Tales from the Sherpa Shed

[R Lutz]

Chassis cabs didn't get stale air vents until 85/86 with the K2. Not long after, they had to remove the vents from the vans as they posed a security risk. I'm going to guess they moved the stale air vents from the body sides/waistline into the new rear light clusters.

Years ago, I ran a bespoke Discovery which was built during a factory shut down for Christmas in 1989. The number of Sherpa bits fitted to it was astonishing. The Sherpa part was cheaper than the Land Rover part if you went branded...

Does yours have the Allegro seats fitted? My dad had a 1986 Sherpa 350 pick-up and it had ex-Allegro seats, same as my uncles 250. Both brand new at the time.  Allegro ashtray, fusebox cover, etc. I think heater as well. 

[jonathan_dyane]

4 hours ago, Heavyspanners said:

That one must have had an engine swap - the Sherpa got the O Series engine in 1978.

Apparently it's quite easy to swap engines on the pre-LT77 Sherpas, and there are advantages in using the B Series - much better spares availability, and lots of tuning options. I should think B Series engines were (and maybe still are?) quite cheap to buy, too. There are certainly plenty of them about.

Ah I omitted the critical detail that it was a diesel! I think the B series diesel soldiered on until about 1987

[Heavyspanners]

7 hours ago, R Lutz said:

Chassis cabs didn't get stale air vents until 85/86 with the K2. Not long after, they had to remove the vents from the vans as they posed a security risk. I'm going to guess they moved the stale air vents from the body sides/waistline into the new rear light clusters.

Years ago, I ran a bespoke Discovery which was built during a factory shut down for Christmas in 1989. The number of Sherpa bits fitted to it was astonishing. The Sherpa part was cheaper than the Land Rover part if you went branded...

Does yours have the Allegro seats fitted? My dad had a 1986 Sherpa 350 pick-up and it had ex-Allegro seats, same as my uncles 250. Both brand new at the time.  Allegro ashtray, fusebox cover, etc. I think heater as well. 

I don't think they're Allegro seats, although having said that I don't know offhand what Allegro seats look like.

I haven't got any seat photos because I took them out without thinking to take pix, and now they're in the rafters of my garage. However, a swift look around the web throws up this ex-BT chassis-cab Sherpa, which has the same seats:



That's a 1986 Sherpa, built after the next lot of changes, so in some ways the cab is different (new steering wheel, new dash, new door cards), but the seats are like mine. 

Photo from here - is it me, or is it odd that a rusty old thing like that was sold by a proper motoring auction house? Usually, the only vehicles in scrap- er, I mean, 'project' condition you'll see being sold that way are things like E-Types, which are valuable in any state.  It sold for £390, so I think we can say Sherpas have not quite arrived at E-Type values yet.

Still, the photos are a useful reference for me, in my quest for Sherpa Lore. Interesting to see how many differences there were from 85 to 86. Only one silencer on the exhaust - I've got two!

I actually bought a couple of extra seats from the chap who owns this one:

I saw it when it was still undergoing restoration. He's done a great job. There was a lot of rust. Those wheelarches are fabricated by hand from sheet steel!

The seats I bought are a slightly more high-end version, with head restraints - and heating, amazingly enough. Who knew the Sherpa had heated seats?


 

[R Lutz]

4 hours ago, Heavyspanners said:

I don't think they're Allegro seats, although having said that I don't know offhand what Allegro seats look like.
 

I wouldn't argue against you. At the time and with little comparable knowledge, they looked and felt like it. Lets face it, most of these things are parts bin specials with preciously little bespoke.

[Snipes]

I was idly looking at a supermarket delivery van with it's extremely bespoke box on the back ie; side door and shutter only with seemingly no other access, and wondering are these the BT Boxes of the future?

[TMP_319]

19 hours ago, Snipes said:

I was idly looking at a supermarket delivery van with it's extremely bespoke box on the back ie; side door and shutter only with seemingly no other access, and wondering are these the BT Boxes of the future?

I have seen quite a few former Asda delivery vans driving around London that have had the boxes taken off the back and replaced with more standard Luton bodies. 

[catsinthewelder]

I've noticed a lot of beavertail recovery trucks have distinctive Asda green cabs too.

I've been reading the thread on RR and saw a few mentions of 'Rich Wigmore' and his collection of Sherpas, thats who I bought mine from.  Decent enough bloke, we were both just a little optimistic about the chances of mine passing another MOT!  Let me know if you need a hand with Sherpa things, I don't think I'm that far away from the shed (near Ludlow).

