yesterday, me and mazza went off on an excursion to derby, to pick up a set of rear bumpers for herman from fellow brickyard forum member icky.

no problems at all with herman in getting there and, in his first run out into undulating territory since i adjusted up the clutch, he seemed to cope OK with the hills down around the peak district. the only thing that slowed us up really was the fact that it was a bank holiday and the sun was shining, so there was traffic a-plenty clogging the roads.

we found icky’s gaff after a bit of wrestling with derby’s one-way system [nearly as confusing as stockport’s!] and he presented us with a pair of rear bumpers for herman and refused to take any money for them - nice chap!

the bumpers were in quite good nick, apart from the fact that one of them had gone a bit furry along part of the inner edge. icky suggested giving it a dollop of fibreglass resin to tidy it up again, but i quite like it the way it is. it has character!

fast forward to today and i grabbed my tools and nipped outside for what i thought would be an hour or so’s work at the most - fitting the new bumpers.

new bumpers - waiting to be fitted:


how wrong can you be! - the bumpers attach to the four mounting brackets on the back of the van by means of eight bolts which have to be removed with an allen key. every single fecking one of them was rusted solid and, even after dousing them liberally with plusgas, i only managed to get two of them out in one piece. the rest of them sheared off and left me with the prospect of having to drill and grind them out. i also noticed that there were bolts missing from the underneath of a couple of the brackets, where they fastened onto the chassis underneath. so they’d need taking care of too.

four brackets & eight bolts versus an allen key, a pry-bar & a gallon of plusgas!


shear frustration [geddit!] - this is how most of the bolts came off


there were also a few bolts missing from where the brackets join the chassis


t’was about then that - almost with relief - i felt the familiar tender caress of raindrops ‘pon my cheek and - not for the first time, retired hurt to the pavillion.

a couple of days ago i found a big sheet of 6mm plywood, about 8’ x 4’, leaning against the railings at the corner of the road. it was a bit smashed up at one side and had a hole about a foot long along another edge. but i reckoned there was at least some salvageable wood in there. so i stuck it in the back of herman.

this sunday afternoon, after a morning spent wrestling bindweed and horse tails down at the allotment, followed by a hearty lunch of mazza’s speciality spicy stuffed peppers, i found i still had enough energy left in my bloated carcass to take myself outside and ponder on the prospects of using said piece of plywood to make a token start of panelling herman’s interior.

doing floor or walls was out of the question as that will have to wait until i’ve got the welding done, which willnae be until i’m off for the summer holidays and have some decent time to spend on it. and with the ceiling similarly off-bounds for reasons of size and the fact that there will be some wiring to put in there, before i board it over, that only left the option of boarding the inside of a door.

originally i thought the plywood board would be big enough to let me attack the inside of the sliding door, but when i measured it up, i found that - although there was enough board to make a piece the right size, there was no way i could get it cut out, without using some of the damaged wood. so i downsized my ambitions and decided i’d go for the slightly less challenging target of the two panels above the windows, inside the back doors.

while i was measuring up the oddly angled squares i’d need to cut out, mazza emerged blinking into the daylight, to contribute to the afternoon’s festivities.

cutting out the panels


mazza on sanding duties. actually, i did most of the sanding. this pic is obviously nothing more than a shameless ‘photo-opportunity’, staged by mazza’s publicists.


while i got on with cutting and sanding, mazza started to make up some insulating panels from a giant roll of bubblewrap, which has been patiently lying in the back of herman since i salvaged it from the skip - just waiting for its chance to ‘come in handy’.

mazza bubble-wrapping


before we put the bubblewrap and panels in place, we wrote down the entire recorded history of our tribe on the inside of the first panel. when this archaeological goldmine is uncovered again many aeons from now, future generations will be able to piece together our vanished culture and speculate on the funny hats we might have worn on ceremonial occasions.

mazza sending a a message to the future


mazza sending a a message to the future


with mazza’s bubblewrap pillow in place and the panel sanded to within an inch of its life, i proceeded to drill through the wood into the door and, after widening the holes slightly with a bigger drill-bit, i screwed the panel into place with self-tapping screws.

there was a bit of a cock-up with the first panel, as the wood was quite warped and - in spite of my efforts to press it flat while marking the holes, i managed to drill them slightly wrong and so the panel was a bit ‘bulgy’ when screwed into place. i took the offending screws out again and re-drilled their holes and got the board to lie nice and flat, second time around. but that - in case you’re wondering, dear reader - is why the first panel has quite a surfeit of screws holding it in place. and then of course i had to reproduce a similar amount of screwage on the second panel, so it wouldnae look too wierdly different…

drilling the screwholes for the panel


first panel done. not too shoddy - considering!


