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!

it’s been a quiet couple of weeks on the herman front, because i’ve got to the stage now where obscure parts have to be sourced from obscure places.

today, a set of steering column controls that i bought over the phone off some bloke down in ‘zummer-zedd’ arrived - or, as mazza described it in a text she sent me to work, announcing their delivery - “you have a starcel. it looks like a viking drinking horn”.

i didnae have much time for wrestling wi herman, by the time i got home from work - especially coz it’s early kwondo at 7:00 on a wednesday - but i got the steering wheel off again and removed the old switches.

off with his steering wheel!


the old switches


when i tried to slot the new switches into place, they were catching on a bit of the steering lock casing that was sticking out [i’m sure i’ve mentioned before that the steering lock has been bust at some point in the past and repaired none too professionally with a giant jubilee clip - sigh! another thing to replace!]. anyway, i couldnae get the steering lock casing to play nicely and sit properly; the cracked bit kept sticking out at the side, so i removed it completely and found out why: the steering column casing itself is bent - obviously as a result of the aforementioned sometime busting of the steering lock.

i tried squeezing the column casing in a vice in attempt to ‘persuade’ it to return to its former circularity, but it kept springing back into its dented shape when i undid the vice. which kinda begs the question - “if it’s made of such springy steel, why the feck did it bend in the first place?”

stubbornly distorted steering column casing


anyway, as i said, only a short time to play today so, faced with new switches which didnae quite want to fit on [i didnae want to force them lest i bust them] and a steering column casing that seemed made of elastic memory metal, i decided to call it a day.

not the most productive of days today.

on the positive side, my new ‘next day delivery’ battery that i ordered four working days ago, finally turned up. so herman has at last got some decent amperage behind his ignition system. mind you, even with the new battery installed, the glowplugs were still only getting about 9volts through them when i turned on the ignition. so, sommit’s not quite right there.

out with the old. in with the new [batteries, that is]


what was a real pisser tho’ was that - far from leaping into life when cranked over on the new battery - herman refused to start. so it was the by now tediously familiar ‘up with the seats, off with the engine cover’ routine again to find out that, once more, the fuel line into the injector pump was full of air and the pump itself as dry as the proverbial nun’s chuff again. so i had to go through the tedious priming process again to get the fecker working.

it’s really weird - once he’s fired up he runs fine and the engine revs great [my trooper, when it’s had an air-leak in the fuel lines will start OK but refuses to rev at all] and the bubbles in the fuel line clear after about five mins. but if i leave him standing for a couple of days, it’ll be back to air bubble hell again and the system will need re-bleeding. it looks like a really slow leak, which is going to be an absolute bugger to track down. at least with a big leak, you can spot it fairly easily. i’ll have to leave the detective work to the weekend tho’, as i havenae time during the working week to be crawling round underneath in the muck, checking out fuel lines.

downhearted by these symptoms of fuel troubles, i turned my attention to one of the other niggling problems; that of the windscreen wipers not working.

an adaptor set had also come in the post today, which would allow the 24mm socket i’d mistakenly bought in 1/2” fitting, to fit onto my 3/8” socket set. said 24mm socket being needed to remove the steering wheel to get at the windscreen wiper switch. under the steering wheel, the switch housings were extremely filthy and a bit dodgy looking, so i separated them out into the main parts and had a hoke round with my circuit tester on the windscreen wiper section - to no avail. there was one lead feeding 12v into the switch assembly, but it didnae seem to be coming through anywhere inside and, with darkness about to fall, i dejectedly decided to call it a day and reassemble the steering column again.

steering column after removing wheel - skanky, or what?


sigh! - another one for the ‘when i’ve got more time’ department!