carry on herman

August

8

2009

OK - folks. on with the show.

you’ll remember that the previous evening had seen us retire to the pavillion with the following arrangement constructed in the back of herman.

the state of play from the night before

during the night, my subconscious chewed over the problem and, in the morning i had a plan! - off to B&Q for some heavy duty velcro and a couple of piano hinges. then i hoked through our wood stash and found a couple of suitable flat planks, which i cut to size and hinged together to form a folding table top, which could be laid across the less sturdy of the two sofa-bed frames and held down with the velcro, to give us a makeshift table-top. with the folding sofa-bed mattress placed onto the other [sturdier] frame, we now had sofa and table to sit and prepare our meals at.

testing my new makeshift table-top, to see if it works OK with beer bottles [a vital quality for any table to have!]. also checking out how the sofa-bed mattress performs in its capacity as a seat.

now, here’s the clever bit! when you’re done sitting and eating, the ‘table’ detaches from its frame, with a rending of velcro, folds in half and fits neatly in the gap between the two sofa-bed frames.

the sofa-bed mattress can now be laid out flat across the two halves of the frame, with the folded table filling the gap in the middle.

not bad, eh? - considering i was making it up as i went along and it was all knocked together out of crap, i’m pretty pleased with that. the only real bummer is that you’ve got to step over the frame of the iron bedstead to get your legs in when it’s in ‘sofa & table mode’. but that’s no great hardship.

August

7

2009

alternator ulsterman

[jeebus! - that’s the worst one yet!]

with the long nights drawing in, i found myself driving herman in the dark a few days back, on the way back from mazza’s mum & dad’s. i noticed that his charge warning light was glowing very faintly and slightly less faintly, when i had to put my headlights on.

so today, working on the tried & trusted ‘try the cheapest remedy first’ approach, i thought it was time to fit a new alternator belt and see if that helped things along. unfortunately this would involve patronising that den of uselessness known as halfords.

needless to say, they didnae have anything listed in any of their parts catalogues for an LT, but - knowing them of old - i had taken the precaution of getting under herman with a tape measure before setting off and measuring the existing belt’s vital statistics. so i was able to find a belt of suitable dimensions. it did take a while tho’, as i had to stand there for about twenty mins, plucking likely candidates off the shelf, taking them out of their cardboard sleeves and measuring them, then sticking them back in their sleeves again - until i found the right one.

you willnae find it listed under VW LT, in the parts catalogue, but this belt was the closest i could find to the size of the one that was already fitted:

when i got home and took the old belt off, i was glad i’d decided to replace it, even if it turned out not to be the cause of the warning light - as it was on its last legs; cracked and crumbling and fraying along the edges.

the old belt. t’was probably about to fall to bits anyway

fitting new drive belts is always a ball-ache of a job at the best of times and this was no exception. the pain was slightly ameliorated tho’ by the cunning use of a set of cogs; one on the alternator holding bolt and another on the bracket. this allowed you to ‘wind’ the alternator out along the bracket until you got the required tension, just by turning the head of the bolt. a nice bit of simple german ingenuity there. on all the previous motors i’ve owned it’s been the old ‘try and brace the alternator with a screwdriver wedged between it and the engine block, with one hand, while simultaneously trying to do up the holding bolts with the other’ dance.

german ingenuity - taking a wee bit of the pain out of drive-belt fitting.

with the new drive belt in place, i was feeling confident that this would sort the problem [especially after seeing the state of the old belt]. but when i climbed in and fired up the engine, i could just make out that old warning light, still glowing gently and mockingly at me.

new alternator drive belt fitted

o well - further investigation on that one is another job for another day.

August

7

2009

leaky leak-offs

i mentioned previously that i wasnae totally convinced that the new leak-off pipes i’d fitted to the injectors were tight enough to make a completely airtight seal and, sure enough, when i was tinkering about with the alternator drive belt earlier in the day, i’d notcied that there was a bit of diesel leaking out around the pipes, where they pushed onto the injector bleed nipples.

not having any hoseclips of a suitably petite size, i did what i do best - ~~botched the fucker~~ improvised cleverly; i got some fancy thickish wire that mazza had left over from when she did a jewellery course at college a while back - and i wired the ends of all the leak-off pipes, to stop them pulling off the nipples and hopefully give a better seal.

improvisation across the nation!

