I can't get insurance cover for my Hijet - Can you help please?

My good buddy runs an LT35 car recovery truck and it has stood him well over 80k miles in the last 2 years.

He/we are are so happy with it we want to replace it with another one, its a 1999 but we're looking for a very late plated one of the same shape and 5 cylinder TDi. Another single rear wheel truck.

Again it'll be a drop side pickup that gets converted. When he was buying the first one I drove him all over the country looking at £5k £6k car recovery trucks but every single one was a rough hammered dog, we must have looked at 20 trucks. They had all been over loaded and worked hard - not a good start when setting up a new businesses!

Then I spotted a LWB dropside lt35 in the next town on autotrader. 65k miles, kept as a spare van for an Electrical supplies company. Total peach - interior was clean, ran nice, no rust, clean truck!

Sold the drop side body to some Polish lads for £500, then had a car transporter body built for a couple of grand plus a winch, straps etc etc.

Pretty steep learning curve taking him out to load his first car

But now 2 years down the road he is doing alright, but some lessons have been learnt with the truck. Plus now its got 140k miles on the clock its getting time for fresh meat. Even though he never thrashes it at all, it never goes over 60mph ever - things are starting to show their age.

Mainly spend cash on a top notch non chinese winch, decent straps - and spend extra cash on getting a super light weight alloy body built as a 3.5 ton truck is on the limit with todays cars. Make the truck as light as possible, as it'll get run on its weight limit every day! Add extra leafs to the rear springs, so at least it doesn't look too over loaded plus it drives better.