akciddento

oh...

i've not written stuff for a bit, i've been meaning to but haven't had the time.
things have been very busy. i've got lots done on the bus. got it all running, serviced it, cleaned and fixed bits of the interior. fixed the dirver door and
yes it's true ! did the MOT prep. all that was needed was a new wiper blade and a new headlamp (the lhs one had a stone chip/hole and the reflector was all corroded.

anyhow. after much excitement i took the bus for an MOT this morning...
it was all a bit hectic. had to stop at halfords to get a new headlamp bulb. ran out of petrol. filled up with petrol. flattened battery. call king nathan to get jump start. won't start. loud bang like gunshot. give up. call aa. aa arrive. gets it to run .. on about 2 1/2 cylinders. water weeping form left hand side head/waterjacket seal. get towed home...
run through possibilities. strong suspicion of broken head stud..
therefore block is potential scrap.

bummer.

however. talk to marco on phone and run through some options. he can build me a new 2.1 fully balanced with cam and compression ratio of my choice etc etc etc in about 2 1/2 weeks.

the budget'll go out the window though..

let's hope i sell lots of t shirts at the weekend..

oh btw the new stickers arrived this morning. bus hooliganz. they're nice.

i packed up all the stamped addressed envelopes that people have sent asking for freebies. by way of apology for the delay i chucked a handful of mixed sweets into each of the bags, so if your stuff turns up in the post in the next few days and it's all stuck together i don't know anything about it...

one of the interetsing addresses on the envelopes is stefon at the chinook maintenance school ar RAF odiham...i'm hoping that stefon will send me a picture of one of the new bus hooliganz stickers on the back end of a chinook...
that would just about make my year.

someone also asked about the webshop.
yes the webshop is in dollars but you will be billed in pounds (there's nearly 2 dollars to the pound at the moment!)

yes international shipping is no problem
ordering from the uk and europe is no hassle at all and actually works out cheaper than me printing and sending from the uk...

hmmm.... now that's an idea!

ollie 'two buses, four sets of wheels' slammedbay came over for beer and backgammon and through the course of the evening we forumlated a devious plan...

talking about racing and enthusiasm (or lack of) and the future etc talk of backgammon at bugjam came into the conversation, beer and backgammon.

picture this if you can, monster backgammon in the camping field. anyone can play, winner stays on. the counters are wheels...

the onl;y entry criteria is that you need to bring your own set of wheels (fifteen of them) to play.

we worked out that ollie and i easily have a set each so that's alright. we also worked out that between us we have a set of porsche wheel monster backgammon counters.
however ollie is working on getting enough porsche wheels for his own set....

bugjam,
see you there...

more useless junk!

blagged a pair of rear bench seats on ebay and collected them...

the head rests are the right type to replace the missing ones from the back of the hightop and the beach seat might be useful in the back of the panel van...

we'll see...

little and large...

more twiddling and stuff...
bit of a frustrating delay, i removed and chopped and welded up the fractured steel waterpipe but with a combination of my bad welding and improper gas flow in the welded the weld is lumpy and porous. so after struggling to get it back in and connected up it leaks... it's strong but leaks. i may revert to the old method now that it wont flex and just cover it in epoxy..

i've also decide to junk the route i've been talking with the turbo manifold and modify a stock late manifold so that i can tuck the turbo away at one side of the engine bay...

unfortunately if i buy a new one and a new water pipe it'll blow the budget so i'm scrounging around trying to find a good second hand one...

doh.

i got out the throttle bodies as well as other bits to check stuff over and realised that the stock throttlebody is not sealed so i can't use it anyhow, i;ll have to use the larger saab turbo one... :)

what a shame ;)

i also pulled out the clocks to make up lists of the electrical stuff i need...

i also pulled out the laser diffuser i bought for the samba but never fitted. i've got a radar detector that does x, k, ka and all the other bands but it's no use with a laser gun. what the diffuser does is fire back laser information at the same frequency when it detects a laser gun and set off an audible alarm in the cab. the idea being that it give you a few seconds grace to 'modify' your driving in the event of being shot with a laser cash gun. when you are driving 'comfortably' you switch off the diffuser and let the gun register your more comfortable speed....

i also broke my socket breaker bar...
doh..

more stuff...

pinholes in the base of the inlet manifolds...

weld em up...

offer up the k-jet injectors to the manifolds...

then louie got on the case designing the collets and adapters that will need to be made to hold the injectors...