August

7

2009

bed heads

due to having to start back at work after the summer earlier than usual this year, me and mazza were going to do our annual fortnight in ireland [a week visiting the mammy and a week camping in the wilds] a month earlier. we usually go mid to late september. this year we were going the middle two weeks in august.

when we got herman, we’d thought he’d be all converted up by the time we went away in him but, as we all know, work expands to fill the available time and we were nowhere near ready. in my defence i could say that i had spent a fair bit of my time just getting the oul’ boy to the stage where at least i thought i could rely on him to start and drive OK [although the sudden alternator shenanigans was a bit of a worry!]

anyway, with only a few days left til we were off, it was time to do a bit of quick sorting out inside; emptying herman of the mountain of salvaged wood and pieces of carpet, which had been accumulating in the back over the previous months - and then constructing some kind of temporary sleeping/seating/eating space, so we could at least have somewhere comfy to kip and a place to cook and eat our dinner.

to that end we set to work. like i said, the first job was to clear all the crap out of the back [we’ve now got wood piled up in all sorts of weird corners and crevices in the house!]. this took us the best part of the afternoon but, by the time we’d finished, at least we could see how much space we had to work with.

with most of the crap cleaned out of the back, we could start to think about how to do this thing. we had an old sofa bed thingy with some parts of frame for it and also a fairly decent stash of assorted bits of wood.

i hummed and hah’ed for quite a while, trying to think of a way i could quickly build some kind of bed base, which could also double as a sofa and eating area. the problem was that every way i could think of doing it seemed to me to be quite a bit of work and we had only a couple of days left to get it sorted.

then i remembered that i had an old iron bedstead up in the attic, that i’d salvaged years ago when my mammy was going to bin it and which had lain, gathering dust up there ever since [like most of my collection of ‘things which might come in handy some day’!]

up i went into the attic and, after shovelling aside about another half ton of assorted broken pointless crap, found the old bedstead. another knuckle-grazing episode later and i had managed to manhandle it out of the attic and down into the house. now it only remained to be seen if it would fit in the back of herman…

success! - the old iron bedstead fitted almost perfectly across the width of the van, at the back

things were looking up! now, obviously, in an ideal world, the last thing you’d want to do would be to start constructing the inside of a camper using cast iron, but this was just a temporary measure and the old bedstead gave me a ready-made frame to build upon, that fitted just nicely across the back of the van.

next, we spent an annoyingly irritating twenty minutes or so, removing all the springs from the bedstead, so we were left with just the frame. i reckoned i could mount this on some wooden legs, thus giving us some storage space underneath and then attach a couple of the sofa-bed frame pieces across the top, to form the sitting/lying platform.

springs removed from the bedstead and in the process of raising it up on some wooden legs. part of the old sofa-bed frame sitting across it, while i cogitate on how to do this.

things must be serious - mazza’s getting her hands dirty! seen here sanding the rough edges off my improvised bed legs.

two of the frame sections from the sofa-bed bolted onto the bedstead frame. the more rugged one on the left will double up as the seat, when the bed’s folded. the lighter one on the right will serve as a table [although, at this stage, i’m not q-u-i-t-e sure how!]

well, this was as far as we got before low-light stopped play. not a bad day’s work really. and quite exciting; even tho’ this is just a temporary rush job, it’s the first bit of proper camper conversion we’ve had a chance to do. everything else, up to this point has just been repairs, cleaining and painting.

August

6

2009

overheads

today, i decided to do something about the bare plywood ceiling herman’s cab has had, ever since i ripped out the skanky old headlining material.

i had two big pieces of blue coloured, quite heavy canvas type material, that had previously been covering one of those portable partition type thingies which you get in offices and which was in my wood stash for a while - before i realised i’d never use it in herman and binned it. after getting mazza to sew the two bits of cloth together on her sewing machine, we had a piece big enought to cover the ceiling.

t’would have been a piece of piss of a job, were it not for the fact that [as previously mentioned in the post linked to above] i’d not been able to find a way to remove the plywood ceiling from above the cab, so we could work on it in the open. thus we had to somehow attach the cloth to it in-situ. cue about an hour of absolute keystone coppery of the first order!

first i had to paint the bottom of the ‘ceiling’ with some PVA adhesive. you can imagine how much fun that was; the stuff was dripping everywhere, my arms were aching from painting above my head and, by the time i’d painted all the way across, the PVA on the side were i’d started had dried, so i had to go over loads of it again - and needless to say, the more i rushed to get it all coated before the glue dried, the more i splashed and dripped the feckin’ stuff everywhere!