drilling the second panel - eyeballing the first one, to try and get the screws roughly in the same places - and roughly in the same numbers!


driller killer


the end result - not too bad really, considering it’s all good ol’ recycled and found materials. only another square mile or so to board out and then herman will start looking like a camper inside


in the end we got the two panels done and mazza made a start on bubblewrap insulating the bigger panels on the bottoms of the back doors. however, boarding them will have to wait for another day, as there’s slightly more work involved, due to having to make cut-outs for the hinges and handles etc. for today, we called it quits at this stage and retired to the pavilion to drink more booze and feel smugly self-satisfied with the day’s horticultural, culinary and automotive achievements.

today i decided to take advantage of the fact that the rain had stopped and a mysterious yellow light had appeared in the heavens - i decided to christen it ‘the trouser press’ - and investigate the cause of one of herman’s less desireable features; the fact that he has an indoor swimming pool, located in the passenger side footwell.

it disnae show up very well in the photos, but there’s a trickle of water dripping from the folded up floor mat [which is soaked] and puddling in the footwell.


again, it’s hard to see in the photo, but there’s a good pool of water gathering here


word on the street - or at least that part of it which is occupied by the brickyard forum - suggests that this is a fairly common problem with LTs and, where not down to their notoriously leaky windscreens, is usually caused by water getting in around the indicator housings.

since herman is remarkable for the relatively rust-free state of his windscreen surround, and also the fact that mazza stuck her paw under the dashboard last time it rained and said it felt damp near the indicators, it looked like herman’s water feature originated in that neck of the woods.

so off on my bike to stepford old trafford B&Q to score a tube of multi-purpose silicon sealant and a triggery-gun type dispenser thing to fire it out in great globules of water-repelling goodness.

i took off both front indicators and laid a good bead of silicon in behind their slightly the worse for wear rubber seals and also did likewise round the outside of the housings themselves, to plug any spaces between those and the bodywork.

off with the indicator…


…and out with the silicon sealer


indicator’s eye view of the silicon gunman, in full concentration mode


while i was there i also removed what i believe are called the ‘courtesy flashers’ and gave them a good dollop of silicon as well. i must have missed these on the way round when i did the original stripping down and painting of herman’s bonny fizzer, coz they were full of green skank and assorted slime.

a courtesy flasher


another courtesy flasher


there’s never been any hint of water ingress in the back quadrant of herman, so i left the rear lights alone.

and that’s about it. only time, and the next heavy rainfall, will tell whether my liberal application of silicon has solved the problem of herman’s footwell requiring tide tables. but, given that this is manchester and also the great british summer, i’m sure i’ll not have long to wait, to find out.

all sealed up again. fingers crossed this’ll have done the job


while i had my silicon gun at the ready and my itchy finger on the trigger, i also availed of the opportunity to glue back into place a section of the rubber window edging on the passenger side door, which had come loose and had an annoying habit of dangling, when you rolled the window down. no photographic evidence of this herculean task exists, so you’ll have to fall back on that ‘imagination’ thing you are blessed with.

this weekend, i decided to take on quite possibly the smallest job to date; namely fixing a wee chip in herman’s windscreen. it’s only about half a cm long and not in the driver’s line of sight, so it wouldnae be an MOT failure, but every time i see that advert on the telly [i think it’s for some windscreen replacement company], where the guy drives over a bump and - with a loud ‘crrrikkk!’ noise - the tiny chip in his windscreen spiders out to fill about half the screen, it makes me cringe at the thought of the same happening with herman.

yes - i know. ‘the power of advertising’, but i’m not so foolish [or so rich] as to have my entire windscreen replaced, because of a tiny chip. no. i bought some DIY gloop for about £15 off ebay and did the job myself. at this point i should apologise for the fact that the customary dullness of this post is not even slightly lifted by the addition of any illlustrative photos. my camera - wherein i recorded the thrilling step-by-step process - decided to eat its own memory card, so no documentary evidence of operation ‘fix a tiny chip in the window’ remains.

suffice to say, the repair did not produce a perfect invisible finish. however, it did fill the chip and the resin hasnae fallen out yet. so, if it’s made the chip less likely to spread then that’s good enough for me.

well, following on from herman’s embarrassing hill-climbing exploits in whitby the other week and also from some advice i got on the brickyard forum, i decided to see if his clutch just needed adjusting up, before resigning myself to the complete arse of a job that would be replacing it.

