I’m Not a Pheasant Plucker

I figured I could take a short break from demolishing my new home to regale you with a tale about a brace of plump pheasants.

My daily commute is your typical 20 mile moron jam.  Most of the road is 70mph dual carriageway but you are lucky to average 40.  So on my journey home I usually take the path less trodden, rural country roads where it is possible to average (ahem) the 60mph National speed limit.  About a year ago I was blasting along in my Grande Punto, singing along with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers when I large pheasant trotted out into the road ahead of me.  I braked to give it a sporting chance but I wasn’t about to end up in a ditch for it, so the outcome was inevitable.  Of course he couldn’t just go quietly, dispatched swiftly by the bumper, he had to try and haul his fat ass off the ground and ended up going straight through the radiator grill. Pheasant 1 – FIAT 1

Fast forward two weeks and I’m barrelling along the same road in the wife’s 500, blissing out The Black Keys when my peripheral vision locked on to a hostile projectile coming in from 10 O’clock at an altitude of about 8 feet.  It was plump pheasant’s kinsman with revenge in his heart!

At the time it was actually comical.  The pheasant was so fat it looked like a football.  It actually flew like a football that had been chipped over the hedge, descending in a lazy parabolic arc until it hit the round plastic bumper on the nearside front of the 500.  It bounced off the bumper, I could swear it even made a “boing” noise and flew back over the hedge with exactly the same trajectory.

The 500 bumper popped back to shape with nothing but some crazing of the paint to show for the ordeal.  Unfortunately the lights didn’t fair as well with both the headlight and driving light being broken off their mountings.  So that’s Pheasant 2 – FIAT 2

Fast forward a year and again I’m Rolling along that road with Limp Bizkit, when the water level warning sounds and the temperature gauge goes off the clock.  I limped, formula 1 “lift and coast” style to a near by garden centre for a splash of water before limping home.

    

 

 

 

 

Upon investigation I found that right behind the impact point, on the inside of the radiator cowl was the cooling fan resistor, which had been broken from it’s mounting and become wedged between cowl and radiator cores.  It had bounced around in there until the spade like connectors had punctured the core.   Game, Set and Match Mr Pheasant.  Well played!

 

 

Lost My Cherry

The opportunity to bash some tin is still sadly elusive right now.  I have my builder starting in a couple of weeks to rebuild the parts of my new home which might fall down in the next strong wind and there is so much to do before he arrives!  Which is how I came to lose my cherry.

I have a steel storage shed for my amazing vintage lawn-mower (keep an eye out for that story soon!) which was right where the builders need to be working, so I planned to move it further down the garden.  I cleared a plot underneath the 50 foot cherry tree half way down the garden and got an early night as a summer squall came in, with the intention of moving the shed the next day.  Come the morning there were two quite sizeable branches laying across the base for the shed.

We have long known that the tree was not in the best of health and planned to remove it in the future, after we have planted an orchard at the bottom of the garden.  The birds and bees love the blossom and we wanted to make sure that they have a replacement habitat before they lost the old one.  So we decided to prune back the dead branches.

Like anyone who is in to car restoration, I’m kind of used to cutting out the rot and finding that it just goes on and on.  So I was dismayed but not surprised to find out a large portion of the tree was dead right back down the trunk.  The tree overhung the neighbours boundary and we soon realised how lucky we were that it had not already ended up in their garden shed.  So with great sadness we chased the rotten core all the way to the ground.

We wanted to utilise the stump and give something back to the wildlife, so I hollowed out a bowl and filled it with pebbles .  Bees often drown in open water but by putting a bed of pebbles in there they can drink from a safe platform.  If they do fall in they can easily make it back to safety.  So we might have lost our cherry but the Bee Bar is open for business.

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Pot of Gold

If you were to suggest to a Briton that there is anything more important than his morning cup of tea he would probably insist that it was caught and shot immediately.  We take our Tea very seriously, which is why back in the days when Britain was preceded by Great it was very popular to have your Maid wake you with a cup in the morning.  Following the post-war communist revolution in Britain it became impossible to find serving staff that knew their place, so they all had to be replaced by machines.  From the 1950’s to the 1970’s decent people throughout the commonwealth were raised from their slumber with a delicious pot of fresh tea and all was well in the world but alas it was not to last.  The fine companies who made these crucial machines were all bought out by Johnnie Foreigner who, in a frankly blatant attempt to deprive Britons of the elixir which provides us with our superhuman powers, ceased production and probably turned instead to making something ungodly like coffee machines.  So what is a civilised man to do?

