Charlie's Echo/Madam Mayhem - glacial Bedford RL project

Speaking of making way for new paint...





Technique that appears to be working the best at the moment is a hot-air gun and a wide scraper. The paint softens nicely and just peels off, rather than turning into dust and fragments.


And a first coat of heavy zinc primer, after beating all the pitted spots and filler patches with the wire brush to see what happens


Thankfully, none of the pitting or filler turned out to be hiding any big trouble, so I'm hoping I can blitz through this side fairly easily. Only the rearmost section of the body, and the locker doors, to do before I can start thinking about laying on yellow paint.

And I'm pretty hopeful that I can get away with not having to repeat the whole process on the other side, thanks to it not having been painted over with the mystery brown paint. 'course, I'm also still undecided on whether (and how) I want to do a tilt, which would then mean I need to add mounting points for that before painting... Would be nice to have a covered portion over the back, though. Maybe I'll just add the brackets, then it doesn't matter if I can't make my mind up.)

While I'm waiting for next week's paycheck, so I can pick up the new welding torch and some other assorted bits (New nuts & bolts for the locker I removed, in particular. ...a locker which I need to give a coat of black paint, come to think of it.), I'm giving serious thought to attacking the insides of the lockers with the powered wire brush and hoover... Clean them up and get them at least in primer, because I'm sick of everything being a shower of rust flakes all the time, especially into wet paint!

Will have to get a bucket of white paint for the locker internals, too, when I can. (Lockers are a lot more useful when painted white. Especially if there's a light fitted! Now there's an idea...)

I have also, while poking around online this morning while refuelling (coffee, bacon & egg on toast) was ongoing, discovered an answer to one of my previous ponderings!

Remember this?



Turns out, it's for this:


Which lets you do this:


And now I know. 🌈🌟

Got it in one! They're the hoops for the canvas tilt. There's some other pieces that run between them, to support the fabric.

I'm thinking having it only extend over the length of the lockers, which still leaves the area around the crane exposed for working in; but provide some covered space on the back of the truck, out of the rain. I was also thinking of having the cover made out of the same PVC tarpaulin that tautliner curtains are made of, in a similar sort of yellow to the body.

I know, it's a lot of yellow in one place, but anything else might look out of place.

In other items, I have now almost completely stripped and primed the nearside. Only the locker doors to do, now. Interestingly, the paint is a lot harder to strip where it's only the yellow (and brown); where it's painted over the top of the DBG comes off lovely. Well, I guess the DBG comes off lovely, and takes the rest with it.

Just after 2pm today:


And by a few short hours later:


I did do some tinkering with mockup-bracketry for a tilt, because it's now seeming like a very good idea (if only to give me more space to dump stuff ), so that took up the rest of the evening.

I reckon, tho, that I'm only a couple of hours away from having the whole nearside in primer, which is a good thought. Less fun is the thought of having to do the front of the body, too, but I really should while it's easy enough to get at.

I wonder would a 'sand' coloured canvas tilt look a little less jarring than green? Assuming they are available for stuff other than Land Rovers...

Have I mentioned that my phone's white balance drives me round the twist?



Anywho. Turns out, I need more yellow paint anyway.


I know I said I wasn't planning on painting the side of the truck 'til I was sure about bracketry and whatnot, but I had an oopsie and my brush slipped.



First coat always looks pretty grim; seems like the opacity isn't really there when brushing this stuff. I had enough in the tin to give a second coat to that centre panel, and that looks significantly better; but I suspect I'll probably be three or four coats in before I'm happy with it. And it seems to take about half a litre of paint per coat, give or take.

And if I force my phone camera's white-balance to play nice, it's pretty good.


And when I got back from doing that, my bolts had come in for putting the locker back on the side; so I'll have to get that in a couple of coats of black and fitted up! Hooray!

Looks very yellow. No excuse for people who say they didn't see you coming.

Yeah. 😬 The door opens to 10'3", the top of the crane is 10'10" with the wheels on.



Can't get much lower!



I've had someone drive into me while I was in a bright yellow and orange truck before; turns out, it doesn't matter how bright you make it, if they're not paying attention...

It didn't have one! Maybe that was the problem... Thankfully, the limit of the damage done (to the truck, anyway...) was a new scuff on the steel bumper. The car fared rather worse.

---

Anywho! Back I've had a fairly productive week/long weekend so far, away from work (Which has been the land of gearbox/clutch hackery...)

The 26th

I got my new MIG torch in, so I celebrated by welding on my remaining two side-marker light brackets on the offside. Which, if my doctor's reading this, involved exactly 0 crawling or kneeling on the floor the day after having some exploratory work done on my knee. (Did you know they made needles 80mm long? Neither did I 'til then!)


One at the front.


And one at the back.


Happy days.

The 28th

Got some tracing paper in, so I could take advantage of having put the truck too far away from the wall, and trace out the signwriting on the offside.


Well, what's left of it, in some cases.


