The backyard Three Opels in Gnarp Sweden

Lars Selin is the fourth generation car mechanic in Gnarp and nothing has been thrown. In the newly renovated workshop’s entrance stands a compression-ignition engine, and in the old office spark plugs rack you will find plugs to T-Ford (!) by Krantz

Everything is left in parallel with the new technologies and digital tools. Lars Selin is on  track and can also organize all stuff. When Worldkustom greeted he had picked up three Opels in the backyard.

 

Kapitän 1955

Grandpa Helmer Selin bought the  Kapitän 1955 basically new but not as you think.

The big Opel was up and down in a swamp with 350 miles  on the odometer.

It had turned around and was smashed with dented roof. Helmer bought the car at the root. The body was straigntend  and received new paint. The roof he bumped out. It is not repainted. Mechanic Lars Selin tries to find unevenness.

Nobody beat grandfather on his fingers when it came to body work, he says and stuck to a surface above the rear window.
-Here He says. It is not visible but it feels.

Hearing betrayed the good tinsmith and car guy  towards the end. He reved the inline six so hard  that it had to be redone.  The year was 1985, and Lars had been driven to his  prom  in 1978 in the Kapitan. With children and grandchildren in the yard and in the workshop could not grandfather understand why  no one wanted to fix his old Opel. On the seat analogue GPS.

 

Truth is they felt that the old man wouldn’t drive a car anymore. They were carrying for him.

 

-Grandpa chased me most because I was the youngest, recalls Lars

 

 

In the end, said the powerful alderman:
-Now I have ordered a new driving license but none of the kids want to renovate the engine so I guess I’ll put up the license on the wall and sit and look at it then.

 Rekord 1956.

The Opel record is a driver , says Lars.
I bought it from the dealer Tore Wennman Gnarp though perhaps not as you think.

The car stood in Tore’s branch in Stockholm. He had that as a run around car  and when the branch was closed Lars made an offer on  the  car for fun mostly.

It was parked and left in 15 years.

– When I took it out I put in the battery and poured a splash of gasoline in the carburetor and it fired up  and ran perfectly

It  is completely untouched from 1956. Every year there is a veteran market in Gnarp.

This year I had packed the Rekord with the stuff the night before.

In the morning there was three inches of snow on the ground. I took it anyway on the rock-hard tires, sat in the swapmeet and felt good when I suddenly heard that they cried out my plate number  as the first prize winner in the European class and the judges also wondered who owned the ‘new’ car.

Olympia 1955

– The black is not mine but Tore Wennmans though perhaps not as you think. It is in Germany now. The car dealer Tore Wennman in Gnarp is the man everyone has a story about, says Lars.

Tore is a colorful Gnarp citizen  that also has a museum in his car dealership that he still operates, this long after joining the pension.

Jan Silén, who writes in Worldkustom and lives in Gnarp particularly remember a purchase he made. Tore had gotten into a car in Stockholm that Jan was interested and he asked about the color. After all the years and thousands of cars Tore had not absolute track but still want to serve the customer with a color.

-Pretty car, he said. Light, green-gray almost dark brownish, he said.

The black Olympia is currently sold to Germany as well as many of our enthusiast vehicles. SAAB: s and PV runs continuously to Germany. The undersigned’s Triumph Chopper recently went to the same country where the interest and above all, the economy is of a different caliber. One may wonder which country was shattered in ruins sixty years ago .

The backyard Three Opels closes for the day and we thank enthusiasts Lars Selin, Tore Wennman and Jan Silén for the chat.