i perused the workshop manual for the correct settings and found that the clutch pedal should have 20mm of freeplay in it. herman’s clutch pedal had none at all. it was as solid as a rock and the biting point was so high you had to lift your foot about three or four inches off the floor, before it started to engage.

luckily adjusting the clutch is a fairly simple process, as it is doable from inside the cockpit, without having to feck about, crawling under the van. so it only took about twenty mins to half an hour until i had the fecker adjusted precisely, as per the recommendations in the manual.

it was well out! - i had to tighten the cable by up about an inch [or was it loosening it off? - i cannae quite work it out], to get it right.

clutch pedal adjustment is on the bulkhead behind the pedal


before adjustment - note the metal adjuster on the end of the clutch cable just emerges from the hole in the bulkhead


after adjustment - now the metal adjuster is completely pulled through the hole. that was easily an inch of adjustment needed



what a difference! - at first i thought i’d overdone it as the pedal felt really soft and wobbly, compared to how it had been before. but the biting point is far better now. you just have to lift your foot slightly and the boy starts to roll. he also feels like he’s pulling a lot better now. pressing the ‘pedal to the metal’ and the ‘heel to the steel’ disnae cause the engine to race like a bastard with no result any longer. it revs slower and you can feel herman accelerating a bit more than previously, where he seemed to lethargically get gradually faster by a process of osmosis.

of course the real test will come when i next throw him up a steep hill. unfortunately there aren’t any near where i live, so that test will have to take place in the wild, next time i go off somewhere. i’ve got a feeling that the clutch will have been worn a bit by being so out of adjustment and slipping for so long and will probably need replaced eventually. but i’m hoping it’ll be good enough to at least last the summer out, as i’ve got other stuff i want to be getting on wi and lots of trips and visits planned. i dinnae want to be spending the whatever sunny days we get, crawling about under the van, wrestling with the clutch.

not content with going to the far western fringes of wales a week or two ago, this weekend, herman turned his flat fizzer in the opposite direction and headed off to whitby on the north yorkshire coast for our annual trip to WGW.

hulme to whitby - herman adventure no.2 


hulme to whitby [close-up] - herman adventure no.2


no problems at all on the way there. he chugged along merrily for the three hours or so the journey took and only used about half a tank of diesel. and he reached 73MPH on the motorway for a few dizzying seconds. nosebleeds were flying out of us in all directions, i can tell you!

home-from-home sweet home-from-home. herman outside our B&B in whitby. mazza in the background, over the road.


on the way back, it was a slightly different story:

when you’re coming into whitby, you’ve climbed slowly up through the north york moors national park before you descend quite steeply into the town. naturally, on the way back this is reversed and you have a steep climb up out of the town into the park.

i noticed when we set off that herman felt pretty sluggish. i put it down to the fact it was a damp, wet, drizzly day and he wasnae really in the mood for it. as we started crawling up the steep hills near sleights, on the way back tho’ i knew something more serious was wrong; i had my heel to the steel and the engine was revving like a bastard, but we were just trickling up the hills at barely over ten or fifteen MPH.

once we got past that vertiginous section and were on the gentle downslope through the national park and then later still, on the motorway, he was pulling like a train again and smashed his world sprinting record by reaching 76MPH on a downhill section of the motorway.

we got safely home without any further incident, but there’s obviously something not right wi the clutch. it seems to be slipping - although i’d have expected to smell burning if it was. but it definitely ain’t right. we even got overtaken on a hill by a family car pulling a caravan, for feck’s sake. how embarrassing!

just a brief tinkering session on herman today. there’s not really much else major i can be getting on with, until i get some sheet steel and a bit of welding practice under my belt - and then i’ll patch up the holes in his floor, so we can start panelling him out. it was such a lovely day tho’, that i just wanted to get out of the house for an hour or so - especially since it’s back to work tomorrow, after my two weeks off for easter!

anyway, just in passing let me mention that the panelling [and more importantly insulation] is going to need doing ASAP and deffo before herman does any serious summer camping expeditions. when i got in the back today, it was like a fucking sauna. that black paint really absorbs the sun! [and i expect it’ll be equally adept at sucking in the icy cold in the winter]

however, i digress. today was mainly about pootering around and enjoying a bit of sunshine.

the first job i decided to do was straighten herman’s steering wheel. after the work i did before on the steering column, i just made sure the front wheels were pointed straight ahead and put the steering wheel back on in the proper position and assumed that was all there was to it. however, it’s not as simple as that. apparently the steering box can get ‘wound up’ [or words to that effect] if you’ve done a lot of recent tight turns [such as reversing into a tiny parking space for instance!] and, even if you turn the wheels straight again this does not ‘unwind’ the steering straight away. you need to drive in a straight line for a fair distance to ‘clear the custard’.

i discovered this to my annoyance when we went to angelsey last week. when i was driving herman in a straight line, the steering wheel was turned at almost exactly 90º, so that the ‘spoke’, which should be horizontal, was vertical and obscuring my view of the dials. i had to keek* round the wheel to see them.