The answer is simple, continue to use the British made machine from the 1960’s.  It’s probably got more life left in it than a new piece of Chinese made crap anyway!

The machine in question is a Goblin D25C from the 1960’s.  The original corded flex was severely perished and I thought it prudent to replace it with a modern corded flex but the original electric clock works perfectly.  Not surprising really because the build quality is stellar.  The switches suggest that somewhere there is Lancaster bomber that can’t open it’s bomb bay doors.  The entire clock mechanism is made of high quality Brass.  I dismantled it, cleaned the gears and bearings.  Then reassembled it with a drop of oil on each bearing surface.  Good for another 50 years then!

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Pulp Affliction

My life has not been my own for some time now and I’ve neglected the Scuderia and for that matter my photographic stock libraries.  I can’t imagine with everything I have going on right now that I will be back up to speed for a while either but I hope to have a little more time to put down a few words.

I haven’t been totally idle and I have a few interesting things to share but they are likely to be a little out of sequence.  One of my guilty pleasures is that I quite like Guy Ritchie movies, like “Lock Stock” and “Snatch”.  So let’s imagine these diverse and disparate snippets coming together in the end to create the story of the last year or so to date.  Hopefully by the time the plot comes back together I’ll be back up to full speed on the getaway car.

We’ll Call Him Doug.

The Scuderia has gained a new member this week. Not only do we have five cars and a camper van, we now have a Micro-Digger!

I’ve long hankered after a mini digger and Jules was happy to let me buy one at first.  Foolishly I mentioned that they were designed to fit through internal doors and knowing me too well she surmised that I would sit on it in the living room to watch TV and that every cup of tea she passed me thereafter would have to be placed in the extended bucket for me to “boom in”.  So that plan was vetoed.

Fast forward to about now and we have some compelling reasons to rethink our position.  Our new home and garden needs some work and much of it will involve digging.  I’ve suffered from chronic back pain for the last 25 years and I really don’t want to aggravate that.  So we considered mini-digger hire. It’s really not cheap for long periods of time, so I looked at some used ones.

Our new garden leads down to a river bank which is being washed away by the flow and I was quite keen to dig out the bank, sure it up with gabions, then put the soil and turf back over the top so you could never tell I was there.  Mini diggers weigh something like two tons…on a crumbling river bank…we can see where this is going to end and it’s in the river!

That’s when I saw “La Sauterelle”.  A Micro-Digger that weighs less than a Formula 1 car!  It will fit in the back of a combi van.  Obviously it’s not going to have the same capacity as it’s bigger cousin but I’m not going to use it commercially and it was the same price new as a used and abused mini digger.  Some rough calculations tell me that if I can get 50 days work out of it, it’s cost neutral against hiring one.  Then I can either sell it or sit on it in the living room whilst watching TV.

I ordered it on the Monday and it was assembled and dispatched in time for me to dig up a couple of quite sizeable tree stumps on the Saturday.  I can see Doug and I are going to be good mates!

Getting to Grips

One of the perennial problems of working alone is that you never have enough hands.  Something as simple as clamping two pieces of work can be a real frustration, especially if you’ve spent ages lining everything up and then when you reach for the Vise-Grips they aren’t set to the correct tension.  Do you let go of the work? Try to hold the grips under your arm to tweak the adjuster with your free hand?  Hold them by the adjuster and try to swirl them around? Invariably whatever you do you don’t get the tension right first time… You know the drill.

So when I popped into my local Mole store to pick up some cat food (I always have a trip down the tool isle) I found something quite interesting.  A set of self adjusting Mole Grips!

These Hanson brand grips seem well made and use a locking cam system to achieve the automatic adjustment. I don’t imagine for one minute they will achieve the same pressure as my Vise-Grips but if they will hold everything in place whilst you get some extra grips onto the work then they have to be worth a try.