[grogee]

On 10/08/2025 at 09:10, Heavyspanners said:

That bit about the 2.0 engines being unleaded-compatible, but the 1.7 engines aren't, is  wrong. That's another myth - one of many. Both engines used the same head. I know where they got it from: it's on Wikipedia, without any kind of reference. It doesn't even say 'citation needed'. Someone just made that up, stuck it on Wikipedia, and now it's a 'fact'.

It pisses me off that the price is 'POA'. I might take a gamble on £500 but POA just makes me not want it. 

Unleaded: I know for cast iron FAKT that the valve seats ARE unleaded compatible, at least on 2.0 heads. 

I know this because I paid a pretty penny to have a NOS one machined. The old machining troll who did it could tell from machining a bit of the seat insert material whether it was hardened or not. It is/was. 

Part of the myth may have come from the Maestro handbook, which states that 'four star leaded fuel must be used'. 

This was actually because at the time four star was a sufficiently high octane to suit the tune, not because the valve seats needed tetraethyl lead. 

The unleaded 'revolution' happened and ARG simply didn't bother retesting or homologating on unleaded. So everybody just assumed O-series demanded leaded fuel. 

My Maestro will run on 95RON but it runs like shite. So I put 98/99 E5 in and it's fine. 

What happened to my pretty ported head, you ask? Engine ran like shit with it, big misfire and the two middle cylinders had next to no compression. Porous head maybe? I just gave up and put the old one back on. 

[Heavyspanners]

14 hours ago, catsinthewelder said:

I've noticed a lot of beavertail recovery trucks have distinctive Asda green cabs too.

I've been reading the thread on RR and saw a few mentions of 'Rich Wigmore' and his collection of Sherpas, thats who I bought mine from.  Decent enough bloke, we were both just a little optimistic about the chances of mine passing another MOT!  Let me know if you need a hand with Sherpa things, I don't think I'm that far away from the shed (near Ludlow).

I bought some wheels from Rich Wigmore - who is actually based near Wigmore in Herefordshire, I don't know if that's his name as well. Although many years ago my old scout leader was called Alan Hayward, and lived in Haywards Road, which shows that name of person/name of location does sometimes coincide.

He seems to have a collection of Sherpas of all flavours, stashed away in various sheds and barns. He's definitely living the Sherpa dream.

When I turned up to collect the wheels he was trying to push a Sherpa camper (one of the large coachbuilt ones) up a muddy slope into a barn, using an old Massey-Ferguson tractor. He persuaded me to sit in the Sherpa cab and steer it, while his tractor shoved it from behind. Unfortunately the ground was so muddy that the Sherpa just slid sideways, across what was quite a steep slope. I had visions of it skidding away down the hill, with me clutching the steering wheel in a panic-stricken death grip.

Fortunately, nothing bad happened, but after several attempts, and some dramatic Sideways Sherpa Action, we did conclude that the Sherpa wasn't going to go up the hill. Not that day, anyway.

 

[Heavyspanners]

Here are some photos of my Sherpa, taken shortly after it arrived.

Because I had bought it off the internet without going to inspect it in real life, the first time I saw what I'd got was when the transporter turned up with it. The seller had confidently stated "Everything works as it should," which I didn't believe for a moment. That's one of those stock phrases like "First to see will buy" or "It is what it is" which don't mean a thing.

It's 40 years old, and it's been languishing in a barn. I expected that there would be problems. And indeed there were - but nothing that couldn't be fixed. Hey, it is what it is.

Here's the luxurious cab. I'm not sure if the plain door cards are a BT-spec item, or whether all Sherpas of this age had them.  Later Sherpas had proper door trim, but mine just has a sheet of hardboard. Still, that's all you need...

The rear view mirror is ridiculously small. I don't think it's original. It looks like it comes from a 1960s Mini. I should think that in its BT career the Sherpa didn't have a mirror at all, given that the massive box on the back would have blocked rearward vision.

Instrument binnacle is straight outta the Allegro 3 (I think the Morris Ital had it, too). It's very much the economy version, with plenty of blank space where additional dials would go on more upmarket models. In 1986 the Sherpa got a new dash with the instrument binnacle out of the Metro, but we're still in 1985 here.

Stalks are standard BL parts, a design dating back to 1971, when they appeared on the Land Rover Series 3. In 1986, when the new dash came in,  the Sherpa got groovy new stalks, so this was the final year of the old BL items. But that wasn't the end of those stalks: they were fitted to the Land Rover Defender right up to the end of production in 2016, which must be some sort of record for the longest production run of any automotive component.

Just to show how long the stalks lasted, here's a photo of a late-model Defender dash, taken from the Chelsea Truck Company website. That's one of their aftermarket steering wheels.

