Roll over Beethoven

After what seems like an eternity I finally have the camper on the jig and rolled over! With the pop-top removed I was able to rotate it one-handed with ease (there’s quite an impressive pile of rust under the left side of the jig in this picture; this fell out of the front deformation panel as I rolled it. It made a sound like a rain maker!)

Now to the actual task in hand of addressing the underside. This is how it currently looks. I don’t know a huge amount about the history of this van but it has had some repairs done under here in the past (certainly some of the jacking points/outriggers have had work done as the welding is a bit naff).

It probably looks worse in the above pictures as it’s got quite a hefty layer of underseal on, I’ve started scraping this off with a wallpaper scraper and paint thinners and it looks like at least on some of the chassis its done a good job of preserving the paintwork (the blue paint below is og).

My current plan is to scrape all this off to get a better idea of what needs attention, and then possibly get a mobile shot-blaster in to completely clean up the underside. I’m still not sure if I’ll get it blasted though.

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Poptop Off!

We finally got the pop-top off Iris today, in a bid to shed some weight to make it easier to roll. Having it on the roll-over jig made it pretty easy to slide off the roof and out of the way.

Once again I owe a big thanks to Max for coming and sitting in the cold car while I arsed around undoing the thing, and for then helping me lift the roof off. I believe she’s displaying the international sign for happiness.

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Slow but steady progress

jamesley:

The last few months have shot past and I don’t seem to have made a great deal of progress! The van is completely stripped down now and on the jig, however my attempts to roll it over recently haven’t filled me with confidence. It feels very heavy as it comes over, and as such I’m now in the process of removing the pop-top. I wanted to avoid this if possible as it was only fitted a short while back, but I’d rather do this safely than conveniently (hopefully it shouldn’t be too bad to fit the pop-top as the canvas has already been cut to size). The list of panels that need work is increasing too (not too surprising!). To name a few (I’d be here a while listing it all!):

  • Front panel
  • Deformation panel
  • Parts of the Cab floor
  • Battery trays
  • Front/Rear arches

Hopefully my next post will be with the damn thing rolled over and me having started on the chassis work.

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