today, the conjunction of getting home from work unexpectedly early and the brief appearance of a wee patch of blue sky, allowed me to don my oily rags and get out for a quick wrestle with the front parts of herman’s gear-linkage. the astute reader will remember that i removed the shiftrod on monday.

today i had to remove the horizontal bar whose name i know not, which runs transversally across in front of the radiator and links the front end of the shiftrod to the bottom of the gearstick. as i said before, this particular section of the gear-linkage disnae appear in the exploded diagram in the workshop manual, so i’m assuming it’s an addition for RHD versions only, to bridge the gear-linkage across the front of the car from the left to righthand side. since it’s not mentioned in despatches, i s’pose it falls to me to name it. after initially toying with calling it ‘the trouser press’ i have finally settled on ‘transverse rod’. so, until i learn otherwise, that’s how i shall refer to it from now on.

anyway, in spite of the usual hassles of the various nuts’n’bolts being moderately hard to get at, it didnae take me too long to get the whole thing unbolted and dropped out through the bottom of the engine bay. i had to manhandle a few pipes and cables out of the way to ease its passage, but it came out fairly easily.

here is the complete gear-linkage, removed and set up on the ground in front of herman


front end of shiftrod, shiftrod lever and the passenger’s side end of [the newly christened] transverse rod


rear end of shiftrod and rear bracket


close-up of polythene bush on rear end of shiftrod


polythene bush on front end of shiftrod. again this disnae seem to be shown in the exploded diagram in the manual, but the front of the shiftrod passes through a tubular bracket on the chassis, just before it bolts into the shiftrod lever. this bush sits inside the tubular bracket.


up to this point, all the bushes and bearings i’d inspected seemed to be OK. a few of the rubber gaiters were a bit the worse for wear, but the polythene bushes were all in one piece and all seemed well greased.

then i looked at the shiftrod lever. this sits vertically with the bracket which bolts onto the front end of the shiftrod at the bottom. the top end of the shiftrod lever is a hollow tube and into this fits a short metal pin which emerges vertically from the bottom of the transverse rod at the passenger side end. this metal pin has a polythene bush on it.

now, although in one piece, the polythene bush was very dry, with no grease on it at all and also looked like it had been forced down further onto the pin than it was meant to go or that there was something else missing from the end of the pin, because there was about an inch of bare metal sticking out past the end of polythene bush, which it seemed to me would have wobbled moved and grated quite a lot inside the tube in the shiftrod lever which it sits inside. maybe it’s meant to be like this but it seems a bit dubious looking to me.

i’ll have to consult on the brickyard forum and see if anyone there knows what it’s ‘supposed’ to look like.

shiftrod lever and the bearing on the end of the transverse rod. is the polythene bush meant to be forced down past the end of the metal pin like this?


plastic ball inside the bearing for the gearstick. all in one piece and nice’n’greasy. seems OK to me



more polythene bushes. this time on either end of the transverse rod. again, both could have benefitted from a blob of grease, but the polythene bushes were sound.

passenger’s side end


driver’s side end


so there you have it. apart from the fact that a few of the bushes could do with a dollop of grease, there’s nothing obviously wrong or broken. the most dubious link in the chain seems to be that connection between the shiftrod lever and the transverse rod. i think that may bear further investigation. unfortunately tho’ as i’ve said, the transverse rod disnae feature in the workshop manual i have, so i’ve nothing to refer to, to see whether or not it’s meant to look like thon.

today the weather looked quite promising, so i thought i’d have another go at tackling the gear-linkage to try and sort out herman’s diabolical gearchange for once and for all. although i’d improved it slightly with my previous efforts, i took him for a quick spin round the block on sunday and changing gear was a fuckin’ ‘mare. so it really needs sorting out urgently.

before i could even get to the rear end of the gearlinkage, i had to remove the engine and gearbox cover from the bottom of the van. this is a big plastic case lined with foam which bolts onto the bottom of the chassis and is presumably meant to lessen engine noise a bit. it was quite easy to remove. just a few self-threading screws, but i’m sure it’ll be much more fun trying to put it back on as it’s quite big, unwieldy and and heavy. so it’ll be one of those ‘lying under the car holding something heavy above your head and trying to screw it into place while your eyes fill with grit from off the bottom of the van’ jobs.