You can bling up your Defender with all the posh kit you like - but you've still got Leyland Sherpa stalks!

One little issue which I have to sort out is the ignition key. There isn't one. There's a strip of metal wedged into the keyhole, with a washer rivetted onto it. Quite a well-engineered solution to a lost key, and it does actually work - but I've bought a new LDV Pilot switch to replace the whole thing. I think the Pilot version is the same as earlier models, but we'll find out for sure soon enough.

There's a mystery hole on the right, which may or may not have ever contained a switch. Some Sherpas had a blanking plug here; on others, the choke knob was here. The switches on my Sherpa have suffered a certain amount of Previous Owner Mucking About, so I'm not quite sure what the original arrangement was.

 

The engine would only run with maximum choke. This was the previous owner's choke control locking solution. I've used the good old clothes peg method myself before now, but this - with a spring clip and a wodge of cardboard - is definitely the heavy-duty variant.

 

Here's the original switch panel, minus most of its switches, with some, erm, alternative solutions installed alongside. I think the switches are Metro items - fitted one year before the Sherpa got the Metro instrument binnacle - but I've looked up Metro switches on the internet and the ones I've seen don't look quite the same as the remaining switch on my Sherpa. Surely they weren't Sherpa-only switches?

Blanking panel on the left is where the radio would go, if fitted, but BT Sherpas didn't have any in-cab entertainment options. I've seen photos of Sherpa cabs with a rather nice Freight Rover badge blanking over the radio slot, which mine probably had before the previous owner got busy.

The heater controls must have been used on other vehicles, but I can't place them offhand...

 

Although by 1985 most of the switches had changed to Metro-sourced items (probably),  the headlamp/sidelight switch on my Sherpa is still this older type of  rocker switch, used on everything from Minis to Maxis.  These are still available new, so I'm thinking of standardising everything to this kind of switch, rather than farting about trying to find Metro switches (and then, possibly, discovering that they're not Metro switches after all).

One of these would tidy things up, I think.

 

One fun feature of my Sherpa was the orange beacon, installed by the farmer in a frankly rather haphazard manner. Oh, it worked well enough...

...but the installation looked a bit temporary, to say the least.

The three switches are for right-hand beacon, work light (a fog light aimed at the load bed), and left-hand beacon (broken, but why weren't the two beacons on one switch?) Two different earth connection points with four separate earth wires going to them. Everything held together with tape and good luck.

 

The lights themselves were bolted on, although everything else was a festival of sticky tape.

 

The live wire for the beacons and work light took an interesting route along the chassis...

 

...and was finally stuffed into the positive battery clamp. Note genuine original Freight Rover terminal cover. That's a rare item in itself.

 

The whole lot came off. I may re-fit the work light at some point, because that would be a useful thing. I'm not too sure about the beacon. Maybe I'll put it on my Land Rover (and then fit a Harvey Frost crane...)

At any rate, without the beacons and wires and tape all over the place, the Sherpa looks slightly more respectable and a bit less Steptoe-spec. It's also a few inches lower, which means it might just get under my new door beam, when that goes in.  I'm rebuilding the shed to Sherpa dimensions - but that's another story.




 

[Snipes]

Some of our works vans have internal mirrors, should one wish to look at the bulkhead.

[ETCHY]

Great stuff, really enjoying this.

The heater controls look like those out of a series 3 Allegro to me.

[adw1977]

22 minutes ago, ETCHY said:

The heater controls look like those out of a series 3 Allegro to me.

I think you're right.

Jan 1982 brochure page

[adw1977]

4 hours ago, Heavyspanners said:

Here's the original switch panel, minus most of its switches, with some, erm, alternative solutions installed alongside. I think the switches are Metro items - fitted one year before the Sherpa got the Metro instrument binnacle - but I've looked up Metro switches on the internet and the ones I've seen don't look quite the same as the remaining switch on my Sherpa. Surely they weren't Sherpa-only switches?

Could be Rover SD1?

1982 brochure page

[captain_70s]

Harsh.

[Heavyspanners]

2 hours ago, adw1977 said:

Could be Rover SD1?

1982 brochure page

They certainly look similar, although the SD1 versions look like rocker switches, while the Sherpa version is push-push.



It seems that Sherpa switches might have been used on the Lotus Esprit. These Lotus switches look very much like the switch on my Sherpa:



There's a Lotus parts supplier which sells an aftermarket version. Real ones are unobtanium, it seems.

I'd like to get confirmation that they really do fit the Sherpa before I lay out the best part of £30 per switch, though. Fortunately the one switch I've got is for the hazard lights, because for some reason the Lotus version of that is over £60!



