today we started using up our stash of pergo flooring that we sniped off ebay, to  panel the walls.  first up was the annoying, kind of sloping, kind of curving space between the edge of the roof and the flattish sides.

it was a fairly straightforward job, although that pergo stuff disnae half take a toll on sawblades and drillbits.  the veneer on it is as hard as iron. 

o well - at least it should be pretty hardwearing then!

driller killer

drilling some countersinks for the screw heads. unfortunately the photo disnae capture the whisps of smoke and smell of burning, coming from the rock-hard veneer.

mazza surveying her handywork; while i cut the planks and drilled the holes, she screwed them into place.

at the weekend mazza sniped a load of pergo flooring plus underlay on fleabay for £21. apparently this represents good bargain hunting, as mazza assures me that pergo is the dog’s bollox, when it comes to poncey interior decor and all that. so scoring a load of it for a pony [as del boy might say] was a bit of a steal.

we went to pick it up tonight from some posh gaff out towards didsbury way. the couple in the house looked delighted to see us disheveled scruffy looking gits turning up in our prehistoric van to collect their former arm & leg’s worth of kitchen flooring for twenty measley quid.

luvvly jubbly!

today, i finished off panelling the underside of the roof with the big sheets of hardboard. nothing much to report in the way of anecdotes or incident - unless you count the fact that i broke one of my 3mm drill bits as worthy of comment?

…nah. i didnae think you would

anyway, here we have it:

at last the mighty hardboard expedition reaches the back doors



view from front to back



view from back to front

freshly armed with my new stash of wood, i thought i’d strike while the iron was hot and crack on with panelling out herman’s roof. i’m going to start at the top and work down, as i’ll need to get some welding done on the holes in the floor, before i start boarding over the lower regions.


anyway, we’d already insulated the inside of the roof with that bargain bucket fibreglass we got a few weeks ago. we’d made into waterproof pillows by wrapping it & taping it up in thick polythene from cut-up garden refuse bags. it was all held in place, temporarily, with lengths of old telephone cable and was sagging everywhere. so the first task was to put some wooden joists up, to hold the insulation in place and to give us something to screw the boards onto.

starting to put some joists in. note the sagging fibreglass pillows

nearly there…

job done - all the joists in place and it’s starting to look like a real roof now!

putting a couple of hardboard roof panels in place

well, with the snows of winter seemingly behind us at last, we thought it was time to crack on with actually doing some boarding out on herman. i’d had enough of staggering round the livingroom, clutching my wallet, when i saw the ridiculous prices plywood sheets seemed to fetch these days [even on fleabay], so i had a search round on the intarwebs for something a bit cheaper and nastier.

i came across this place; timber recycling in manchester - or TRIM to its friends, tucked away in amongst some run down old mill buildings in gorton. we thought it was worth a look, as their prices didnae seem too bad, so off we set on a wood scavenging mission.

some more heavy snowfalls and herman once more dons his festive hat and scarf.  we took him out one day to go shopping when it wasnae this bad - and when we got back it took half an hour to get up the very slight incline, leading into our carpark.  i had to dig two trenches through the ice in front of his wheels for him to slither up.

poor lad. he wasnae exactly at the front of the queue when off-road ability was being handed out!

nothing to report, tinker-wise, but here’s a nice pic of herman looking all festive, during the recent heavy snow we had.

 

i noticed someone was breaking an LT on ebay,  so i emailed him to see if he still had the alternator.  he did, so i snaffled it for £30 and then, when it arrived, spent the most infuriating afternoon i’ve had in a long time, removing the old one and fitting the new one.

now i’ve worked on many a motor in my time and done many a job that had me wanting to headbutt brick walls in sheer frustration.  but never in recent memory have i come across a job so absolutely cuntish as changing the alternator on a VW LT35.  every single fucking bolt seemed to have been deliberately placed so that it was as mindfuckingly inaccessible as it was possible to get it.  i honestly spent about three or four hours swapping that bastard alternator over - a job that involves undoing three bolts and a couple of cable connectors.  it would literally take less than ten minutes, if you could get at it easily.


new alternator on the right. old one on the left.  the old one actually looks in better nick!

with winter getting ever nearer, we’d got to the time of year when it’s dark by the time i get home from work in the afternoon and usually too bloody wet’n’cold at the weekend to go out and work on the van, even if i wanted to. so work on herman has pretty much stopped for the next few months, until i come out of hibernation again.

that’s not to say he hasnae had an adventure or two. at the end of october, he enjoyed his first ever whitby goth weekend - even adopting a broomstick on his radiator, a scary plastic skull wall-hanging in his back windows and a pumpkin lantern to glow eerily in his front window at night [said pumpkin lantern powered by an LED nightlight. we’re not so dumb we’d leave a candle burning in an unattended van overnight!]

preparing herman’s pumpkin lantern for overnight glowage

well, after making our bed and table and doing a bit more tidying up inside, we were ready for the off.  we insulated and panelled the bottom halves of the back doors and mazza knocked up a dinky pair of curtains for the back windows and we were as ready as we’d ever be.

i also picked up a cheapo leisure battery from atlas auto electrics on stretford road:  i couldnae resist, when i nipped into to have a mosey at their camping gear and saw they had a big pile of platinum leisure plus 110aH leisure batteries for £62,50.  when i questioned the callow youth behind the counter as to whether they could conceivably be a proper deep cycle battery at that price, he looked at me blankly and just repeated “it’s a leisure battery”.

then the slightly less callow youth behind him, who obviously didnae know what ‘deep cycle’ meant either told me they had a 2 year guarantee, that they’d shifted loads and none had come back.  so i thought i’d take a punt. 

for £60 notes, you cannae go wrong can you?  looked ‘em up  on the intarwebs after i got home and they’re supposedly good for 300 cycles, which is probably more than a couple of years worth, for the occasional weekend camper.

having two batteries on board was a bit of an insurance policy anyway, seeing as the alternator warning light was still glowing from time to time.  i also took my battery charger so i could top up both batteries at the mammy’s before heading off camping and again before setting off for the journey back home.

sorry - another out of focus snap.  here’s the view into the back, as we set off for our trip to ireland.