Total Whiteout

David Humberstone’s dazzling white T5 is deceiving: Despite its clean lines and apparent simplicity there are lots of stylish and (mostly!) subtle modifications, when you look a little closer.

- Anne Rogers

Many beautiful buses have graced the pages of this magazine, gleaming with chrome, black or carbon accents, or fantastic paint jobs, or a thousand and one modifications to their owners’ tastes. As your eye travels across Dave’s van you may at first glance think ‘just a white van’, but then something about it catches your attention, or perhaps four somethings! To start with, those wheels – more on which later, and the fact that for a white van it is usually absolutely spotless. Yes, I really do mean spotless. I’ve never seen a cleaner white van! Dave said he’d been polishing it all weekend prior to the photo shoot, and I don’t think he was exaggerating all that much, if at all…

Dave has a long history with VWs. His first ‘proper job’ was as a mechanic for VW, moving on to working on paint work, which he’s been doing ever since, now running his own business, CAWMC Paint & Body shop in Louth. So he was early to the scene, starting out with ‘a few’ Golfs, one of which was a Mark II Golf GTI ‘showpiece’. But life moves on, and through his paint shop work he was seeing and working on a lot of VW Transporters. By this time he was married with children, and spending holidays in static caravans. The lure of a van got stronger, until along came a decent basic panel van that looked like it would fit the bill. It was a family owned SWB ex-builders van on a 2005 plate with the 1.9 engine. The original paint work had lots of small scrapes, which didn’t worry Dave, as the van had plenty of service history and had been pretty well looked after. The deal was done, and the scruffy builders van began the process of the transformation into the stunning bus it is today.