[*keek in the irish sense of peeping round a corner - not the irish sense of having a shit!]

so today i took herman out on the straightest piece of road i could find near me and ran him up and down a couple of times to ‘unwind’ the steering. then slid him [at as shallow and angle as possible, so as not to turn the wheels any more] into the side of the road and, with hazard lights blinking, took off his steering wheel and put it back on straight again. people passing by must have thought i was the most blatant or most inept car thief ever, as i sat there in broad daylight, at the side of the road, with the engine running, my hazard lights on unbolting the steering wheel of a giant black van.

aha! - that’s were the gauges were hiding!


anyway, it’s a lot better now. if i was being anal about it, it’s still just annoyingly very slightly off the horizontal, but at least i can see my dials and gauges while driving now!

when i got back home, i attended to another small but niggling job; the windscreen washer on my side is loose and also at the wrong angle - it only squirts a couple of inches up the glass. i took it off, cleaned behind it and araldited it back in position. then when the glue had dried i used a pin stuck in its ‘pee-hole’ to adjust the aim of the jet, so that it now hits the top of the glass instead of pathetically dribbling along the bottom. not only will i be able to see my gauges when i’m driving. from now on i’ll be able to see through the windscreen as well!

pathetic dribbler - and my van’s windscreen washers need adjusting too!


i then did a couple of other minor twiddles; tightening up the winders for the door windows, which were a bit loose. unfortunately i didnae record this thrilling repair for posterity, so you’ll have to use every ounce of your imagination to summon up the mental image of ‘me’, ‘tightening’ a ‘screw’ with a ‘screwdriver’… exciting stuff!

next up i decided to have a crawl around underneath. i bought a big tub of VACTAN rust cure a couple of weeks ago and i thought i might give some of the side panels underneath a quick going over with that. [as you’ll know from previous episodes, some of the side panels are suffering a bit from the oul’ ‘tin worm’]. i wire-brushed down a bit of one of the side panels and painted it up with the VACTAN and then, while i was under there, i idly started wire-brushing the crud off one of the chassis cross-members beside me. the chassis is actually in really good nick, for the age of the van, but i thought i might find another bit of surface rust to vent my chemical spleen upon, while i still had a bit of VACTAN left in my yoghurt pot.

when i brushed down the cross-member tho’ i was in for a surprise - and a pleasant one for a change! - there was barely a dot of rust on the thing. in fact, underneath the layers of dirt, the cross-member looked practically new. either it has been galvanised at some point [it has that galvanised looking grey-silver colour about it] - or the VW people know a thing or two when it comes to mixing up a rust resistant underseal.

methinks i shall have to ask the chaps down the brickyard and see if anyone can shed any light on that one.

typical chassis cross-member. covered in muck and likely pretty rusty too - right?


not so! - after a quick wire brushing it looks like it’s only just left the factory.


that’s yer lot for today!

well, this morning herman went on his first great adventure; me and mazza’s long trek [well, about 140 miles] down to visit my mate baz in angelsey for the easter weekend.

hulme to angelsey - herman adventure no.1


hulme to angelsey [close-up] - herman adventure no.1


no problems whatsoever on the way down; herman cruised along quite happily at around 55mph, topped 65mph a few times on the downhill bits and even scaled the dizzying heights of 67mph during one particularly ferocious overtaking manoeuvre on a trundling-along caravan. he even got us there on less diesel than GULG used to use, which was a nice bonus!

approaching the menai bridge


punky the dashboard penguin’s eye view of our crossing the britannia bridge into angelsey


our hero and role-model at the wheel, crossing the britannia bridge into angelsey


herman, relaxing in his rustic surroundings


on the journey home, i had the old familiar problem of herman running like a bag of shite when i first started him up. a quick whip off of the engine cover revealed that, as expected, i had my beloved bubbles back in the fuel system again. the last remaining section of diesel run-off tubing from the injector pump had decided to spring a leak. luckily i had some lengths of rubber tube in my toolbox, so i was able to effect some quick running repairs at baz’s before we set off.