I’ll let you know how we get on together over the coming months….

As Mark Twain would have said….

‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’.  I know I’ve been gone long enough for decomposition to have taken place but there must be another reason for the bad odour.

In fact there are a number of reasons that I’ve not been posting any work… or in fact doing any work.  The first is because that pesky day job has been getting in the way but nobody is in the least bit interested in that.  The second is that having spent quite a lot of time and money getting our home just the way we want it we’ve decided to move!  But that is only very slightly more interesting.  The third reason is where it should begin to get a bit more interesting for those of a mechanical bent (I could probably straighten that for you. No? OK).  After years of struggling along in my domestic garage I’ve bought a workshop. A proper commercial property big enough for a couple of cars.

The building was in a pretty poor state of repair and I’ve spent much of the year getting it in shape but I’m close to being able to recommence work on the Scuderia’s projects.  Watch this space…

Do A Little Jig

The final step in this merry dance was to attach the filler neck and tank supports in exactly the right places to fit the original mountings and have the filler neck pass precisely through the chassis outrigger I made in an earlier post. There is a fair bit of free space around the tank but it’s surprising how quickly a few millimetres here and there add up to components rubbing on things they shouldn’t touch.

The easiest way to replicate the layout of the original tank is to use it as a template, so I raided the scrap bin for bits of Dexian and odds and ends to make a jig. By bolting, clamping and welding together a ramshackled collection of scrap I was able to fix critical points in mid air and after removing the old tank, use those points to locate the new.

Jig VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The jig allowed me to position the filler neck and align the mountings on the end plate, holding them in place while I spot welded the mounting bracket and silicon bronze welded the the filler neck.  After adjusting for the movement caused by expansion and contraction I tacked the end plates into position in the skin with silicon bronze, then removed the tank from the jig to braze all the way around the joint.  Reposition and repeat for the other end.

With the tank closed up the only remaining construction task was to fit the breather pipe.  A piece of 15mm steel pipe which I bent to shape with my plumbing pipe bender, carefully positioned and brazed into the top of the tank.  I then closed the sender unit hole with a roughly made blanking plate ready to seal the inside of the tank with a commercial tank sealing kit.  Although there is obviously no rust inside my new tank it is important to protect the steel from the damaging effects of modern Bio-fuels.  The first stage of the sealing process is to use Metal Ready to passivate the inside surfaces and filling the tank with this also proved that there are no pinholes in my joints.  I bought a big enough kit to do the Spider tank too, so I’ll prepare that and seal them both at the same time…..But there is something else afoot right now!

Assembly

With the baffles completed the first stage of assembly was possible.  My plan was to form the shell around the baffles and tank ends leaving only part of the top open for access. Once everything was clamped in place I’d check the position of the sender unit then fold down the last section of skin and secure that too. Then I’d carefully remove one end and spot weld the skin to the baffle assembly, re-clamping the end when done before repeating the process from the other end of the tank.  I’d specifically designed the flanges of the baffles to be within reach of my spot welder arms.

Assembly VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The tank ends needed a bit more work before they could be fitted but this required the main body of the tank to be completed first.  That’s something I’ll cover in my next post.

Easily Baffled

A petrol tank, especially one that is flat and square like this needs baffles to prevent the fuel sloshing around inside.  You need to keep the fuel pick up pipe submerged or you’ll splutter to a halt every time you change direction and you don’t need the weight of a tank full of fuel with a mind of it’s own under you while you’re driving.  No, you  want the fuel to move to the pick-up pipe in an orderly fashion, thank you very much!

Baffles VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I made the transverse baffles using the same hammer-form I used for the ends.  Fortunately I didn’t need to form corners on these components as this is where the fuel will get past. The longitudinal baffles run about 1/4 of an inch from the skin, which will prevent surge but allow good flow to the pick up sump.

The whole assembly was dry fitted to check the position, then spot welded together to be fitted to the final assembly in one piece.

Skinnin’ Up

It’s all about the joints!  I wanted to make it in one to avoid having too many, so some careful planning was needed….

