The art of the costum van is a long and culturally diverse tradition. from the shag-pile-and-dreamchatchers era of the oh-so-velour early 1970s to that decade's end with jacked-up rears and porthole windows, onward through the slotmags and airbrushng of the 80s and the sidestripes and coplous spotlights of the 1990S, there's always been an enthusiasm for taking the stark functionally of van and turning them into wacky fun-buses, of course, this does mean that any aesthetic vanning treatment you care to name has been played upon, played out, recycled, and done to death all over again. so what does it take to make a cool costum van in 2016? lateral thinking, that's what. a liberal sprinkling of originality and a bullish keenness to do it on your own terms.
This all made perfect sense to dan ewins who, after an extended period of flidding with astras, chose to fuse what he knew with the wild world of costum-vanning. 'I've always liked the Astra, and I Love trying new things that others are nervous of doing like with my last Astra GSi that featured on the cover of total vauxhall in Astra.
he explain the car in question running banded steels and sporting a whopping front mount intercooler, but i also like it to look like any modification i make was meant to be there from the start. i chose the van this time as i'm a builder by trade and, coupled with the fact that I'd never tried an engine swap before , I throught I'd make a new twist on the builder's van. so when I saw this one for sale after selling my GSi, it was time to take the plunge.
Humble beginnings
as project base go, this astra van sportive was a pretty humble one. It belonged to a mate and wasn't actually functional in any meaningful sense, so dan threw him a silly offer in a sort of jokey I'll take it off your hands manner, and ended up dragging the sorry thing home with him. it was a bona fide, hard used builder's van, and as such had suffered a pretty hard life that's what they're for, after all utilitarian load luggers bought to do a job without complaint.'It had loads of bits missing, every inch was covered in dirt, and it stank like a bag of cement" he recalls with a grimace. but from such little acorns do mighty oaks grow, and dan had already eyed up a worthy donor to replace the tired bits with some that were rather more exciting.
such excitement came in the form of a MKV Astra SRi Turbo, a model that hed chosen carefully to suit his vision for the project, with worthy candidate being sourced from the croydon area. it came up just before the four-day bank holiday weekend, so that set me the challenge of carrying out the swap in a defined time period, says dan casually, as if such ambitious targets are totally normal. i started on the friday stripping both engines ready to remove them, then on the saturday the van engine came out and i finished all the prepping before the Z20 could go in. on the sunday i took out the SRi engine and fitted it to the van, all piped up and with the front end back on, so that on the monday i could swap over the fuel tanks and lines, fuse boxes and controls, and by 5pm i was driving down the road. phew easy as that, eh? it's a wonder we don't hear about weekend engine swaps more often.
from the on it was about sourcing the upgrades, the injectors and airflow meter were easy to find, but the turbo piperwork was a game to get hold of as I'd set myself a budget to build form, and i was getting to that target veru quickly! but once I had all the parts sorted I booked the van in with SM Tuning, and had it mapped to arround 300bhp on low boost so as not to kill the engine.
three hundred horses, as you'ill probably agree, is more than enough to be entertaining in an Astravan although the SRi transformation is but half the story here. sure, the interior has been treated to the full hot hatch makeover too (and all propertyfunctional, no half measures while this guy may be quick, he certainly doesn't take shortcuts), but the major talking point is the treatment of the exterior. you might have noticed, it looks bit scary.
Shabby chic
you see, in the pursuit of doing something fresh and new, dan's opted for a harsh, militaristic vibe, peppered with bullet holes and rocking a certain shabby chic flavour around the rust spots which, you'll be glad to hear, aren't actually rust spots. but we'll get tothat.
Custom creation
There are 956 of them across the bodywork, each one giving the appearance of having been punched in by the guys in a protracted marathon of measured violence. Those striking looks really do characterise the sheer agression of the build too. It's Mad Max. It's World War II. It transcends nu-rat to become something entirely its own. When the nuclear winter comes, it'll just be the cockroaches, the T-1000 and this Astravan left stalking the Earth. Builders' vans, you see, are totally indestructible.