Go find a hobby!

A few years after Elly and I started Adrem Car Rental, she said to me: go find a hobby! Always being busy with your business is not healthy.

Well, finding a hobby. That was easier said than done.

Until one beautiful day we went to the Three Country Point in Vaals with our family.

The place had been chosen by a club of car enthusiasts for a meeting. A whole line of strange cars with mudguards that turned as they steered, roared past us. It was the sound of Ducks, but they looked completely different.

I spoke to one of the drivers. He told me that all those cars had originally been Citroën 2CVs, but had been converted into the convertibles they were now. With steering mudguards.

Some were called Lomax, others Le Patron.

You could build a Le Patron yourself, the driver said.

When I got home I looked on the internet how that could be done. If you had 300 hours, it was not an insurmountable problem to convert a Duck into a Le Patron yourself, even if you had no technical training.

I had found my hobby.

I just had to find a donor car. A Citroën 2cv, a Dyane or a Mehari. If it was rotten, that wasn't so much of a problem, you could buy a new chassis - they were still available.

That meant searching on Marktplaats for a Citroën that I could use as a donor car. In Zeist there was one for sale. I called the seller, who told me that the car no longer had a valid MOT, still had old license plates (without the EU logo), wouldn't start and had no keys. After some haggling the sale was quickly done.

Once we got home with the red Duck, the demolition work could begin.

The top of the Duck was bolted to the chassis with 14 bolts. If you loosened them, you could lift the whole top and take it to the scrap yard. Or use it as a playground for the kids.

The doors, the seats, the exhaust manifold and the windscreen washer system could also be removed (except if you buy windscreens that are higher than 10 cm - then the RDW requires you to have windscreen wipers and a windscreen washer system).

In the meantime I had visited the importer of Le Patron. I had looked at a few beautiful examples with licking my lips, and decided that our Le Patron had to be black. With white seats – that seemed beautiful to me.

The donor duck was almost completely demolished, but still needed to be broken down. The chassis was from the famous 80s. They are known for the fact that Citroën did not use such good steel for this. That steel had largely evolved into rust.

While you're at it, you might as well do it right. Ordered a new chassis - I could give it a proper anti-rust treatment right away.

I spent many evenings tinkering. One sentence in the manual ('now install the gearbox') could easily take 3 or 4 evenings.

But the project was completed.

The first time starting was exciting. Had you managed to build a car without a technical education? It still amazes me that the little car started.

Would you like to build such a car yourself? Then look here.

Do you want to try out how such a car drives? You can rent it from us! Reserve this open two-seater here.