I’ve got pretty good spatial awareness but I have to confess to some surprise when I worked out how big a sheet of steel I would need to roll the outer skin of my Amigo tank in one piece.  There wasn’t a lot of spare from a 4 foot sheet.  I usually work alone but a sheet this size takes some handling, I’d have struggled if it weren’t for my lovely assistant Jules.

I planned the layout to ensure that the joint in the sheet would be on the uppermost surface, giving one less weld to potentially leak. The sender unit posed the greatest challenge, with it’s mounting ring in the top of the tank and a pick-up sump in the bottom.  These had to be positioned in the same location as the original tank to meet up with the connections and coincide exactly for the pick-up and fuel gauge to work correctly.  My old Dad always says “measure twice, cut once” but I must have measured about a dozen times before I committed!

Tank Skin VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

With everything marked out and double checked I had to create the two “blisters” in the skin.  This was what I made the Pixie’s Toilet Seat for in an earlier post.  I decided (wisely as it turns out) to run a test before attacking my pristine sheet of 20 Gauge Zintec and soon discovered that my air chisel would not generate enough stretch to form the blisters.  I needed to pre-stretch the area whilst still keeping my blisters accurately located so Thor and a beater bag were deployed.  I took great care not to influence the register marks that located the sheet in the hammer form.  After stretching, Jules and I smoothed the resultant walnuts in the wheeling machine.  Finally it was back to the hammer form and air hammer.

After forming the blisters I crudely rolled the skin over some steel tube, roughing out the bends to ensure they were located correctly.  Once I was happy that I wasn’t wasting my time to continue I punched out the aperture for the sender and checked the ring I’d made earlier fitted.  Looking good so far…

The Ends Justify The Means

The tanks ends were the next components to take shape.  They are identical in construction, geometrically mirroring each other, although one was destined to have a hole for the filler neck added at a later stage.

My hammer forms, made from tough plywood are identical.  I marked the most accurate half as the die but wasn’t sure if the plywood would withstand the rigours of making two pieces.  With two identical forms I had the option of switching to the second one if the first lost it’s crisp edges.  As it turns out I needn’t have worried as the die survived almost unscathed.  Just as well because I had further plans for it….

Tank Ends VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I learned an awful lot from these pieces.  I got nice crisp angles but couldn’t get anything like enough shrinkage on the corners hammering onto the plywood.  I tried heat but with only a blowtorch, was not successful.  I found a piece of Transit van leaf spring which was just the right radius for the corners and used a combination of tucks using my vise grip crimping tool and hammering onto the makeshift dolly to get it close. Then I switched to a technique that I’ve seen done by others, David Gardiner demonstrates it on his training DVD but I’d never been able to master it.  Practice makes perfect though and eventually it clicked!  The technique involves hammering obliquely on the edge of the turned flange to force the metal into itself.  The angle of the blows, weight and effort all require precision and this is something you have to learn with practice.  The first couple of corners I chased the spare metal back and forth but by the eighth corner I was a dab hand!

Sundry Details

With my house literally like a building site I decided to start with some of the small but critical parts of the build, rather than tackle the larger components that would necessitate me trying to work in the garden.

The sender unit mounting requires a reinforcing ring with attachments.  The original had captive studs but a 4mm thread stuck on top of a mud trap like the tank hasn’t got a snowballs chance in hell next time I need to remove it so I reversed the design and attached captive nuts to the tank and will use stainless socket head bolts to fit the sender.  There is a risk that fuel will seep through the threads but a drop of thread-lock should prevent this.  A spare piece of 1.6mm steel plate was duly sacrificed and using a combination of hole punch and plasma cutter the ring took shape.  To avoid distortion I TIG brazed the captive nuts in place.

Detail Pieces VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The next sundry item to form was the filler neck.  The original was an awkward size, at 50mm diameter it fell between the two sizes of exhaust pipe I happen to have in the oddments bin.  Nothing else for it but to roll my own.  Pythagoras helped me work out the dimensions of my sheet and I rolled it around some scrap tubing and zip-tied it into shape.  Following a buzz with the TIG I rolled a flange with my bead roller and Bob’s your live in lover.

