If anyone has any questions about anything in particular please just ask.
It's been baltic in the big shed of late so things have been sluggish. After many months of work the rear doors for the body are pretty much done and mounted. Like a twat I was determined that it needed three hinges on each door for purely aesthetic reasons. They might look good but because everything is very stiff the three hinges have to be absolutely bang on in line. I got the nearside door right but the offside door wasn't which lead to a few days of swearing and cursing and depression to get it right.
The nearside door opens...
And so does the offside one. I'm going to bolt this shut because you never need to have both doors open and one is enough to try to control in the wind. It also makes things easier to make the draw bolts to lock the door if I am only locking one.
And when they shut they are pretty much bang on. The door close onto little steel to steel wedges so it takes the load off the hinges - more accurately takes the load off the corner posts - when the doors are closed.
And the shut lines are bob on too. I've never made something as big and heavy as this in wood before so I am dead chuffed with how it has panned out. It also means I haven't pissed several thousand pounds of wood up the wall on a complete balls up.
When the doors are open you can see the lovely lined interior just crying out for a caravan conversion. We won't do that because we might be sad but we aren't that much of a basket case. The two coffins are the additional water tanks which will have plywood lined boxes around them to keep everything looking pretty.
The tanks give us about 380 gallons of water in total so we should be able to get at least 70miles between fill ups and still have about 20 miles in reserve. It is easy finding water around town but when you go bigger distances it's a fair distance between hydrants.
Treating lorry drivers like scum is nowt new and storage space was always at a premium usually because any other space was taken up with coal or water or oil. Some waggons had rear mounted storage boxes for oil and tools and spares and clothes and food which were slung under the floor behind the rear mudguards. In one photo we found a DG6 was fitted with extra water tanks in the same position which was something I hadn't thought about.
This is one of the frames for the boxes which will be clad in steel face plywood and trimmed like the body. We will also use these as the mounting for the LED side/brake/indicator units so hopefully they won't be blindingly obvious.
This headboard has been a pain in the arse to get right. Some waggons had these as extra advertising space but they also let drivers throw tarpaulins on the roof to keep them out of the way. It's made in four pieces with bolted butt joints so they needed to be very tight to keep them looking good.
The curve of the headboard finally matches the curve of the ash bend which was a battle because the lad who made the headboard sections - we don't have a swager yet - didn't read out drawing right and missed out the 12 foot radius. With a bit of clever bracket placement it got tweaked into place. Now they both line up pretty well.
And from the front it all looks not too bad. Apprentices No1 through to 6 seem to all hate it with Apprentice No4 just making cat vomit retching noises when she sees it. The youth of today, eh?
Welding and grinding is always good in winter because it does a decent job of keeping you warm. This is the start of the spare wheel draw bolt assembly which is used to keep the spare wheel and its frame swung out the way. What you see here is the bracket from which the draw bolt will swing and this is bolted to the underside of the chassis leg. It obviously needs a fair bit of fettling before it looks like the casting it is meant to be.
And this is the draw bolt itself which will pass through the wheel mounting fame and wind it up out the way. This also needs a lot of fettling to make it more casting like.
Some people may think the threaded section looks familiar and that is because it is a scaffold screw jack. The thread I was looking for needed to be a bit crude and not only did it need to be a square thread but also it needed to be a bit sloppy so the thread didn't need to be dripping in grease to stop the nut binding. The spare wheel will almost never need to be taken down so a thread and nut like this will let us paint it and it still be useable.
The lugged nut that came with the leg had the lugs cut off and then turned down on a mandrel so it could be shrunk into a bigger nut that will be made to look more period correct.
And that is it for now. Hopefully the Combat heater will be finally plumbed in over the next week or so - it took a while to sort out another oil tank - so maybe enthusiasm will rise as the air temperature does.