a bit like this...

louie got it done so quickly, i was amazed, it seems that he is learning things at school!
all the cad models are ready to be output to a cnc mill... :)

it's alive !

yes, it's true !

the race bus runs !
after the work yesterday chasing through the electrics and cleaning contacts and refitting the starter motor i left the battery on charge overnight. today the sun was shining and the smell of summer was in the air, day dreams of touring france ran through my head - long lazy days in shorts and barefeet -

get boiler suit on, clamber into the van, key in the ignition, turn the key expecting a click and the sickly slow chug of the starter motor labouring away and i was greeted with a deafening roar. the engine barely turned over, maybe one complete revolution before it fired ! i let it run for barely two seconds before shutting it off. i had to clambed out and sit down, suffering heart palpitations!

after a few minutes i thought that i must have imagined it but after starting it again and revving it a bit i was convinced. yes, it lives!

from the drivers seat of the panel van it's deafening. there are j tubes on number 1 and 3 exhaust ports and half a header on number two port but no muffler and nothing on number 4. from the drivers seat you can see the flames leaping out of the top of the merged header. nice....

the rest of the after noon was spent sending slightly incredulous text messages and checking over the planned layout of the injection and turbo system. louie came back back and spent a merry hour or so welding up the rest of the header i'd hacked together the day before...

it's coming together.

the engine has run for a total of almost a few minutes. (considering that its made from the parts of the original panel van 1.9 that hadn't run for a year or more and the 2.1l block i got from nick in scotland that hadn't run for maybe two years...) hopefully it'll last for a few minutes more....

oh trolley day

after a gloomy start to the day and too much paperwork and phone hassle...
(more and more of each day seems to be taken up with just trying to organise basic things and battling against bureaucracy run riot. even the simplest thing like ringing my phone company to query an item on a bill turns into a david and goliath battle where the phone company is a cross between goliath, an 'i speak your weight' machine and charles clark the home secretary telling me that he can't tell that he cant tell me what he's not allow to tell me becaus eotherwise i might know and be able to do something about it and that would mean that i would know what it was that he thought i had done...)
and this is just dealing with the phone company. dealing with, for instance, the Inland revenue (who are soon to be combined with HM customs and excise !!!! can there be a worse scenario for the population ? a government department with more powers than the police combined with an department with the record keeping acumen and accuracy of a bontempi 'play shop' till????????

anyhow... after doping the phones etc for a bit i advanced out into the yard, armed with my new replacement trolley jack (the previous one was stolen from the samba last year) purchased at halfwits, that purveyor of fine tools across the land, last evening i decided to shuffle the panel van across a bit. every time i jack it up it moves across a few centimeters (aha! did you see that, i deliberately stopped myself writing inches and put centimeters! wow, i feel more european already, (maybe i'll give up binge drinking and join my intellectual peers in the cafe this evening for a few glasses of wine and some petanque)...
the upshot of this shuffling is the gap to get the hightop wedge in and out of the yard is diminishing, to the point where the width of the hightop is diminishing as it gets rubbed and dinked and bumped between the wall and the racebus...

so i jack it up and snap...

the jack failed...
... i took it back to halfwits and got a surly refund with a sympathetic 'so what?' when i explained that it had nearly dropped a bus on me..

ah joy!

off to machine mart on the other side of town, just to check prices...

honest...

then back to the yard with a REAL trolley jack. the kind that takes two people to lift.. also got more bottles of argon. unfortunately the welder only takes little bottles of gas and i think it leaks a bit from the regulator... can you believe that these steel cannisters are disposable ? ie NOT recycled ???? it's all a bit wrong.

anyhow i got on with some work and started with the starter motor, removing cleanign etc... all seems fine but i think i need to chase back all the wiring for it... will attack that later..
onto the header for the turbo, using the t1 baja header from ebay i've got ports one, two and three to fit but number four is a problem, the exhaust port sits next to the water pump and on the 2.1 wasserboxer block there is an additional oilcooler curcuit underneath the base of the oilfilter. This makes it a few inches wider at this point and makes a constriction between the oil filter and the main waterpipe running from the water pump....

after lots of fitting and fettling and swearing i admit the inevitable conclusion that i must either re-plumb how the water system flows or re-engineer the header.

i decide to go for the header...

cut and turn and tack and cut and bend and hit and swear and .... relax..

it just isnt happening..
i start to hack up lumps of the old exhaust and it looks like something from bluepeter... only with grinders and welders...

