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

chips away!

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.