anyway, eventually the board was all coated in tacky PVA and it was time to manouevre the cloth into position. lots more clownish behaviour as me and mazza wrestled with trying to stick the cloth to the ceiling from underneath, without it wrinkling to buggery, and all the while getting covered in glue and fluff. and of course there were the obligatory moments when a bit you thought was stuck would suddenly peel off and drop on your head.

but we perservered and things were helped a bit when we got near the edges and could pull the cloth up around the corners of the board and then weigh it down from above, so that at least it was held in place while it dried.

if only you could have seen what a feast of laurel & hardy antics were involved in the supposedly simple task of gluing this piece of cloth to a piece of board!

the end result ain’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it looks better than the bare board and, given the amount of hassle such a tiny job cost us, we’re quite pleased with it. i’m still not sure what to do about the gap between the sill over the window and the bottom of the board tho’. it could make for a very tiny storage space, but i dinnae know if i could be arsed with the hassle involved in boxing it in and putting some kind of doors on it.

July

27

2009

pack o’ tubes!*

about the same time i scored my non-return fuel valve off ebay [see the point of non-return ], i also ordered a shitload of new fuel lines from butts of bawtry, as i was fully prepared to have to rip out all herman’s fuel lines and replace the lot since, up to that point, i had had no luck whatsoever in trying to banish the accursed bubbles from his fuel system - in spite of having crawled all over it, checking and tightening every bloody inch of the damn thing.

exciting new toys - a huge stash of new fuel line.

as luck would have it [and again, i’m writing this far off in the distant future, so i know how things turned out], the non-return valve fixed all the problems, so i didnae need most of the fuel line i bought, after all. still, i s’pose it’s handy to have around. i’ll doubtless find some use for it.

however, i did get to put some of it to good use; as well as sooking air in due to gravity draining diesel out of the injector pump, i was also pretty sure that air was getting in around the injectors themselves, as the leak-off pipes were all pretty knackered looking.

the leak-off pipes are the small curved tubes, you can see arcing between the injectors. they catch any un-used diesel from the injectors and feed it back into the fuel filter again. obviously if they’re not air-tight, they’ll be depositing some nice juicy air bubbles back into the fuel system as well.

as well as my half a kilometre of chunky new fuel pipe, i’d also ordered a couple of metres of new leak-off pipe too. so, even if i wasnae yet ready to embark on replacing the whole fuel-line kaboodle [at least until i’d waited to see if the fitting of the non-return valve bore fruit], i thought i’d replace the leak-off pipes for now.

old leak-off pipes removed. all a bit shoddy and decrepit looking and the one second from the right was already sporting a temporary ‘botch’ repair that i’d had to do, when it split on me, in the middle of anglesey.

making up some replacement leak-off pipes from my new fuel line stash

new leak-off pipage fitted. that should keep the wolf [in the form of air bubbles] from the door [in the form of the fuel filter] for a while.

i’ll probably revisit the leak-off pipes at a later date and add some clips or wire ties to hold them tighter in place. although i bought the correct diameter pipes, they weren’t as firm or hard to squeeze on to the bleed nipples on the top of the injectors as i’d hoped and expected. so i’m not entirely convinced that they couldnae work loose with a few hundred miles of engine vibration underneath them.

[* the title of this post is a hilarious pun, that you’ll only get if you know ‘norn iron’ slang]

July

20

2009

the point of non-return

well, today i finally put paid to herman’s occasional recalcitrance when it comes to starting and likewise said farewell to having to watch a diesel pipe that might as well have been pumping coca cola into the pump with the amount of bloody bubbles that were zipping past my helpless gaze. i scored myself this nifty non-return valve off ebay [for about a fiver, if memory serves me right]

i apologise humbly and whole-heartedly for the piss-poor out of focus photography. my excuse is that i bust the screen on my ixus, so i couldnae see what it was focussing on! - here’s the non-return valve.

about twenty mins later - the valve fitted into the fuel system. it goes between the fuel filter outlet and the injector pump inlet. it will allow diesel to flow into the injector pump, but willnae allow gravity to drag it back down the pipe again, when the engine is off. thus it stops air being sucked into the fuel system.

if you thought my bragging about finally saying goodbye to awkward starting and fizzy diesel at the beginning of this post was a bit premature and smacked of tempting fate, i should point out that, in my usual fashion, i’m updating this blog about a zillion light-years after the event. suffice to say, the job turned out to be most definitely a good ‘un. bubbles are a thing of the past and herman starts on the button every time now. best fiver i’ve ever spent!

