Number 26.

At a scrap yard in the Swabian Jura mountains in 1982 Werner Lachnit was looking for spare parts for his tractor. The plan was to find the components as quickly as possible and then return home. But he suddenly discovered something else; something which would take up a lot more time than he had anticipated: abandoned in a corner was a blue-green platform truck.

"I had no idea which model I was looking at. All I knew was that it had a three-pointed star on the front," explains Lachnit today. Something that was clear to the man from Aalen, Germany was that he wanted that vehicle: 500 Deutschmarks was his investment at the time. "The truck was in good shape. You could see that straight away."

But Werner Lachnit wouldn't find out much information about his classic. "There was no paperwork and the model number wasn't shown on the door." But the chassis number helped bring him to the information he needed. "It started with a 3, a 2 and a 9. So that was the model series. I had initially thought it was a 334 model. That was the only truck of this type that I was familiar with."

Destiny was to shed more light on the subject: in the workshop, one of the customers recognised the classic truck. "It turned out that the vehicle used to belong to a saw mill in the region. The man even knew the truck's driver from the time." So Lachnit paid him a visit on one Saturday afternoon. "He was totally thrilled, of course, when he heard that the truck was still in existence." Since then, Werner Lachnit knows the whole history of his gem.

Only 629 models of the LP 329 series rolled off the line in Gaggenau. Werner Lachnit's truck was from the first year of production, 1957. From the drawings made by bodybuilder Wackenhut, it would appear that Lachnit now owns truck number 26.

It took several years before the vehicle was completely restored. Apart from a new head gasket, there was no work needed on the engine. Werner Lachnit has completely rebuilt the platform. And the cab needed some new metal too. The fuel tank had a crack. "It looked like it had been hit by a fork-lift during its time in storage."

Initally, after restoring the vehicle, it wasn't subject to much praise on the classic scene. "People asked me why I had opted for a cab-behind-engine truck. Classic trucks have a long bonnet was what I often heard at the time." At the first classic meeting he went to in the LP 329, he was even told to leave the truck parked outside on the car park. "Since then, things have changed a bit, though," says Werner Lachnit.

He doesn't take the blue-green gem on long journeys. "You just get in the way of the modern trucks." But you can still see him in his LP 329 at some classic vehicle meetings in southern Germany.