Some of you may have been wondering what I've been up to.
Most of you, probably not!
Well get ready to find out, anyway!
I don't think any of this is being repeated, I had a quick skim through to see where I was up to last.
Last time I updated this, I was umming and ah'ing about how to sort some dents.
Obviously I procrastinated a bit on this, but what did I get up to??
Well, SWMBO and I convinced our parents that they should pitch in together and front up some cash for our birthdays and we got a pretty shiny coffee machine.
So for SWMBOs birthday present, I thought I'd get a bit creative.
Take a piece of shelf. Clean it back, fold a lip on it.
Roll it as round as I could using the back post of my vice. Cut a 'circle'.
Attempt to weld all the very thin steel together without making a hash of it. Fail.
Get desperate.
Skip some steps.
??
Profit!
It has a rather home made feel to it, but she was pretty happy with it. The primer didn't take and shrunk oddly, but I was running out of time and just painted it anyway, so it has a sort of marble feel to it which I kind of like anyway.
We also wanted some better vege gardens, so I built these at some point.
Compost goes down the tubes in the middle, the gardens are full of worms.
However coming in to the end of the year and summer, our backyard gets absolutely blasted, as its all concrete. So a solution was needed.
Three sheets of reo later - I got some odd looks driving down the road with that bouncing around on the roof!
It wasn't far to go, though, so wasn't worth more hassle.
Max settings on the welder and the gas turned off, I blasted it all together.
Bent up the overhang you can see at the bottom to give it a bit more strength, and then enlisted the neighbours to help get it in place.
It stayed like that for the rest of that season, except I put some shadecloth over it, and ran a bunch of irrigation on a bluetooth timer because I'm too lazy to go turn the tap on and off all the time.
Kept an eye out for something suitable, and eventually one of our job sites had a couple of rings of column reo going spare, so I managed to get our delivery guy to drop it off in the truck instead of struggling with the floppy mess on top of the Pathfinder.
Offset it as much as I could, ran a couple of bars through the middle and failed entirely to weld it together anything remotely square.
Works, though!
It's about time we started prepping for the next season of crops, actually. I want to grow some vine veg up the column so its doing more than just holding up the middle.
Well, a bit before Christmas, my parents announced that they had found a buyer for their farm property.
This meant that my spares car needed a new home.
I considered breaking it, or just dismantling it and storing the useful bits. But realistically, the entire car is more or less a useful bit.
So I decided that it would make more sense to store it complete, what with it able to start and stop.*
curse word, I thought to myself. I should probably sort out this panel work so I can shift Seedy over and slot the spare in to the second bay of the garage (the third being taken up by the large wooden dining table that hasn't been used since I met SWMBO 5 odd years ago.
Despite having about 10 carparks work of driveway and concrete around the house, I was safe in the assumption I would not get approval for such a solution.
So, I put my big boy pants on (they're the heavy cloth ones that are more weld spatter resistant) and revisited.
This side:
Needed to look more like this side.
Note to self: add photo here of the result of my flailing, apparently I wasn't happy enough with it to take a photo..I also needed to finish up some welding on the main patch join where I had a few holes due to my crappy welding.
I'm not sure I can get much better than that without a lot more practice and time, as the skin is pretty thin and I was getting a bit worried about grinding through it, trying to flat the weld down.
How do you guys deal with this? Fresh flapwheel almost every time??
I find it a bit challenging keeping the flap wheel to mainly where I want to remove it, especially as the wheel wears down..
In regards to the welding itself, I don't think I'm going to get much better, welding two old pieces of thin tin together. I was getting probably about 40% decent pooling, 40% pigeon poop and 20% blow-through, which I then had to basically use pigeon poop to build back up again.
I also had these previous repairs to deal with down the bottom of both wings.
There is a point behind here were the brace pushes up against the skin but I don't think is normally welded to it.
Both of these repairs they had glued the skin to the brace, which made it more difficult to undo.
I made a patch.
And then made it again. Still not ideal, but about the best I could manage.
Then I took a look at the other side. It's a bit worse.
Removed eventually, I had to cut the little bit of the brace that pushes against the skin away as well, as it was heavily welded to the skin.
This was my second attempt at the repair patch. I used the offcut piece of wing from the same side but further up the first time, but the angles were wrong and the crease in the wrong direction, so chopped it out of the other side offcut instead, which was a lot better basis to start from.
I also made a little patch for the brace, but I'm sure you don't need to see a 15mm square** piece of steel.
