The Second road trip of the week over to the keeper of parts, David Howard on Hayling Island.
Got a good condition drivers door, napoleons hat and arch repair.
A family trip this time so stopped in at a farm shop for pumpkins and goodies.
The first of two road trips this week to collect parts for the baja project. This evenings journey, a 150 mile round trip up to Membury Services to meet Graham from fbivw to get the baja kit. A lovely chap, and he had this corker in tow too!
Front cabinets
The shorter evenings have meant the front cabinet and under bed panel have taken quite some time, with only a few hours of good light.
The cabinet carcass all cut and assembled:
Max helping me out with the iron on trim:
Shaping the top surface:
And all installed in the van along with the bed kick panel:
The last time we had cabinets in Iris was about 7 years ago when we first bought her.
Strip down
I managed to get a full day down the workshop today starting to strip down the bug.
Bonnet and dash area stripped.
Most of the panels at the front look solid in the right places but it needs all of the usual places which rust out on these. The areas that are bad (spare wheel well) will be getting chopped out for the baja kit anyway.
Rear all stripped out, I just need to pull the loom through. Some numpty cut through the loom when they repaired the quarter panel so we’ll need a new loom.
The luggage panel is generally in good shape but has started to go on the O/S:
And has had some bad repairs along the bottom edge:
I’ll repair these rather than replace as the surrounding metal looks good, and this is a baja so doesn’t need to be perfect.
Winter service
I had a day down the workshop today hoping to quickly service the van and then make a start on the baja.
Suffice to say I’d never get onto the baja as Iris had some bits that needed attending to. On the way to the unit I noticed the clutch pedal seemed lower than usual, and found this delight when going over the service items:
This is the gearbox end of the cable and the cable is only 6 months old! I’ve fitted my spare cable and all adjusted up now.
I noticed that pretty much all of the cv joint boots are starting to crack, again only 6 months of use! I gave them a squeeze and they’ll be ok for a little while but no doubt will need replacing before the MOT in March. These are the supposed good quality lobro boots.
Then while adjusting the rear brakes with the wheels off the ground one of the boots completely dettached itself from its mounting ring:
So it was off with the driveshaft to fit one of the original boots that I’d kept:
This will hopefully be the last time the van comes down the workshop over winter. We’re running Iris over the winter and the track to the unit can get pretty bad over the colder months. It was pretty sloshy today but the van seemed happy enough.
The driver’s door lock also decided to completely disintegrate in co-op carpark so I’ve spent this evening rekeying a spare barrel I had in the garage.
Hopefully I’ll have some more exciting updates soon as I’ve just about finished the main cabinet now.
