Armoured Lightbody

History

A Gen 3 Lightweight wearing the Northern Ireland Vehicle Protection Kit: a bolt-on glass-reinforced-plastic hard top and rounded lower side panels, mesh over the screen and door glass, the spare on the cab roof, a wire catcher up the screen pillar and CONFIDENTIAL TELEPHONE 0800 666999 stencilled in yellow on the side.

The Ministry approached the Navy, which had GRP experience from submarine conning towers and fittings, for the moulding; the kit could be fitted with standard hand tools in about 32 to 35 man-hours, and taken off again when the vehicle went back to ordinary duties. It gave a full hard top with a rear door and small protected windows, wire-mesh guards hinged over the windscreen and the door glass against thrown missiles, and deep lower side panels curving in beneath the body to shield the wheels and underside. In the late 1980s it was common for units to stencil the body sides, in yellow or red, with the Confidential Telephone number 0800 666999, the Ulster Police's anonymous information line — done by the units themselves, and not always very neatly. The registry's model is the Lightweight in kit form as a surviving example shows it: the standard Gen 3 Lightweight front with its headlamps in the wings and the shared bumperettes, a flat-sided GRP top with the Series hard-top crown, mesh screens over the glass, the rounded skirts, the spare lying on the cab roof, a wire catcher — the sharpened steel bar up the windscreen pillar that lifts and cuts wires strung across a road — and the three-line yellow stencil on the rear side panel.