Age of Van

[viscountofmydomain]

Hi All

Our daughter and her boyfriend have just bought a van through gumtree. It was advertised as a 1962 Franklin but looks to me to be almost exactly the same as my 1966 Viscount ambassador, only its 13ft and ours is 15ft.

I have looked through the Ambassador Chassis Numbers Thread, our van is pictured within this thread as a 1966 Ambassador, Chassis number E1308 (thank you Al for your previous help aging our van). Their van has been painted and has a new paint scheme but still has the original drawbar with E1317 on it.

I have two questions,
1. Do the numbers run consecutively enough that we could say our daughter has bought a Viscount Ambassador that was built 9 vans after ours? Or is it not that simple.
2. I'm not familiar with Franklin vans, could a Franklin van look exactly like a Viscount Ambassador?

There is also a tag riveted on the back of the van indicated it was originally sold by Croydon Caravans, but no indication of what year.

We all like a picture so here is one from the gumtree advert.

[Franklin1]

G'day vomd,

I'm confident your daughter has got herself a Viscount Ambassador, and yes the chassis number for her van is 9 numbers after yours, so it should also be from the 1966 time-period (...underneath all that white paint, that is ). The Franklin tag is a furphy - somebody must have celebrated a bit too much one night and just made that connection up.

cheers,
Al.

[viscountofmydomain]

Thanks Al

Great to know. Imagine the chances of that, we both buy vans 48 years after they are made that could have been in the factory at the same time as each other.

Cheers

Stu

[Franklin1]

G'day again, vomd...

I'm a bit curious about the Croydon Caravans badge on your daughter's van. No doubt you would have seen the badge on Observatory's van . Are we talking about the same sort of badge being on your daughter's van? If so, can you tell me whether the badge has only one phone number printed on it (74-3334) or does it have two numbers printed on it? (74-3334 and 74-6350)

The newspaper archives show the Croydon Caravans advertisements as showing only one phone number up to about the middle of 1965, but from then on the advertisements show two phone numbers. I'm just curious about whether the badges also changed around that time to show both the phone numbers. Maybe the badges could be used to help with confirming the year of manufacture (or at least determine pre- and post- 1965).

cheers,
Al.