 

[Jenson Velcro]

P.S. to your post on the blue, the brickwork to your wc looks to have been laid largely in English garden wall bond.

[Heavyspanners]

Sherpawatch: this has just popped up on Farcebook Marketplace.

It's described as a 'Fright Rover' (aw, c'mon, they're not that scary) 400, but it's not. Someone has done quite a lot of panel swapping from a later model. The doors probably come from a Leyland Daf 400, which is why it's wearing those 400 badges. It's got the later impact-absorbing bumper, and probably the entire later front end, because the wings and valence panel were different on the squishy bumper models. That's a post-1987 grille, at any rate.



MOT ran out in January, although as it's old enough to be MOT exempt it can still be driven on the road. Looking at the advisory list, there's nothing wrong with it that a general service wouldn't fix.

BUT....I spy a full set of those mysterious Sherpa switches on the dash.  I wouldn't mind just having a look at those. I'm almost tempted to go there and be a shameless timewaster just to have a nose around that cab.



 

[busmansholiday]

Aren't the switches the same as the Maestro?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/376479162659

 

[JMotor]

54 minutes ago, busmansholiday said:

Aren't the switches the same as the Maestro?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/376479162659

 

I think you're spot on.

Or they are damn close.

I did think it could of been Ambassador ones. 

Except that switch was red instead of black.

[Heavyspanners]

I think the Ambassador/Maestro versions have a bigger logo in the middle, going by this lot which I found for sale on eBay:



I can't find a clear photo anywhere of a 1985 Sherpa dashboard - well, apart from my own photos of my own Sherpa. But I would like to see a factory-original, un-messed-about-with '85 Sherpa dash, just to see how it looked when new.

Here's  a 1986 Sherpa, as sold by KGF Classics. This is the later, improved dashboard with new stalks. The Sherpa was getting dangerously posh by this time. The area which housed the switch panel on the '85 model now has a digital clock - cutting-edge kit for the 80s.  But there are still two blanking plugs and no radio!



Those switches look like the same as Metro ones of the same period.

Of course, the Metro had about four million different dashboards over the years - it's another rabbit hole to go down - but late Austin Metros (or no-name Metros, produced after the Austin name had been dropped but before it all went Rover) had the same instrument cluster as the Sherpa and suspiciously similar switches.



Those Metro switches might be the same as mine. But it's difficult to tell, because my one and only remaining  switch stands proud of the mounting panel, while all these are recessed into it.

It may well be the same mechanism behind the push-button in all the variants, of course.
 

[grogee]

@Heavyspanners most if not all of that 1986 switchgear is copy and paste Maestro. 

Posh Maestro & Montego got backlit stalks using fibre optics from the FUTUR. I suspect Sherpas weren't treated to this extravagance. 

If it helps I can pull some switches out of mine and measure / photograph them for you? 

Related: I really, really want a Freight Rover t-shirt. 

[stuboy]

On 16/08/2025 at 20:04, captain_70s said:

www.plentyofsherpas.com

lol

[Heavyspanners]

13 hours ago, grogee said:

@Heavyspanners most if not all of that 1986 switchgear is copy and paste Maestro. 

Posh Maestro & Montego got backlit stalks using fibre optics from the FUTUR. I suspect Sherpas weren't treated to this extravagance. 

If it helps I can pull some switches out of mine and measure / photograph them for you? 

Related: I really, really want a Freight Rover t-shirt. 

It would be useful to see some pix of the switches, but don't go pulling your dashboard apart just for me.

I haven't found any fibre optics on my Sherpa, but I wouldn't be surprised if later models had that. Later Sherpas became a strange mixture of old-school engineering and high tech. From the 1987 model year (so from some time in 1986 in real life) the O Series engine was reworked into the O2, with an ECU - science fiction stuff for the time. But it still had a carburettor!

The O2 Engine was later developed into the M Series, with a 16 valve head and fuel injection, and went on to power assorted Rovers. At one time there was an entry-level Rover 800 which had an 8 valve + carb version of the M Series engine called the M8, which was actually the dear old O Series engine in disguise.

The O Series had a good run. I've always thought it was a rather under-rated engine, although I don't know if I'll feel so kindly towards it after I've put in a few miles on the 61 bhp Commercial version.

Sherpa T-shirts are available on the internet - Leyland Sherpa and Freight Rover - although the black version of the Freight Rover shirt looks a bit rubbish. The white version has a much better print. I bought one in BT yellow, but nobody seems to do a range of colours any more.

I suppose Sherpas in all their versions are very much a niche interest, so there probably isn't much demand for Sherpa T-shirts.

