Dez' 'fleet' thread. Another bl00dy transit!

“Less cars but better ones.“

That’s the mantra I keep having to chant 😂

Did this today before the long delivery trip.
Of course the old one was rusted on and I had to hack it to bits to get it off.


Transit wheel bearings are an utterly bizarre design, because they’re designed to fit both FWD and RWD, and twin wheel mega offset 6 stud wheel hubs and normal 5 stud wheel hubs too.
Good thing is cos they’re all the same and there’s millions of em parts are dirt cheap. £17.50 for a bearing/hub/bolts/etc. from the ‘recommended’ supplier not just eBay pot luck.

It didn’t have much play but rumbled a bit. Hopefully the stereo won’t need to go as loud now 😂

Speaking of which, it had previously been fitted with a f-king chainsaw. The centre dash panel was totally hacked.




Presumably because that’s about the skill level of most people who normally work on transits.
I bought a better centre dash panel (surprisingly hard to find). I then filed it out carefully to double DIN size. The slot is 90mm and it needs to be 100mm, so 5mm off the top and bottom side.
The holes is a bit too wide so I bought a fitting kit that bolts to the stereo and slots into the dash hole and clips in. This was overpriced and fits poorly, but it was the only one on the market.


The top corners are rounded to fit the curved corners, the bottom ones are square peg in round hole. All a bit sh1t really when it’s £20 for a coupe of bits of plastic.


But, it’s better than it flopping about in the hole in the dash. It looks a lot better now and might squeal and rattle a bit less now it’s held solid, and there is a full complement of screws holding the dash together unlike before.



I then figured out how to pair my phone and got that working, so it’s good to go. It seems quite a fancy stereo, it’s touchscreen and a DVD player, and was lots of money new. It has the option for adding reversing cameras too which would be useful with a load on, so may happen.

Probably, but I doubt it’s worth it for the 3 or so people in the country with a mk6 transit who want to fit a double din stereo properly... 🤣

So transit is out of MOT and I’ve started sorting some of the shonk.
I’ve sorted the front bumper/slam panel mounts out first. The mk7 front had been fitted the low tech/zero effort way as so many are, by keeping the mk6 crash bar and just screwing the new bumper to it, and hacking a bit out the inner wings and just welding it where it touches. I’ll eventually sort all of it but I need some inner wing cuts to do that and I cant find any locally. I did get some chassis rail end cuts though so I’ve put them on.

Old mk6 bumper crash bar removed-




The slam panel/headlight frame attachment was comedy. Turned round through 90degs and some long bolts run in so they touch the chassis rails and welded on 😂


The original mk6 chassis ends sit at an angle but mk7 ones are square. Mk7 are also thicker/reinforced more as they have more stuff bolted to em. Mk7 are also about 20mm shorter, despite what a lot of people will tell you. So the right way to do it is cut the mk6 ones off and weld on mk7.
Original mk6-


Then this is a mk7 end tacked into place. I tack em down the inner side then bolt the bar on to both sides to square them up before fully welding. Notice all the extra bolt holes for the bolt on towing eye, and the previous bracket bolted up where it should be which adds a huge amount of support to the headlights. They might not flicker on bumpy roads now!




Both sides on, crash bar bolted on to square up, and welding commencing.






I’ve got to sort a few broken bolts in the rad crossmember to extract and then that’s that bit done, everything is a lot more solid now it bolts down properly!

Still got to source some mk7 inner wings to finish it, but I’ll do all the sill/arch welding next whilst I find those.

The stupid thing is that whole job took 2 hours, and would have been even quicker if I’d cut the chassis rail ends off the donor van myself where I wanted em cut. It would have hardly been any more work to do it right in the first place than come up with creative bodges to make it work.

Obviously most are done to make the vans look newer, although this one had quite obviously been done because it had been crashed at some point in its life.
But I don’t really like the mk6 front, and the headlights on them are very poor.
The mk7 design is better to work on as well as splits down into smaller bits easier.

So now the transit is out of MOT I’m supposed to be welding up the sills and cab steps before I put it in for another test.
So obviously what I did was chopped the bed up instead 🤷‍♂️

I pulled the ally sheet off the back half of it, as after the debacle loading and unloading the Laurel (yes, it’s still here), I was gunna do a quick 3 angle bed job on it. Basically chop off the ‘corner’ of the beaver tail and add another section in so lower cars can go on without scraping.
I’d already removed the side bars and binned them as they did nothing, especially when half the welds were cracked.


Here it is without the rear skinning on.


This just showed how Heath Robinson the rear end was. It was solid, very solid, despite some dubious welding. There was just about twice as much steel as there needed to be, Proably half the reason it was so lardy. There was also the remains of at least 3 different ramp rack setups.


I should Proably rewind a bit at this point and say why I bought this truck in the first place.
The reason is it’s a MWB model, not a LWB. The other is that I never intended to keep the bed anyway. It was always going to be a stopgap until I built the one I really wanted, which you can’t actually buy. But it in the meantime it would still do a few jobs I needed it for.
Beavertail or even 3 angle beds are no use for someone with cars as low as mine. If I need to recover something with failed air suspension, I need a totally flat bed. So the plan was to eventually build a ramp bed. It’s just been rolled forwards a bit.

Ramp beds are virtually non-existent over here. They’re more popular in the states though.
This pic shows the rough idea.


It shows the intended angle of the new bed, which I calculated to be 7 degrees. It’s also shows why it works better on a MWB than a LWB. the axle is essentially further forward compared to the bed, allowing more angle for a bed the same length (15ft).
Your front wheels sit a bit higher, but your rears a bit lower. There’s also a bit more clearance over the arches so they can be mounted a bit higher. The tail end of the bed is in the same place.

The bed had been welded to the chassis in a couple of places, so I couldn’t actually remove it in one piece. After pricing the steel to make a new one, I elected to break it down and reuse as much as possible, as it was mostly in the sizes I intended to use anyway, and It was a saving of about £300.

So after much cutting, I’d broken it down to a pile of useful bits (mostly the existing 2x2 crossmembers) , this centre section that had been the original tipper base frame, which has 4x2 main rails-


And a lot of junk-


These were the annoying bits that had been welded in-


And where the winch mount had been added at the front it had been welded down to the chassis and across to the bed frame, making it very solid but also very difficult to remove. Much picking apart later and a bit of cleanup and it’s all removed.

I’d never load engine rearwards on anything. More than anything it would drive bloody awful.

The twin rear wheels make all axle weightings ok. Rear axle is weighted to 2600kg. It’s impossible to overload it and still be under my
Licence.
I was considering the more modern single rear wheel transporters the other day, and I can’t see how any of them are legal, either in axle weighting or tyre load rating.

The reason for dualies was always tyre load capacity, some of the modern tyres can get you close to a 3000kg axle though so you don't really need dualies until you get to around 5 tons GVM now.

Al-ko do a low chassis which bolts onto factory modified fiat van front ends, a few people have also built motorhomes using the front of a fwd car, biggest issue is it gets you into IVA etc.