(fun thing of the day, wait for one of the numerous yardie types/wannabe yardies to pull up in a badly modified Calibra and turn his badly put together stereo up in an effort to impress whoever is in the vacinity of the corner shop opposite and just fire up the grinder!
'yeman! aye! boom boom boom GRRZZZZZTTTZZZ, KRAAARKKKKK< ZUPPPPSSTTT GRZZZZZZZTZZZZZZ' fun for all the family

anyhow i finish the day with some progress, i have most ofthe leg on the header of rnumber four port sorted out and if i can get the motivation for it i might get it finished tomorrow. it's full of holes and looks like a mad concertina. i might not be able to fill all the holes but if not i have a pattern to bend up fresh steel from.

my thinking is that this might not be the best way to do it, that i might revisit it all later to tuck the turbo away neatly down by the oil filter but that can wait for another day...

progress...

thanks to the welder of jimby, the argon of halfords and the gloves of machinemart (in a rather attractive shade of turquoise (sp?)) and lots of tea and help from louie we got the welding going on the baja exhaust, all that needs doing (kinda) is to swipe the flanges off the end of the front left and back right (ie number 4 and number 1 exhaust ports) and turn them though 90 degres or so and weld them back on...

the last time i welded anything was years and years ago (and even then i wasn't any good) but after cleaning up some old exhaust and running a few practice beads up and down all looks good, good flow, good penetration and a nicely shaped continuous bead, no pits, no mess... not bad i think to myself...

i attack the first flange and spot it in place and then start seaming... then run out of wire.. off to halfords (doh! the bontempi of tool suppliers...) and another roll of wire (and soome more cutting disks while i'm at it...) and it all starts going a bit pete...

anyhow we knock that on the head and louie starts doing his first ever welding... the grin on his face when he realised what he could now make!

we welded happily into the twilight with the arc making crazy shadow up the trunks of the trees...
...quite magical ;)

brrrr.....

late night dash to the beach via flowers and cards for mothers..

take some fantastci pictures driving through the lanes...
b-stop long exposure of the headlights on the hedgerows, open shutter ofr twenty seconds... much of it is very beautiful albeit in a predictable way but some of the constructed panoramics are really exciting...
i need to go back and shoot lots more.

this is a rough sketch but i love it, it has that 'something' i love the shape, i love the colour (though i need to spend a lot more time doing the colour grading and processing - the assembly is a mess but it's a sketch...)

i'm happy..
some of the shots need the white line & cats eyes in the middle of the frame. this ,of course, neccessitates driving in the middle of the road for extended distances in the winding lanes on the periphery of dartmoor...
it's all a bit =eek!= but turns out rather nice!

a beer in a lovely bar in widemouth bay in north cornwall and then park up in the hightop overlooking the beach with the sound of the surf crashing....

...the temperature is below freezing but i'm sure there's at least 10 degrees of wind chill...

... i must get the pump on the eberspacher heater fixed..

it's good to be back at the beach again though. its what a bus is all about.

peace at last.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!

well, it's the first of march 2005 and this is entry number two hundred and sixty eight!

the weblog is now TWO years old (in a week or two but i thin kthat 1st march will be its official birthday from now on, like the queen but less wrinkly and more like a weblog than a human being...)

and what a strange two years it's been.... it seems like i've been tapping out this drivel forever. not really knowing (or comprehending for that matter) if people read or care... then every so often i meet someone and find out that they have read the blog, or read the blog regularly. i think that's the biggest freak out, finding that people come and read regularly...
...i almost feel that i need to write to make sure i don't disappoint them but then that would defeat the whole object of the exercise... i think ??

not too much news, V busy with a photographic project at the moment (more later) enjoying walking past a very clean looking hightop (note to self: must service hightop & do coolant change) and promising myself that i'll spend the weekend doing the panel van... new bushing in the gearbox and midifying the exhaust header for the turbo....
and i keep promising myself i'll go to the beach for the weekend, and i got a new studio at jamaic street studio which i'm very happy about. great view and FINALLY proper space that i can go and think withoit interruption and without feeling guilty about not doing the billion and one other things that clamour for my attention and demand my time...

The studio is great, the kitchen area mightbe the best part of it...
..i found myself cleaning the kitchen the other day, lost in a blissful rapture...

but that doesn't mean i'm a bad person, right ?

*oh btw did i mention that you can click on the images to make them popup bigger? that's technology for you!