See, I managed to wipe out the same bit on both doors before I managed to get a tracing of it. Thankfully, I have enough pictures that I can reassemble the missing bits pretty close to how it used to be; they won't be exactly identical, because I'm probably going to move the "vauxhall" and "bedford" bits down to miss the mirror bracket, but...


...that's alright, because they weren't identical to begin with.

I did also make a set of tracings of the "Scott Bros. (Colchester) Ltd" on the locker doors, but no pictures of that because it was incredibly close-quarters in there!

The 29th


Dragged the locker out from the nearside, and stripped all the old mud, underseal, and paint. It's in pretty good condition underneath, all things considered. Much better than the locker in front of it.


A nice heavy couple of coats of primer...

The 31st

Not a lot of pictures from today, because my phone was on music duties again. I did interrupt it in order to grab a snapshot of the whole ridiculous mess that was reftting the locker. I should note, this was 2-1/2 hours into proceedings; I had to give every enclosed side of that locker a coat or two of black paint, which thankfully dried pretty quickly in the warm sunlight. And while it was drying, I made up a mounting bracket for my air manifolds. (Unpictured. I'll have to grab a snap next time I'm down there.)

I also went and tack-welded in the bolts at the forward end of the locker, because there's no way to get a spanner on them in order to prevent them spinning. I'm not entirely sure how they were originally put in, because there's a floor above them and they're inside a C section in such a way that you can't hold a spanner in from the side even if the forwardmost locker wasn't there!


This was round two of trying to fit it; the previous round, the bike jack launched itself out as I tried to squeeze the locker into place atop it, and I ended up making an attempt to fit the locker by lifting it a bit at a time and blocking it up... only to find out I only drilled the mounting holes to 8mm, and the mounting bolts are 3/8.

Redrill holes, reassemble the whole silly stack. Discover that all the bumping and banging has tweaked two of the mounting bolts... Make up a special tool (bent stick) in order to reach in through the narrow gap and pull the bolts back into place, then pump the jack to shove the box over the bolts before anything else moves out of place! And, of course, this results in scraping off a non-zero amount of the paint I put on this morning. ...but most of it's still painted so that's something. The worst of the paint damage is on the underside, which I can still get to in order to repaint it.



Tada!

I will, of course, have to clean and paint the inside of that; which promises to be fun. Oh, and strip & paint the face of it that has the door on, of course. But I might leave that 'til I've pulled the door off and repaired/re-made it, because it's suffered quite badly from The Rot.

Then, three hours of tin-bashing, heating & forming, welding, grinding, more bashing... and we finally have the nearside-front rear wing put back on!



It's only partially welded in place, the rest of it's just tacked for now, and I've just hosed over the welds with the zinc primer for ... I don't know why I did it, really, I'm only going to end up taking a bunch of it off when I grind them down. Makes me feel better, I guess? No it's not pretty. More work to do on it, which will neaten it up a good bit; but even then it will probably still show the scars of the repair, and I'm fine with that.

Still some bashing and fitting to do in order to close up gaps before fully welding, but it's on now which is good news for multiple reasons:
1. It's not floating around for me to trip over and damage
2. Another piece goes back onto the truck!
3. It's been holding up figuring out where I can put the compressor's air supply and unloader return pipes. So now I can make the bracketry to fit those! (Just in time for me to run out of gas for the TIG welder, I'm sure.)

Since my last update post here, I've not done a whole lot. (Beset by The Agonies again, alas. Thankfully, it's been a short work-week. The painkillers help, but I turn into a pumpkin when they start wearing off.)

I have got another big bucket of golden yellow paint, and that's now in my paint cabinet awaiting a paintbrush day! I have also gotten some more air fittings; two elbows to come out of the compressor -- unloader return, and compressed air supply -- and a T so that I can attach my unloader to the supply hard-line.



I've attached a little bracket to the nearside front cab mount bracket, with a bolt welded to it, so that I have somewhere to bolt my new hard-line pipe to; since the original, while also being a hard line, was formed with multiple bends that I do not have the capacity to replicate. At the other end, there'll be a tab that I should only have to drill a hole in the spare wheel carrier bracket to support.



The replacement is a straight-shot from just in front of the cab mount, to underneath the spare wheel carrier; which will have a flexible line at each end -- stainless-braided teflon, as is common on modern trucks-- to connect to the compressor and the dryer unit's inlet. The return from the unloader to the compressor's inlet, I think I can get away with regular air-brake hose, which I will support with a rod welded to the tab for the supply (But it's easy enough to change out to a similar setup as the air feed, if I have to.)

I also did some more playing about with bits of aluminium tube, and modifying my little jig to cut a 15° angle. It definitely tightens the turn up -- I can now come from the manifold flange to pointing straight up, in 3 join lines -- but I'm going to have to add in some straight sections to ensure enough clearance for the injectors and whatnot. And all the while I have to make sure it fits underneath the engine cover! It's certainly a packaging challenge, but I'm sure I can make something happen. And once I've got one of them figured out, the rest should be a fairly easy job of replicating it.