All this took me until early Jan, what with christmas, family drama, the need for some actual rest after a pretty full on end of year at work, and other various excuses.
Suddenly it was time to bring the spares car home. SWMBO and I wanted to make a weekend of it as we wouldn't be able to go camping up there ever again, so we took a long weekend, invited a couple of mates up and made the most of it.
I took up a brand new battery that I'd just bought for Seedy (turns out I'd left the key in at accessories, so despite being on charge, the battery was cooked), a couple of spanners and a can of carby cleaner.
When we got up the farm, I took the air cleaner off, removed as much of the mud wasp nests as possible, and hooked the battery up.
Gave the car a minute of cranking to shift some oil around and then gave it a couple of quick squirts of carby cleaner.
* Lo and behold, it caught and started up pretty much straight away. Idle struggled for a little bit, but once it pulled fuel through and warmed up a little it was good enough to go!
Last time this had fresh fuel in it, was sometime around August 2017, which I think is pretty good!
Anyway, my mates came up, one of them kindly with a car trailer behind him, and the spares car was brought back home.
Gave it a pressure wash to remove as much crud as possible, and then did the four car juggle with three batteries to get everything parked in the right locations.
At some stage I should pull the windscreen vent panel off and clear all the debris out so it has less excuse to rust more.
Being outside for almost 4 years hasn't been that kind to it and it's rusted through in a few choice locations (including the rear window lower corners where I was hoping to investigate to get a better idea of what to expect on Seedy. Bit hard to learn much from big gaping holes!
Anyway, got a bit more motivated, so carried on as and when I could.
Got Covid, had family dramas, so has been slower than planned, but chipped away at it.
Patched the brace, only grinding it down enough for the skin to clear. No one will know but me (and you, so shh!)
I didn't bother retaining the weird divot bit as I don't really understand it's necessity.
Did a burns victim skin transplant.
Turned right down, I still struggled either getting too little penetration, or blowing through. So ended up giving it another run on the back so I had more margin to remove on the face.
**not actually square
Ground down as best I could.
Now about a week and a half go, you may or may not have heard, we got a bit wet here on the East coast.
3 days of solid rain, our house got about 850mm over the course of the event.
Some people got a bit more (that's a 4.6m canopy on that petrol station.
So there has been a whole bunch of fun with flooded roads, half the city is busy dumping their soggy furniture on the side of the road.
We were pretty lucky at home, I had cleaned the gutters pretty recently, and I knew the drain in front of the garage was curse word, so I had cleared it, and dug a bit of a channel to let the water run in to my neighbours yard instead of under my garage door.
I also had been putting off sorting out a welding trolley for ages, while also being not that happy about it sitting on the floor as I knew it wasn't the best location what with an easily floodable floor. I finally bit the bullet and got one, built it, and then it was sitting in the dining room when the rain started. So... it didn't help any!
It's also a little small, but it will do!
Well, I knew the garage roof leaked a bit, but I wasn't aware the walls did too!
Got a bit wet in the end, but nothing to complain about compared to everyone else.
I had a couple of boxes of parts that got a bit wet, so emptied that out and opened up the garage for a couple of days to let it all air out.
It was so damp for almost two weeks that I have gained a whole bunch of flash rusting, reminding me that etch primer isn't a sealer.
So that needs sorting. I think I've decided that I will fully strip back the front AND the back of the wings this time. I'll probably just give the backside a squirt of primer and then enamel to seal them up and keep them safe, and save my acrylic matched paint for the visible sides.
Check out my nice clean patch.
I cleaned it back before I welded it on, I swear.
Did a little better job of grinding it back on this side.
It sunk a little, but that will help cover the weld a bit I think so I'm happy enough with that. It's not too warped.
Left the strength in it on the backside. You can see the weird divot bit on the brace clearly here.
Anyway, that's about where I'm up to. I need to strip the primer off and do filler work, but I think I'm going to remount the wings and focus on the nose cone first to make sure it all lines up and looks right. Just in case I need to alter what I've done already/need to do more work to the front of the wings.
So two more panels to go with welding/adjustments, then I'll probably strip, fill, prime and paint each panel one at a time so I don't have to worry about flash rust again.
I'm using aerosol paints anyway so it's not like I have to worry about mixing up a port, etc.
So getting there.
It's a bit more of a pain now because I have to roll Seedy out to do any work, which means it has to be relatively dry weather.
I'm also almost out of beer again (1 keg empty, other has I think about 6L left in it), so I guess I'm due another couple of kits (they lasted through summer, with reduced intake due to other goings on).
Cheers!
Matt