July

17

2009

dripping and ripping

another attempt to find the mysterious source of the indoor lake, which laps contentedly round the vast and lonely shores of herman’s bleak passenger side footwell.

owing to the fact that LTs are notorious for leaking in at the corners of their windscreens, this looked the most likely candidate. however - unlike most LTs - herman’s windscreen surround is pretty much rust free, which makes it difficult to spot anywhere that rain might be getting in.

i did a bit of home-made endoscopy, by sticking my camera in behind the fusebox in the passenger side footwell and taking a couple of pictures, pointing up the way. they showed the telltale rust trail left behind my the constant dripping, but no obvious point of origin. nor did my groping round behind the bulkhead turn up anything, apart from a wet finger-tip.

hmmm… a bit disorientating, ain’t they? these photos are both taken with the camera in the footwell, looking up behind the dashboard. the curved box-sectioned bit is the bulkhead, which sits just beneath the windscreen. you can see where the water’s going to, but where it’s coming from is just too inaccessible to pin down.

well, even tho’ i cannae find the exact source, it looks pretty nailed on that the drips are getting in round the bottom corner of the windscreen somewhere. i’ll have to give it a good dollop of silicone sealant and see if that cures it.

next up today, some [not so] wanton vandalism:

the header material in herman’s cab was pretty minging; really grubby and dusty and smelt like a sock full of old fag-butts. so i decided, in the interests of health and safety to rip it all out. i’ll find something else to cover the ceiling, when i’m panelling out the inside.

ripping out the header material from the cab - a horrible, smelly, dusty job. you wouldnae believe how much cac and cobwebs had accumulated up there over the years

afterwards. not quite as stylish looking perhaps, but a lot cleaner and - as an added bonus - we seem to have acquired an extra inch or two of headroom

those LT owners like myself who tend to throw about half a ton of assorted crap in the storage space above the cab may [depending on your optimism] be frightened or comforted to find that all that stuff above your head is suspended there by a nothing more than a large plywood board, supported on three small metal struts.

ideally i’d have liked to have taken the ceiling board out and covered it with carpet or sommit, but i couldnae suss out how to get it out; the roof narrows in above it, so you cannae lift it up more than about an inch or two, before it wedges and you cannae slide it straight out backwards as the bulkhead gets in the way. looks like you’d have to lift the whole roof off to get it out.

this means, when the time comes, i’m going to have to cover it ‘in-situ’, which will be fun!

July

13

2009

clocking on

today i’m going to take you on a journey into time!

it had been bugging me for a while that herman’s clock didnae work. i wouldnae usually be that bothered about something so trivial, but VW have seen fit to make the clock in the LT the size of a dinner plate and stick it right in the middle of the instrument panel. so it’s quite difficult to disregard the fact that the hands are stubbornly refusing to move.

unfortunately, decent access to the clock can only be had by removing the entire instrument panel. so it was out with the screwdriver to remove the four screws and then began the epic task of disconnecting speedo cable, injector advance [ie. cold-start] cable, heater switches and about half a pound of wiring spaghetti.

speedo on the left - clock on the right

i took plenty of snaps as i went along to remind me which wires plugged in where!

after about half an hour, i had the instrument panel completely disconnected and was able to lift it out of the van, so i could get a proper look at what was wrong wi’ the clock.

instrument panel removed

the gaping wound where the instrument panel used to be

once i’d got the instrument panel up to the house and [literally] shone a bit of light on things, it soon became obvious why the clock wasnae working; the connector plugs for the clock and speedo are soldered into a pretty flimsy plastic circuit ribbon and one of the solder points for the plug that goes into the back of the clock had come away from the ribbon. [sorry about the blurry photo!]

clock connector solder has come loose

there was no chance of me trying to solder the connector back on again, as the ribbon was so thin that the soldering iron would melt right through it, so a more creative remedy was called for.

i noticed that, although the section of circuit ribbon that went to the clock looked quite complicated, there were actually only two tracks in the circuit that actually connected to anything; one live and one earth [t’aint exactly a complicated machine, the oul’ dashboard clock!]. the other two tracks in the ribbon didnae connect to anything and just finished in blank terminals.