Having said that, I was surprised to find it's possible to get a T-shirt depicting the Leyland 15 - a version of the Standard Atlas van. That's got to be really niche. There are probably only about 3 Standard Atlas vans left in the world by now, although - slightly incredibly - they continued in production until 1968, well into the Transit era.



 

[MorrisItalSLX]

Could the switches be Range Rover items?

[grogee]

2 hours ago, Heavyspanners said:

From the 1987 model year (so from some time in 1986 in real life) the O Series engine was reworked into the O2, with an ECU - science fiction stuff for the time. But it still had a carburettor!

A-series and R/S series Maestro had an electronic unit attached to the carb, possibly an auto choke thing? I think late A-series even had a carb/catalyst combo, madness. 

I wonder if (some of) the Sherpa unit was shared with late bASe SD1 (2000)? 

Occasionally I see bits listed for R800 8v and pick them up for my Maestro. It's tempting to fit an M series but I bet it would be a bit of a fuckaround. Unless I had an empty barn, and a work-free winter to complete it. At the moment I'm contemplating fitting PAS to it and that's a reasonably big job in itself. 

[Heavyspanners]

2 hours ago, MorrisItalSLX said:

Could the switches be Range Rover items?

Very similar, but I'm not convinced that any of the versions which sit in a recess are exactly the same as the Sherpa type, which stands off the panel - and has the logo recessed into the button surface, which is another detail difference.

In my photo, the Sherpa switch actually looks rectangular rather than square, but I'm not sure if that's just a trick of the camera angle. I'll measure it when I'm next in the Sherpa Shed.



I'm still puzzling over the Lotus Esprit switches, which look the same - except possibly not quite.

But then, everything is the same except possibly not quite...



I'm starting to believe the Sherpa switches were a Sherpa-only item. Which seems ridiculous - surely BL wouldn't go to the trouble of making an exclusive design of switch for a vehicle which in every other way is a parts bin special.

But then again, that's exactly the sort of thing BL would do...

 

[Heavyspanners]

16 minutes ago, grogee said:

A-series and R/S series Maestro had an electronic unit attached to the carb, possibly an auto choke thing? I think late A-series even had a carb/catalyst combo, madness. 

I wonder if (some of) the Sherpa unit was shared with late bASe SD1 (2000)? 

Occasionally I see bits listed for R800 8v and pick them up for my Maestro. It's tempting to fit an M series but I bet it would be a bit of a fuckaround. Unless I had an empty barn, and a work-free winter to complete it. At the moment I'm contemplating fitting PAS to it and that's a reasonably big job in itself. 

Maestros did indeed have an auto choke. It was so unreliable that converting to manual choke became a common modification.

For the '85 model year, Sherpas had an electronic distributor as standard, but no other fancy stuff. It was the following year when full-on  electronic control came in, but offhand I don't know if automatic choke was part of that. It's covered in the Haynes manual, in the 'supplement for later models' (which is about the same thickness as the main part of the manual), but I haven't read that far yet.

My Sherpa has a handy data plate which I think was a British Telecom thing, fitted to let their workshop staff know what they were dealing with. Ignition is 'Breakerless':



I don't think the A Series ever had a carb with the catalyst.  Late A-Series engines engine had three (count 'em, three) different versions of fuel injection: single point, twin point, and multi point, and all of these came with a cat. 

The Lada Riva, now that did have a catalyst and a carb. But that's another tangent!

 

[High Jetter]

2 hours ago, grogee said:

A-series and R/S series Maestro had an electronic unit attached to the carb, possibly an auto choke thing? I

 

1 hour ago, Heavyspanners said:

Maestros did indeed have an auto choke.

I think the correct term was an Automatic Enrichment Device (AED unit). I think similar were fitted to XJ's and SD1's.

[Snipes]

3 hours ago, Heavyspanners said:

Maestros did indeed have an auto choke. It was so unreliable that converting to manual choke became a common modification.

For the '85 model year, Sherpas had an electronic distributor as standard, but no other fancy stuff. It was the following year when full-on  electronic control came in, but offhand I don't know if automatic choke was part of that. It's covered in the Haynes manual, in the 'supplement for later models' (which is about the same thickness as the main part of the manual), but I haven't read that far yet.

My Sherpa has a handy data plate which I think was a British Telecom thing, fitted to let their workshop staff know what they were dealing with. Ignition is 'Breakerless':



I don't think the A Series ever had a carb with the catalyst.  Late A-Series engines engine had three (count 'em, three) different versions of fuel injection: single point, twin point, and multi point, and all of these came with a cat. 

The Lada Riva, now that did have a catalyst and a carb. But that's another tangent!

 

I thought late minis were spi carb and cat, but I was never "into" them it was just from seeing them about.