The record
Land Rover's Lightweight was designed to a War Office requirement for a utility vehicle that a Westland Wessex, the forces' medium-lift helicopter of the 1960s, could carry underslung: a 2,500 lb (1,134 kg) load. Solihull took the 88-inch Series IIA chassis and drivetrain and drew a new, narrower, flat-panelled body around it whose wings, doors, tailgate, bumpers and windscreen could all be unbolted and left behind, so that the vehicle stripped for the sling weighed about 2,808 lb (1,274 kg). Officially it was the Truck, Utility, ½ ton, 4×4, Rover Series IIA — 'Rover 1' in service shorthand — and it was offered as a 12-volt General Service vehicle or the 24-volt FFR (fitted for radio) with its screened electrics.
Production began in November 1968 and the first examples entered service in 1969. On those early Series IIA vehicles the headlamps sat inboard in the radiator panel, because the shallow front wings were shaped only to cover the wheels and carry the side lights and indicators; in 1970 the lamps moved out to the wings, which is the arrangement the Series III Lightweight inherited when it replaced the IIA in 1972. In all 2,989 Series IIA Lightweights were built before the change-over, against 37,897 Lightweights of both marks by the end of production in 1984. They went to all three services, the great majority to the Army, and stayed in British use into the 1990s; the type was also exported to more than twenty countries, the Dutch armed forces taking left-hand-drive diesel vehicles.
The registry's model shows an early Series IIA in its inboard-headlamp form, in the Deep Bronze Green the Army painted its vehicles before the change to NATO green. It follows the Wikimedia Commons photograph by Meltie; that vehicle carries an owner's electric fan and an extra spotlamp, which are not represented.