so it was out wi’ the scalpel and i ‘amputated’ that section of the circuit from the main ribbon and then soldered two leads directly into the plug which goes into the back of the clock

clock heart bypass surgery

i then reassembled the instrument panel, wired everything back in again and soldered my new clock leads into a suitable permanent supply wire behind the dashboard. after the obligatory ‘screw everything back together and find it’s not working’ first go - which was caused by me knocking the plug out of the back of the clock while wrestling the the air conditioning vent into place behind the dash - the job was a good ‘un on the second attempt - and herman can once again tell the time!

at the third stroke, the time will be…

May

30

2009

bumper vans - part 02

the weekend cometh and it’s time to don my wrestling gauntlets and go out to do battle with herman’s bumpers again.

i’d found a nice box of chunky nuts’n’bolts in my toolbox, which looked the right size to attach the bumpers to the brackets. so i was at least saved the annoyance of having to make a soul-destroying visit to the ever-useless halfords. that still left me with the task of getting the remnants of the old bolts out of the brackets tho’. [the astute reader will remember that they’d nearly all sheared off when i tried to remove them, due to being rusted tighter than a nun’s chuff].

well, i willnae bore you too much wi’ the details but, needless to say it was a titanic struggle; first i had to grind down each bolt, top and bottom, with the angle grinder and then had to drill out what was left. a slow process as it meant starting with a small drill bit and then gradually widening the hole with larger bits, in about three stages. the hardest ones to get out were the bolts on the bottom of the brackets. there wasnae enough room to get under and drill upwards and there was slightly too much clearance to get my arm wedged underneath in such a way as to get any leverage. so i had to use my behemoth-like strength to pull the drill upwards from above using only my ‘knot in a piece of string’ sized biceps.

driller killer - angle grinder resting in the background

eventually, after probably a couple of hours, i’d got all the old bolts drilled out and it was time to start putting on the new bumpers. surely i was on the home straight now!

the lefthand bumper went on without a hitch:

halfway there!

however, when i came to do the righthand bumper, i found that it didnae want to line up properly with the holes in the brackets. a bit of investigation soon revealed the reason why; herman has a bit of a bump in his back righthand corner, where he’s hit or been hit by something in his dim and murky past. nothing major - just a slight dent but, when i looked underneath, i saw that the damaged area was right where the outermost bumper bracket sits. the crossbar welded across the back of the chassis, onto which the bumper brackets bolt, is crumpled, so the bracket is pulled out of alignment

‘dunched’ in bracket mounting. so the bracket is pulled out of position

straightening this out would have meant more dismantling of the bracket, which would no doubt have involved more sheared off bolts and hours more drilling and grinding, so i decided to leave it be for now and trust to the flexibility of the fibreglass bumper to allow me to get it bolted onto the brackets as they were.

it took a fair bit of wrestling, some mighty ‘thwacks’ wi a lump hammer on the offending bracket and a bit of strategic drill hole widening but, eventually i managed to persuade the righthand bumper to fit onto the bracket and got it all tightened up.

the results wouldnae win any beauty contests; the righthand bumper is at a bit of a jaunty angle - sticking out at the inner edge and touching against the bodywork at the outer, but it’s solid enough and even a crooked bumper has got to be better than no bumper at all!

disnae look too bad from ‘ground level’…

but if you stand up, you can see how the bumper is twisted out slightly

compare it to the other one and it’s even more obvious

the weird thing is that the position of the ‘frayed’ part of the righthand bumper corresponds almost exactly to where the bumper would have hit against the bodywork if something had run into the back of herman. wouldn’t it be a weird coincidence if they were actually once herman’s bumpers that had come back to him via a random coincidental route?

cue spooky music

forgot to mention, i also put in some hefty bolts underneath to replace the ones i’d noticed were missing from a couple of the brackets and which attach them to the chassis. this involved scraping about half an allotment’s worth of dried mud out from in and around the brackets and bumper cross-member. i must have lightened herman by a good couple of lbs, with the amount of cac i shovelled out of there.

time for some under-van gardening

anybody wanna buy some topsoil?

so there you have it. another complete ball-ache of a job and all the more annoying for the fact that it should have been the kind of thing you’d do when you’ve got half an hour spare. still, it’s done now and herman has some sturdy, if a bit wonky, rear impact protection.

get that arse!