the engine and gearbox cover was nicely filled with a glutinous mixture of mud, oil and diesel - with the odd loose screw and pebble thrown in for luck


beginning the job of cleaning out the cover with a paint scraper


when i removed the biggest piece of foam - which was soaked in oil and water - i found this insects’ graveyard on the underside of the foam; a dead, cobweb-covered fly and a ‘dead’ wasp


here’s how much crap i scraped out of the inside of the cover. that should be good for a couple of pounds off the herman’s weight


here’s the cover after the removal of the abovepictured mound of skank


i’d left the big piece of foam near a grid so the water could drain out of it and when i went to pick it up a few mins later i found that my mate the ‘dead’ wasp was walking about, yawning and stretching and cleaning himself off. for some insane reason, he’d obviously decided to hibernate in that oil and diesel soaked environment and my exposing him to the air, just as we had a few minutes of rare sunshine had brought him ‘back to life’ again.

behold - he is risen!


anyway, now that the dog could see the rabbit, it was time to get down to the main business of the day; inspecting the hitherto unseen rear end of the gear-linkage, where it actually connects into the gearbox.

the casual reader at home possessed of an ‘armchair general’ disposition can follow along with the next moves in this thrilling campaign by consulting this handy exploded diagram of the LT35 gearlinkage, which i have shamelessly lifted from page 16 of that international blockbusting best-seller ‘the VW workshop manual. 5-speed gearbox 008 and final drive. april 1982 edition.’

gear linkage exploded diagram


the first task was to remove the mounting bracket that holds the rear end of the shiftrod against the gearbox where the shiftrod fits over the inner shift lever. there is a plastic ball on the end of the inner shift lever which acts as a bearing and this ball is apparently prone to disintegrating and thus contributing to sloppy a gearchange. as you can see from the piccies below. this disnae seem to be the problem in herman’s case

armchair generals! - we’re looking at the area circled in red on your maps.

rear bracket removed and shiftrod pulled off inner shift lever and moved aside. the inner shift lever is the thing with the orange ball on the end


closeup on the inner shift lever and its notoriously disintegration-prone ball. a bit dirty due to a cracked rubber boot, but definitely in one piece



rear end of shiftrod pulled away from gearbox and moved downwards slightly


i then turned my attentions to the front end of the shiftrod. if you consult your exploded diagrams again, you’ll notice an area circled in green. this is where the shiftrod connects to the shiftrod lever at the front of the van, just tucked up beside the radiator. ‘loosen this bolt off’ advised the workshop manual casually and the shiftrod will just ‘slide out to the rear’.

easier said that done. the nut and bolt holding the shiftrod into the shiftrod lever was about as inaccessible as you could wish for. one of those were you can get the end of a spanner and the tip of one or two fingers to it and move it about a millimetre at a time. after unsuccessfully trying to attack it from directly underneath i eventually hit on the ‘easier’ method [and i use the word strictly in the relative sense], of coming in from in front of the radiator, after moving a piece of cardboard panelling out of the way. it was still a major pain in the arse - especially since the bolt was not a captive one, so once i’d loosened the nut about a mm, the bolt just started turning round too. i had to get one hand up behind the radiator holding a spanner on the bolt and the other hand up in front of the radiator, undoing the nut with a socket on a long handle. but i got there in the end!

the reluctant nut. you cannae see the full extent of the tangle of girders, pipes, tubes and other bric-a-brac which i had to weave my arm through to even get the camera in to take this shot


at this point i was confronted by another problem. the shiftrod didnae want to slide out after the nut was loosened off and who could blame it. it’s probably been wedged into the shiftrod lever, without anyone looking near it, for the past 16 years. i tried pulling the shiftrod from the back end, near the gearbox but, as i twisted it, pulled it and pushed it, i only succeeded in causing the gearstick to flop about inside the van. i therefore had to go and summons mazza from the flat, so she could hold the gearstick from being able to move, while i wriggled the shiftrod out. to my delight and surprise, it came out really easily with a couple of twists.

mazza took this artistically composed shot from inside the cab, down through the hole in the floor where the gearstick passes through, of me just checking out that the front shiftrod bolt was nice and loose before we wrestled the fecker out.

portrait of the artist as a young grease-monkey


at this point, flushed with my success at getting the shiftrod out i thought ‘what the hell. let’s take the whole fecking linkage out!’ and i started measuring up the amount of hassle that would be involved in removing the horizontal crossbar which goes from the shiftrod lever across to the bottom of the gearstick [not pictured in the diagram above. i presume it’s an addition for RHD versions of the LT, where the gearlever is on the opposite side of the gearbox to the LHD model].

of course, no sooner had i decided to go for it than a huge black cloud poised itself happily overhead and i felt the joyous first drops that marked the end of my brief sunny interlude. sadly, i wiped my tools down, packed them away and retired once more to the pavilion, feeling that, brief tho’ my innings had been today, i had at least got some useful work done.

