PART 3 THE PAINT SHOP

till 1981, and still a bunch of clowns. Just down the road from the first paint shop — Stewarts Auto Painting, in the old home-town of Wangavegas — at the end of Hinau Street (ironically, right next to the Wanganui rubbish dump) was Suzuki New Zealand’s headquarters. Back then, there was a proper big vehicle assembly plant down there, assembling the Suzuki utes and vans that came across from Japan as bits in a box. While the plant had a big flash spray painting facility, it couldn’t deal with small touch-ups, so it had become a customer, and we always had brand-new Suzuki utes and vans in our shop getting small jobs done when they got a dent or a scratch prior to leaving the assembly plant. There was something about those Suzuki vans that made them especially interesting playthings for us. It was probably their slow speed and tiny size that prevented us from taking