Plan Of A Tank

The original tank is formed of two half-shells, resistance welded in a continuous bead around the perimeter of adjacent flanges.  There are a couple of simple baffles inside to prevent fuel surge along with a matching male and female indentation for the pick-up point and sender unit respectively.  I initially considered making a replica of this arrangement for my replacement but soon realised, as I visualised the construction process in my mind that this design would be difficult to realise with the tools I have available.  There were clearly design elements I must adopt but with something as critical as a petrol tank I couldn’t afford to take any chances, so I revised my design to allow me to form it without risk of compromise.  I also opted to increase the capacity of the tank by about a gallon by increasing it’s width. It’s not a very big tank and an extra 35 miles range, give or take is not to be sniffed at.

I opted to make the tank shell in 3 pieces; two end panels with a single skin wrapped around them rather like a barrel.  The baffles would be two panels of similar form to the ends joined by two transverse panels.  By assembling the baffles first the tanks skin would wrap around all of the vertical members and join at the top where the likelihood of leakage is lowest.  The end panels could be removed, granting access to secure the baffle system with spot welds (something the original “shell” design wouldn’t permit), then replaced and welded into place.

Hammerforms VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Using a standard sender/pick up unit was essential, so the two indentations were a necessity.  To create these I opted to use a Hammer form.  I formed an elaborate device I call The Pixie’s Toilet Seat (you’ll see why) from some scrap timber and a T-hinge which was ultimately destined to hold up my new garden gate.  No wastage here!  The pixie’s toilet seat allowed me to hold two concentric circles in register to each other.  By clamping steel sheet in between I could hammer a circular indentation with clearly defined inner and outer diameters.  A test run proved that quite a lot of pre-stretching was required, which I achieved with hammer and dolly and English wheel. The end panels and baffles were also created using a simple hammer form consisting of two pieces of scrap plywood.

Next installment…I start bashing tin!

Tanks A Lot

It’s that time of year again when I inevitably succumb to the heinous cocktail of germs that the new influx of students bring to my workplace.  I really cannot afford to lose this time, either at work or home but short of calling in Hans Blix I’m sure “Fresher’s Flu” will continue to be an occupational hazard until we can eradicate the common student…I mean cold!  So in between the fever/shivers/aching cycle I thought I’d take the opportunity to begin the saga of the Amigo petrol tank.

I’ve been concerned about the tank on the camper since we bought it.  There was always rusty water in the inline filter.  So having reached the point where I needed to weld the sill right next to the tank I figured it was the opportune moment to drop it down and refurbish it.  The Spider also has a steel tank which will need protecting from modern bio-fuels, so I bought a kit from Frost that was big enough for both tanks.

I dropped the tank down, drained and flushed it out with hot water.  Then I filled it with the Marine Clean industrial degreaser which did it’s job for a couple of hours and then was recovered and the residue rinsed out.  All was going well.

The next step was to fill the tank with rust remover.

Original Tank VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The kit comes with Metal Ready but I had a large quantity of DEOX-C mixed up and decided to use this initially.  It’s very impressive stuff.  I half filled the tank and left it on the bench to stew.  The following day there was a steadily growing puddle around the bench and the bottom of the tank looked like a Tetley’s Tea Bag.  Closer inspection revealed a number of places that had been soldered up in the past.

Now the tank sealant in the kit is claimed to repair small holes like these but to be honest, I’m not keen to give it the benefit of the doubt when I’m likely to be sitting inside this van with a gas cooker blazing away.  It had to be a new tank!

I’ll describe the design process in the next instalment.

Still AWOL

On the up-side I’m keeping alive some skills I’ve not used for a while.  On the downside it’s very frustrating that I’m not getting any work done at the Scuderia.  My petrol tank is assembled but I ran out of rods when brazing it up…I was 6” short!!  But for the time being I’m still on home improvement duty.

I’ve built another cabinet for the new utility room which turned out quite well I think.  It’s inspired by 1950’s and 60’s utility furniture larder cabinets, with a long broom cupboard and a multitude of cupboards and drawers.  I stopped short of a hinge down work surface because that’s just not as useful today as it would have been back then.

I still have a kitchen to refit, it’s coming along but there’s a couple more weeks of work there.  It doesn’t help that the day job is frantic at the minute too.  I’m a bit frazzled to be honest but I’ll start posting some of the build up to the tank soon, I promise.

