carry on herman

July

2009

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!

May

2009

silicon enhancements

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.