there’s something interesting afoot. “It’s no exaggeration,” he says. “These guys are warriors. When they’d finished it, the Sherpa was a work of art. But at the start, it was in such bad condition even a crusher would have rejected it.”
Ray and Ken were in the pub with Chris and a few friends who, between scouring the back pages of and searching eBay, did their best to try and come up with a worthy project. Every suggestion received a resounding NO. They’d either done a vehicle like it before, or it was an ordinary truck
