Dick wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 12:29 pm
...re fitted the starter motor on my clio 1.5.. (4 times) that's a world of pain i never want to repeat...
Sounds like me with Skoda Estelle clutch release bearings. I've said that the last four were the last time I was ever doing it. The last one was the fifth! £2 part which takes five minutes itself to change. However you need to remove the engine to do it, and the original ones are made of cheese. It only takes a few hours to pull the engine in an Estelle, but it still grates having to go through all that palaver for the sake of two quid's worth of bearing. Probably have changed my last one now though as both of the last Estelles I've had have been nothing but headaches and I've just accepted that I'm never going to find one that's half as good a car as my first one was - and that even if I did parts availability is so much more of a headache than it was back in 2006 when I had Tango that it's just not likely to make sense.
A little package arrived for the Invacar this morning.
For those of you who don't know what you're looking at, that's a front hub assembly. That fits over the stub axle and wheel bearings and is what the brake drum and wheel are actually attached to.
I only actually need the studs from it...but buying the whole hub assembly seemed to be the only way of getting hold of any without having them custom machined (with the obvious difficulties involved in that given the current restrictions).
It's still looking like new despite sitting on a shelf for goodness knows how many years thanks to a thick wax coating. Not much I can do with this until the new wheel nuts arrive though. They have been dispatched though so hopefully should arrive tomorrow or Friday.
While digging around in the back of the garage for something totally unrelated I did find a good old stock set of front indicator lenses for it which look far better than the modern ones which came with the new lamp housings. Modern one is on the left in the photo below.
The apparent actual size difference is just an artefact because of how I was holding the camera.
The older style ones look far better on the car.
On the same note I do have a proper set of headlights on the way too. These modern ones are bugging me enough that they have to go. I will keep them around though as they actually work *really* well, so if/when I do the epic country-wide road trip I'll probably refit them for that. It's just a five minute job to swap them. These were floating around in the loft though and did just fine for testing.
Not really much else I can do here until we've got the new wheel nuts here though.
I then turned my attention to the van. Today's target was the hob - not least because I'm sick of tripping over it.
It did need a good clean though before I was going to handle it any more than I had to. The whole thing was sticky and just generally horrible.
Yes, I do have the missing knob, it's missing the spring clip which holds it on though so I've just left it in the box of random van parts for now.
After a good old scrub though it was looking much more presentable.
I've moved the missing knob to the grill position as I've yet to build the box below for it to sit in. Though being honest I'm less bothered about that as it's not something we're really likely to use often.
After a bit of carpentry it was in place.
I've got a couple of metal plates which I'll install underneath as a heat shield. Plus I've insulated everything even vaguely near to it with aluminium foil tape as well.
No it's not perfectly straight...but neither is the whole worktop relative to the wall of the van. This whole worktop will be coming out and being rebuilt at some point in the future as it's an utterly unsuitable material for use in a van and really isn't fitted well (it does slope back towards the offside wall as much as it looks like it does in the photo).
The fact that the kitchen layout has been completely changed is obvious by virtue of the cover opening the "wrong" way. Obviously the hob originally would have been recessed as well so this would have been flush with the rest of the work surface when closed.
Initially I thought that the hob might have originally been where the sink now is - but if that was the case the grill would have been totally inaccessible. Hmm.
We'll figure out things like that somewhere down the road though - for now it can live where it is, it's ugly but having a working hob will be worth that when we're using the van. Just having it functional again will be good enough for me for now. Should have it up and running tomorrow, just need to hook it back up at the manifold end and obviously leak check etc. Just ran out of daylight today.