Everything And The Kitchen Sink

I’m about 2/3rds of the way through making a new petrol tank for the camper.  I’ll post details about that when it’s finished but I’ve been comprehensively diverted from tin bashing projects by some home improvements.

We’ve just had an extension built that will be our new utility room and I’ve been painting and decorating and building a cabinet for the butlers sink to stand on.  I quite enjoy woodworking, the only trouble with wood is that it’s made out of wood.  It would be much better if they made wood out of steel.  If you cut wood in the wrong place you can’t weld it back on again!

The new work surfaces arrive next week, so hopefully after next weekend I can get back to bashing stuff. Of course, I’ll still have the kitchen to refit…….

Still Here…Honest

Amigo Archaeology

I’ve been so busy over the last few weeks I’ve not had a chance to blog.  My day job is frantic, I’ve had a jolly to Norway, which is nice…I’d move there tomorrow! And I’ve got the builders in to extend my house.  I’ve still found some time to get a bit done though.

I’ve done a bit of archaeology, digging out the remains of a door from what seems like centuries of filler build up!  There is little detail of the original panel so I had to take great care not to destroy the only evidence of what shape the door skin should be.  I think I’ve got a good pattern from it, we’ll soon see!

Fallen Arches

Progress has been steady over the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of other stuff on my plate. I’ve refurbished a bicycle for my 5 year old Nephew, work has been chaotic and we’re in building work limbo, awaiting the commencement of work on an extension but I’ve been plodding on with Pandora.

Front Arch VIEW SLIDE SHOW

The front wheel arches were badly bodged with filler. It was difficult to discern exactly what shape they were supposed to be, so rather than attempt to make them I ordered some from Italy.  They were NOT cheap but it was a supplier that I’d used before so I was reasonably confident that they would actually show up!  Most of these old stock panels have been on the shelf so long that they’re scratched and beginning to show signs of dry rust.  So they went straight into a bin of caustic which fetches the paint of in no time, then into a bin of Bilt Hamber Deox-C. The stuff rocks!  The black passivated panel then coated with Zinc galv paint which provides pretty good Long term protection (but Weld-Thru my arse!).

Behind the arch and under the tub is an intermediate panel that forms a box section with the new arch panel…or at least there should be, there wasn’t much left.  So with the new Tank Roll bead roller dies I recently purchased I tried my hand at making a new one, similar if not exactly matching what I thought the original looked like.  It was pretty successful for a first attempt and easily good enough.  The rearmost section of this panel is a little more complex in shape and I made this separately using an FSP.  I clamped the new arch to the new sill I made earlier and fitted the intermediary arch panel to the assembly.  The tank rolls were quite frankly obscenely expensive for Made in China crap but they’ve worked well.

I’ve started to strip all the underseal and paint from the tub and there are some repairs needed there.  I went nuts with the plasma cutter and spot weld cutter to strip off the old arch and badly repaired sections of floor and chassis and things are looking hopeful for reassembly before the builder arrives!  I’d desperately like to see some progress, as forever cutting more rust off it gets pretty demoralising.  Here’s hoping.

Pointless Pastimes

I spent Sunday making something I will never, ever use.  The jacking points on these old FIAT’s are like nipples on a man, (apart from proving that our “Creator” hates joggers) they serve no useful purpose.  The original jacks were rather like the old “monkey up a pole” affair but they had a winding handle at the top to drive a screw thread.  What invariably happened when you used them was that on all but the most even ground, the vehicle weight would shift and the top of the jack would dig into the bodywork about a foot above the jacking point.

Jacking Point VIEW SLIDE SHOW

The jacking points are useful in that they are a clear indication to tyre monkeys as to where they should jack and I also favour originality.  So I had to create new ones.  I got an excuse to play with the Plasma cutter too and that’s always fun.

I cut some 2mm plate and went to work with my vice bending brake.  It was heavy going, I even bent the handle on my vice but I got there.  The first one needed a tweak or two because it’s not easy getting dimensions off a piece or rust swollen scrap but it turned out pretty well.  After work this week I’ll set about the other three