bloody fuel pipes! - the diesel was oozing out of the bastard


time for some more rubber tubing repairs and fuel line priming


bubbleicious repair job done, herman cruised home as happily as he had cruised down there and even, at one point, overtook a VW T3 camper wagon on the A55 near conwy. all in all a successful trip and i found herman a helluva lot less sluggish and clunky than stuff i’d read about the LT35s on the intarwebs had led me to expect. probably my expectations were too low since i’ve always driven clunky, slow 4x4s and the like before. so i was expecting him to barely be able to reach 50mph. the fact that he’s more fuel economical than GULG is nice too - although that’s a situation that’s likely to change, once he starts getting a load of ballast - in the form of campervan innards - stuck in the back.

next major mission will prob be whitby in a couple of weeks time - another 130 mile trek!

a momentous day in motoring history!

this morning my tax disc arrived in the post and herman was officially road legal. i was itching to get out in him all day but unfortunately had work. i might have inadvertently let my afternoon class out a wee bit early, but this was entirely due to the fact it was the last day of term before easter and not in any way connected with the fact i wanted to get home early so i could take herman for his ‘maiden voyage’.

t’was just a shortish run of about five or six miles either way. we just went to the asda opposite the trafford centre for the weekly shopping. when we got back, in a further burst of adrenaline-fuelled bravado i reversed him in through the gates leading to the carpark at the flats and did a tidy reverse park in my space [OK - i did have mazza scurrying around the back of the van like a blue-arsed fly, ready to thump on the side if i came within a foot of gatepost, wall or anyone else’s car, but i’m still feeling pretty pleased with myself].

this mad old bat turned up and smashed a bottle of champagne on the van as we tried to drive off - should be given a bloody ASBO!


bullet points from the journey:

• i think i’ll get into the habit of pulling off in 1st - even tho’ it’s ridiculously low-geared. pulling off in 2nd works most of the time, but i had a couple of hill starts in 2nd and it really struggled to get going.



• i’ve got a very slight pull to the left while driving, a bit worse on braking, so obviously one of the brakes is binding. it must be very slight tho’ - i had a feel round the wheels after the journey and none of them was noticeably hotter than the others. i hope it is the brakes and not my front wheels out of alignment [thinks back to all those smacking into the kerb incidents on my first tentative spin round the block].



• engine didnae overheat. OK it was a short journey, but quite a warm day, so i’d have expected to get a hint of any probs in that area, but the temp guage stayed right down on the ‘normal’ line.



• have to get used to lifting my foot right off the clutch. it’s got quite a high biting point and i’ve got a bad habit of resting my foot on the clutch pedal while driving. i did it a couple of times today on those hill starts in 2nd and smelt that lovely smell of hot clutch plates when i slowed down at the next traffic lights.



• i still don’t know what top speed he’s capable off. there was too much traffic about to get a good straight run, so i didnae have him above about 40. i reckon he’d be lucky to get much over 60 tho’. still, who cares about a slow journey when you’ve got [or will have] a motor with a comfy home from home in the back?



• it feels like you’re going a lot quicker than you are. i dunno if this is all down to the size of the van. i think it might have more to do with the fact that GULG was a jap import with a speedo in km/h only. i’ve kinda got used to thinking in km now, so when my head tells me i’m doing about sixty and i look down and see the speedo showing about twenty-five, it seems a bit strange.



• gearchange is a zillion times better since i sorted out the linkage. i still missed the gear i was aiming for once or twice, but that’s to be expected at this stage. i reckon a couple more trips and i’ll be stirring that porridge like a good ‘un!



• well, that’s about it. now celebrating the maiden voyage with a few bottles of ruddles county. tomorrow, if winds are favourable, i may take a spin down the motorway and see if i can hit the dizzy heights of 60mph!

the groaning sound you can hear is the disappointment of a dozen ‘one-handed surfers’, taken in by today’s incredibly witty and original title.

since, as i mentioned previously, i’m at the thumb-twiddling stage now, until i tax herman at the end of the month, i thought i’d take advantage of blue skies and sunshine to throw the oul’ vaccuum cleaner round the inside of herman’s cab, fill his windscreen wiper bottle and generally just tidy him up a bit in the front.

what was more remarkable today tho’ was that the sunshine actually managed to surgically remove mazza from the intarwebs for about an hour or so, to give me a hand. since this is such a rare occurrence i have pushed my flash animation skills to their very limits to bring you this ‘reconstruction’ of the amazing sight of mazza steam-cleaning herman’s seats.

behold and marvel!

full steam ahead!