obviously ‘the mystery of the recalcitrant gearchange’ is going to be a tale of more than a few episodes.

hallelujah! - today i finally finished the painting of herman*

[*terms and conditions apply. other monotonous activities are available. further touchups may be necessary]


now, i dinnae want to encourage pedantry, but the quick-witted amongst you may have noticed that there’s a thin strip of white down the middle of the roof, which still wants painting. this strip bears mute testimony to the length [or shortness] of my arms combined with the feeble altitude achieved with my crappy, rickety B&Q stepladder and shall be taken care of by attaching a longer handle to a paintbrush - just as soon as this lot is dry.

but, as near as dammit, he’s finally all painted up.

ta-da!


so, let’s see how far we’ve come:

before and after


next job: sorting out the windscreen wipers. and then i can move onto the welding of the floor - after which the camper conversion proper begins!

try not to get over-excited here, but today’s thrilling installment is not about painting. nor is it about sandpapering!

just for a change the weather was slightly on the ‘moist’ side, so i decided to forgo paintbrush and sandpaper and instead seek alternative entertainment in that other never-ending quest; the search for the source of the air bubbles in herman’s fuel system.

after crawling up and down the length of the van, tightening every hoseclip and joint i could find in both fuel lines [delivery and return] i noticed that the length of pipe which leads from the diesel plugs back to the fuel filter looked a bit worn [this return pipe feeds excess fuel from the injectors back into the fuel system]. it’s not a crucial vaccuum-tight part of the fuel system, but i decided to sort it out anyway.

as luck would have it, i found in my stash of ‘things which might come in handy’ a section of plastic tube which was the same diameter as the dodgy one. unfortunately it was a bit too short. undaunted, i had another hoke around in my hoard of crap useful stuff and found - of all things - the nozzle pipe from a footpump [footpump itself long since departed to the great junkyard in the sky]. the footpump nozzle was the same diameter as the tubing and at the end where it screwed into the pump was a nice wee metal connecter which was just the right size to screw into the old return pipe tubing at one end and push into the new tubing at the other.

so i cut the worn section off the old tubing, spliced on a section of the new tubing with my new found connector and the job was a good ‘un. it also gives me the added advantage that, with the new pipe being transparent, i can now monitor the fuel [and bubbles!] which are feeding back into the system from the injectors - as well as being able to watch the bubbles feeding into the injector pump from the fuel filter.

new tube fitted to the injector plug return outlet


a handy find. this connector [extracted from an old footpump nozzle] is just the right size to fit the new tube on one end and the old tube on the oher


job’s a good ‘un! - worn section of old tube trimmed back and new section of tube spliced in, using the abovepictured connector

i’d been planning to get straight into painting the last white side of herman this morning, but when i had a closer look at the panel running along the bottom, which had been previously [and badly] painted blue, i decided that - just to be on the safe side - i’d strip that down as well. after my experiences with the roof, i didnae fancy painting straight on top of some other paint of dubious origin.

as it turned out, it was a good job i did. i’d always been a bit suspicious of that solitary blue panel and - sure enough - when i stripped the paint off, i found that it had been hiding a multitude of sins; most of them rust coloured.

blue side panel, partially stripped down


hmmm… so that’s why someone decided to paint this panel blue


the rust on the horizontal seams is actually the outward manifestation of the rust along the edge of the floor inside. funnily enough, although it seems obvious when you look inside the van, i’d not realised up til now that the floor level was quite so high up the side of the van. that horizontal band of rust is rusted right through, but is earmarked for cutting out anyway, when i do the floor. the vertical seams should be OK without welding. they’re nowhere near as bad and havenae rotted through.

this is actually floor level - there’s a long hole in the floor up against the inside of this wall


in an ideal world, after stripping down that side panel and uncovering the rust, i’d have left off the painting until i’d cut it out and welded up those seams. that’s in an ideal world, where i’d have a large workshop, with wall-to-wall tool racks. but in the real world, herman has to stand outside in the interminable manchester drizzle, so i had to paint the side up anyway to stop it getting any worse. of course this means i’ll have to strip it down again, when i start on the welding jobs and then paint it up once more afterwards - but such is life when you choose to practise car maintenance in the great british outdoors.

i gave the seams a good going over with a wire brush attachment on my drill to get the rust and dead metal off - and then gave them an extra thick dollop of hammerite…


…then i painted up the rest of the side. the seams will have to be stripped down again when i weld the floor, but at least this should stop the ‘tin worm’ getting any worse in the meantime.


