By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
DAVID Kett has finally found those 1 million reasons to fall in love all over again with his trusty Kingswood ute.
While driving the ute last month, the Narre Warren South piano tuner allowed himself a smile as the odometer in his 1979 HZ Kingswood clicked over to 1 million kilometres.
In May the News reported that David was 10,000 kilometres from reaching the milestone, having owned the ute since 1990, using it to travel all across the state for work.
“When I started piano tuning I was living in Warragul and my boss’s business covered all of Gippsland, basically all of Victoria, so we did cover a lot of ground,” he said.
“I’ve had my own business now for 15 years, and moved to Melbourne nine years ago but I still do a lot of work in Gippsland because I’d much prefer to be in Sale at 9am then Glen Waverley.”
David said a ute made the perfect vehicle for his line of work, even retaining it once he started up his own piano tuning business, First Craft.
“I started to learn how to tune pianos in 1989 and it was the year after that I realised a ute would be the perfect vehicle for that.
“My boss ran a fleet of utes and had a couple of the Kingswoods, so it made sense for me to get one,” he said.
“I discovered the hard way that if you simply got a signature on a quote and drove home without the piano, it could be a couple weeks before the company sent a vehicle out to get it.
“I could lose the job, which meant my commission.
“So the vehicle made perfect sense, I could quote for major work, grab the piano, take it back to the workshop, claim my commission.
“Customers are far less likely to go cold.”
And while David admits the Kingswood has needed a fair bit of maintenance work since it came into his possession, he said the good times far outweighed the bad.
“It’s going pretty well,” he said.
“With a vehicle this age, odd things break, like the door handle, or the windscreen wipers. Dumb things that should never break.”
