Hi all.

I should have done this a long time ago, but I have started combing the GMH records for the first potential Sandmans.

We found a memo in the South Australian Library archives dated in October 1973, where the planned Car to Sales Date of the first Sandmans was pushed back from 20th January 1974 to 24th January 1974. And another one that states that GMH were restricting Retail Orders of 4spd commercials so they had capacity to built Stock Order Sandmans ready for sale when they were released.

Notes to the above:

Car to Sales date (as printed on each vehicle's broadcast sheet) is the day that the car's ownership transfers from Procurement to Sales. Basically the day they start welding the body together. Sometimes the cars actually are completed that same day, sometimes its days or weeks later, just depending upon rectification & touchups. One HX LE we know of had a Car to Sales date in July 1976 and wasn't completed until December.

Retail Order is an actual customer order. Not a common thing.
Stock Order are cars GMH built to sell. All of the initial Sandmans will be Stock Order as no-one could have ordered them.

Given GMH hadn't sold any Sandmans yet I would expect them to have built a cross section of Sandmans across the 6 x HQ models XX7 and XY5 was available on. SO there in theory should be a large volume of 173 & 202 4spd 80180, 80380 and 80170 models, and also 253 4spd 80280, 80380 and 80270 models, plus the odd 308 example.

Been through Elizabeth. Elizabeth stopped building panel vans around August 1973 and utes soon after. They only built cab-chassis from then until they started building vans and utes again late February 1974. So they didn't build any initial Sandmans, but it looks like they may have started in later February, possibly ordered cars. They don't appear to have built van bodies for Dandenong either, as Dandenong weren't building vans at that time, and Pagewood did their own van bodies between March 1973 and March 1974.

Dandenong as per above were not building vans at this time. But they were building utes and cab-chassis. There is a heaps of utes completed on 24th January and onwards with a couple of 202 auto and 253 manual & auto but not many. The first three 6cyl 4spd examples appear as completed on 1st February, and weirdly they all have the optional economy 3.36 rear axle and front disc brakes, one even has integrated A/C, but it was an internal GMH car. I have yet to go looking hard for V8 examples, but the fact these are the first 6cyl 4spd utes out of Dandenong in 1974 screams Sandman to me, and they are built just prior to the official release. I'll have a better look as there should be a significant amount of utes soon afterwards. As an aside here I have never figured out exactly what was going on with 6cyl 4spds on these. The standard 4spd for any HQ 6cyl commercial was an M22 (just called wide ratio M20 until later in HQ, just like the XU1 box was called a close ratio M20), but the Sandman sales brochure actually shows the standard M20 with 3.05:1 1st. Funny thing is, almost all HQ Sandmans I have recorded with either 173 or 202 have M22 on the body ID tag. A couple have M20 though. The problem though with the GMH records is every HQ-HZ commercial with a 4spd other than M21 shows up with the same code for the transmission regardless of whether they are 6cyl or V8, M20 or M22.

So that means that the vans (plus more utes) must have come out of Pagewood and Acacia Ridge. This may explain why I do have a few Acacia Ridge van examples built in the last days of January, as a lot would have had to be completed and then freighted to Victoria, South Australia and WA ready for the release. The HQ Sandman van tags I have for my tag display is a Saffron Metallic L31 Acacia Ridge built van completed in the last couple of days in January 1974. I'll go looking at these as time permits.