with a bit of thumb-twiddling time on my hands, while i waited for my repair to the steering lock to cure, i decided i’d turn my attention to herman’s roof once more.

those of you with a memory exceeding that of a goldfish may recall that, at the end of the marathon painting sessions, herman was left with a white stripe down the centre of his roof - owing to the fact that i couldnae quite reach to the middle from either side, while painting it. i had hoped that the intervening weeks might have seen my arms achieve the necessary length, but i’ve had to resign myself to the fact that, at my age, i’m unlikely to undergo a late growth spurt. so it was on with the white coat and off to my underground laboratory

[yes. of course it has one of those machines out of the frankenstein films, with the two wires and a big spark moving up and down between them!].

after several hours of brain-wrenching research, during which i pushed back the frontiers of science, filled several blackboards with complicated equations and grew a really sticky-out-at-all-angles ‘professor’ hairstyle, i was finally ready to unveil my patented ‘distance-paint-o-tronic mark I’ - manufactured from finest quality plastic tubing, with the aid of my ever-useful turboflame.

the ‘distance-paint-o-tronic mark I’ - ideal for painting things far away [or around corners!]


armed with my new invention i made short work of filling in the blanks up the middle of herman’s roof.

the inventor puts the ‘distance-paint-o-tronic mark I’ through its paces


the collossal reach of the ‘distance-paint-o-tronic mark I’, when running at full power


while i was teetering at the top of my ladder, i noticed that the alien life-forms i had previously decimated, when first i set hand on the vast unchartered territory of herman’s roof, were starting to crawl forth from the primaeval slime and begin the process of evolution all over again. for the roof was covered with a thin grey layer of powdery dust, which looked like it was once again forming into round circles of lichen. just shows to go you - you cannae keep a good species down!

lichen: we’ll be back!


well, new life-forms notwithstanding, herman has finally got his new clothes on!

finished - at last!


and that’s about it for today.

after finishing herman’s roof, i got the oil-drenched foam lining of the engine bay cover out and squished a load of soapy water through that to dry and de-slime it a bit, coz i’m going to stick the engine bay cover back on tomorrow. then i packed away my bits’n’bobs and repaired upstairs to enjoy an export strength black irish beer, which i’ll not mention by name this time, as neither the vast sponsorship deal cheque, nor the case of free samples have arrived yet!

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!

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!

today i just did a bit of sugar soaping, sanding and painting. so nothing too interesting to report, apart from the fact that my wee paws were as numb as plums by the time i finished my allotted section and repaired to the relative warmth of the house.

me in action - captured by mazza from the safety of the flat


getting there slowly but surely - probably got another three times this much still to do tho’


incidentally, the battery i ordered last friday evening from alpha-batteries still hasnae come. i’ve obviously missed some subtlety in the use of the phrase ‘next day delivery’ on their website, as naively i thought it meant something along the lines that they would ‘deliver’ it on the ‘next day’. if it’s not here by the time i get home from work tomorrow, i’ll have to give the feckers a bell and see what they’re playing at.

today when i got home from work, i dragged marie away from the internet so we could make a start on the epic task of covering herman liberally in luvverly black hammerite. rather than try to paint the whole forth bridge in one go, we decided we’d do a section at a time, to try and keep monotony at bay. the thought of having to sand down an entire van that size is enough to send anyone flying from the room screaming.

so, we decided to start off with the rear doors. i removed the numberplate and some rubber stoppery type things and we got down to giving the doors a good going over with 240 grade wet-or-dry. terribly tedious, but as any good painter knows, preparation of surfaces is half the battle.

after we’d finished rubbing down the doors, we noticed that the ghost of the lettering was still visible across the top, mocking us. it seemed that even tho’ the letters had gone, the glue which originally welded them to the paintwork was still there, raised up and in the shape of the letters. i was minded to just leave it as it was and trust to the thick gloopiness of the hammerite to obliterate any last vestiges of the signwriting but, in the end i decided to take no chances, so we got a couple of bits of rag, soaked in hammerite thinners and managed to scrub the remnants of letter glue off with that.

sanding away like a beaver cheese


mazza the smurf, havin a break and a brew


with the boring prep out of the way, we could begin the comparatively ‘fun’ task of actually getting some painting done. with the two of us dolloping it on, it didnae take much more than about 45 mins to get both doors painted. looking at herman now from a narrow angle at the back, you can get the first hints of how he’s going to look when he’s completely ‘blacked out’. should be pretty cool, i think.

mazza back at work



so far, so good - only another 3 sides and the roof to go!



one downer today was that, just before we headed back up to the house after our painting session, i decided to turn the engine over, just to see if it would fire up. as i half expected, it didnae. unfortunately the half-dead car battery that came with the van is just too weedy to turn the engine over fast enough and for long enough to get him started. it died after a few seconds of turning the engine over. so that’s going to be more shelling out, as i’m going to have to add a good beefy heavy duty battery to my ever-growing shopping list.

let’s hope that a heftier battery will be all it takes. i’m still not 100% certain that there isn’t a leak in one of the fuel pipes somewhere, which could be allowing air into the system…. or of course, it could be that the glow plugs are on their way out… or the injectors… or all three. still, i’ll need to get a decent battery anyway, as i wouldnae trust the one in him at the minute as far as i could throw it. if he’s still a reluctant starter after that, then i’ll do some more detective work on the fuel supply side of things.

today, when i got home from my half day at work the sun was shining and the ground was dry [although still bitterly cold after the snows of the last couple of days] so me and marie went oot to start the tedious task of removing all the vinyl lettering from the side of herman.

the task was indeed onerous. in fact far more onerous than we’d expected. with one of us working with a hairdryer and the other a blowtorch [not held too close!] we managed to remove two or three of the big letters and a handful of small ones in about half an hour. the vinyl stuff the lettering is made from tears, cracks, crumbles, stretches and generally does anything it can to resist coming off the side of the van without a fight. so, with hands numb with the cold and a whole side and the panel above the backdoors to do, it was looking like it would take us at least a day or two to get it all off.

took us feckin’ ages to get this much done!


“sod it!” i thought and said to marie that we might as well just go to crappy B&Q and buy one of those hot air paint stripper guns to make the job easier. so off we went and bought the cheapest one they had; £19,99 and with the same spec as the £50 bosch one, apart from lacking a 50º setting, which it seems to me you’d only need if you were trying to dry your hair with it! we also nipped into the equally crappy halfords on the way home, where i picked up a 24mm socket for the steering wheel nut. when we got back we resumed our attack the accursed lettering once again.

me, brandishing the heat gun


marie brandishing the heat gun


the heat gun made all the difference and we got tore into the signwriting on the van with a vengeance and had all the side done in about a hour. at this point marie went indoors to start making the dinner while i got up on a chair and made short work of the lettering across the tops of the backdoors. that only took me about another half hour or so.

all nakeded up and ready for sanding


mañana if the rain gods spare us again we can start another tedious job; that of sanding herman down, ready to start painting.