if you’re wondering why the strange harlequin pattern on the side, it’s because i found an area in the middle which hadnae been sanded down yet, so i left that - and then i ran out of hammerite halfway up the front door.

well…. ‘of the van’ actually.

i sprang eagerly from my foetid pit this morning and ran outside in one of those wee willy winkie nightgowns, with an ebenezer scrooge nightcap on my head, clutching a candle in a candlestick - to see whether herman’s roof had accepted its latest coat of paint or not. to my delight and delectation it had done. so, at last it was time to turn our attention to the previously neglected passenger’s side of the van.

i turned herman round so we could get at the other side and then, while i heat-gunned the old paint of the roof [as a pre-emptive measure], marie roughened up the side panels with sandpaper. then we gave him a good rub down with white spirit.

the problem with working outside at this time of year is that it starts going dark about three or four o’clock, so by the time we’d finished sanding him down, it was time to call it a day and head back to HQ for some stuffed peppers and wine.

me and mazza - looking over the moon at the prospect of another afternoon spent sandpapering and paint scraping


the white side before our afternoon’s hard work


the white side after our afternoon’s hard work [what a difference!]

yes. i know what you’re thinking:

‘he’s already used that ‘roofhog day’ title before. he must be completely bereft of ideas!’

au contraire - dear reader. nothing could be further from the truth. the fact that i’ve used this title before and have nevertheless chosen to use it again is actually an indication of my collossal wit - a wit that works on so many levels it may be mistaken, by the ill-educated, for a lack of originality and imagination.

now, speaking of originality, gather round and i’ll tell you an interesting story about ‘sanding and painting’. eyelid matchsticks will be handed out in a moment and my hired heavies will be on standby with cattle prods at the ready - for anyone careless enough to fall asleep at the exciting bits.

unfortunately for aficionados of thrills and excitement, the past couple of days have been spent mostly… wait for it… yes, you got it; ‘scrubbing and painting’.

just before retiring to the pavilion on tuesday [yesterday] i took off herman’s grill and headlamp surrounds and - after sanding the odd bit of rust i found lurking underneath - i painted his fizzer for him. again, using the slightly diluted hammerite seems a lot better than the fully gloopy stuff out of the tin and the finish was a lot less treacle-esque.

beginning the front of the roof


various bits of ‘face furniture’ removed, ready for painting


low light stopped play

well, after a weekend spent valiantly trying to drown my cold germs in alcohol, i thought i’d better get back to work on herman today. so it was out with the hammerite and the brushes again, as once more we endeavoured to get another couple of square feet covered before either rain, darkness or the prospect of a cheese, spam and pepper sauce butty drove us back to the house.

i nipped to B&Q [or ‘brian and quincey’s’ as we call it] to get some more hammerite thinners first, cos the paint has been running really badly as it dries and looking a right mess. i dunno if it’s because the cold weather is keeping the hammerite wet longer, thus giving it more time to run - or they’ve just ballsed up the recipe [i noticed it said ‘new rollable formula’ - or words to that effect, on the tin], but whatever the reason, a lot of the paintwork we’ve done already looks like someone has poured black treacle down the side of the van. so it’ll have to be sanded down a bit and given a second coat.

anyway, the thinned down hammerite seems to work a lot better; it dries faster, so does not get time to drip as badly. the down side of course is that it disnae cover as well either, so a second coat will be needed.

me and mazza painting away [mazza can only work outside if she’s got a brew to hand at all times]


it’s getting easier to envision how he’ll look when finished now [note the badly drippy paint on the side of the roof, which will have to be done again]


with that side completed, apart from a few edges and awkward bits round hinges and locks, i moved onto the prepping the front for painting. i removed herman’s bumper and number plate and gave his fizzer a good scrub down with sugar soap. while cleaning round the indicators i noticed they looked full of skank, so i undid them and found out that - for the second time in recent history - i was going to be called on to destroy a thriving ecosystem.

how the primitive lifeforms must have run screaming and praying for forgiveness to their orange flashing gods as soapy vengeance was wrought upon them!


before - mmm… swampy goodness!


after - sparkle city!


tune in next time for more exciting adventures - which will almost certainly involve soapy water and black hammerite!

no work on herman today [and possibly tomorrow] as i am ‘quoid lidderally’ at death’s door, with a stinking cold. however, next week i’m off work coz it’s half-term, so i should be able to put in a few good sessions and hopefully sort out those couple of niggling problems that i’ve been wrestiling with since i got him.

in the meantime i shall be studying VW LT35 wiring diagrams through an alcoholic haze which i have inflicted upon myself for purely medicinal reasons.

bottoms up!