New Year Fireworks

As usual, when I get involved with electricity, there are plenty of them. Fireworks, that is, both from me and the things I touch! I don't like electrical stuff, and it certainly doesn't like me.

Four weeks of fun and games have resulted from my "successful" attempt to install a rear wash 'n wipe system. I say "successful" because the outcome of the work was As Intended in one sense, that is we can now see out of the back window without resorting to a sponge and bucket. In another way, I just caused myself a lot more problems.


You see, as I'd had to take the centre "MUD Stuff" console off to fit the W/Wipe switch, I thought I might as well sort out the already-installed-but-non-functioning switches so that they actually controlled something, tidy up the wiring so that the radio would actually fit into the space designed for it and add some more gauges. As I said in the previous post the latter "upgrade" is to provide a bit more information on what's going on in the engine department - coolant and oil temperatures and pressures - and an EGT gauge.

I need one of these before I can try out the boost pin I bought quite a while ago but haven't dared to fit until I could monitor the temperature of the gases going into the turbo. The extra power would be good, but not at the expense of a wrecked engine.

I also needed to fix the headlamp flasher switch, which would require dismantling some dashboard trim anyway.



That was the plan. While assembling all the necessary parts and waiting for the postman to arrive, I set about the headlamp flasher. Given the state of the switches and stalks on the steering column I planned to replace both the horn/flasher/indicator stalk and the wiper stalk on the other side since I'd had trouble with both systems recently. 

Having got the necessary bits I got the plastic trim off and set about removing the steering wheel. Or not, as it happened. Despite a lot of pulling and thumping with both fists and a mallet, the bloody thing wouldn't budge. Some types of Defender have a steering wheel that can be removed using a puller, but not me....after several hours over 3 days, lots of penetrating fluid and very little movement, I gave up before frustration led me to break something. Another reason to give up was that I worked out how the flasher switch worked and fixed it....perhaps I should've done that in the first place.

The focus isn't great, but the two bits of brass that make the connection had been stressed to a point that they didn't touch when the stalk was pulled. It took 2 seconds to sort it. It doesn't address the fact that both stalks and the switches on them are going to fail soon and that wheel is going to have to come off eventually.



With that job out of the way I set about butchering parts of our previous designs for dashboard upgrades. I dug out the DIN facia that'd originally come from the sale bin at Halfords and has already been through two iterations of interior redesign, the last as the mount for the CB radio prior to the Alu-Cab roof fit.

The old CB carrier with the bottom cut off. The gauge mount clips in, and offsets the dials towards the driver.

This will be the carrier for the new gauges and will sit over the hole otherwise used by the ashtray.

The wiring can be fed into the ashtray hole via the plastic grill underneath.

The shape was built up using card to make sure it would fit and to plan how the bends need to be made.
A bit of cutting and forming of some scrap aluminium sheet produced a pretty neat 3-gauge pod ....

....with a flat front face for the coolant warning light and test button and a nice flat top for use later on, perhaps. It might be a better place for the tripmeter, for instance.

 Bending ally can result in the metal cracking if it's too brittle. Annealing it can be a bit hit-and-miss but if you rub the bend point with soap and then heat it, when the soap turns brown, it's cooked...and nice and soft to bend.

Turning to the wiring, I wish now that I'd left well alone! The intention was to simplify the spaghetti and get things to work a little better. One example of this is the power to the reversing camera. Quite often the screen reverts to a "blue screen of nothing" when I deselect reverse gear. This stays on until the next time I reverse, when it might work normally, or stay an annoying bright blue postcard-sized distraction. I've been resolving this by disconnecting the jack plug power feed, but I thought that using one of the otherwise redundant dash panel switches would be better. I also needed to wire in the front work light, coolant alarm and lighting power for the new gauges.

To cut a long story short, I've gone through about 4 variations on the theme of "some things work but others now don't". I fix one problem and another appears. I would assume that this was as a result of what I'd just done so go back and reverse the action, only for it to have no result. Lots of head scratching, cursing and coffee later and I'd notice, for example, that a tag had become detached from a connector as I'd moved things around. The clock stopped working for this reason and had me mystified when the fuse was OK when I thought I'd heard a "crack" from Down There. It later turned out that I'd operated the wiper stalk while removing the dash binnacle (as well as disturbing the earth tag on the clock). Coincidentally the wipers were frozen to the screen and the almost inevitable movement of the stalk caused the fuse to blow but I made the wrong assumption... Further discussion and analysis isn't going to amuse anyone, certainly not me, so suffice to say that I've called a halt to any more fiddling with wiring before I set something alight. Some things now work better, others not at all, but the latter I can live with for the moment....

The revised dashboard now looks like this:

Once it arrives from China the EGT gauge will replace the altimeter, and that will move up one level. It's a very useful instrument for mountain navigation as well as giving us a weather forecast, so I want to keep it.

While I had the main dashboard binnacle out, I noticed the tracks in the dust where water had been getting in. A bit more dismantling of trim panels revealed a worrying sight....

After a bit of probing around I think there are three possible sources of the problem. One is the seal around the ventilation flap and the others are either the rubber seal under the windscreen and/or the new windscreen seal itself, which would be a bit annoying. The seal under the windscreen I reinforced with mastic sealant a while ago so other than putting a little more of this under the more difficult-to-reach spots, I think that's all I can do. The windscreen seal is certainly suspect but it's been so cold while I've been working it's difficult to know whether the moisture on the inside of the seal is coming from outside or is condensation from the inside. It needs to get a bit warmer to be sure, so while we're waiting for Spring, I had a look at the vent flap.
I got the new seals for these some time ago and had added yet another job to the "to do" list for warmer weather. To get this off and repair the seal requires the removal of 2 hinge pins and 2 screws from the operating mechanism on the back of the flap.

The first is easy, the second is a right b*stard of a job, particularly if you have to do it while kneeling on the bonnet in 2 inches of slushy ice and only remotely possible if you can get the flap to open completely.....

Now, you might think that the mechanism for doing this would be engineered in the usual Landrover fashion - solid and a bit overdone - so I was surprised to find that the reason I haven't been able to get the flap to open fully was down to the operating arm being made of tinfoil. Or something equally flimsy. Once the swivel pin on the mounting bracket had begun to corrode it made it more difficult to get this little arm to do its job and eventually it bent. With even less movement now available, things corroded even more, producing even less movement, then yet more corrosion on parts that weren't moving...yawn...I guess you get the picture. If not, here's one I took earlier:

The state of the seal is pretty clear, as is the siezed pivot point on the hinge. I've already straightened the actuator arm but it still has a bit of a kink in it.

Once I'd got it off, cleaning off the old and sodden seal wasn't difficult with a bit of elbow grease and thinners, and the new one is self-adhesive so went on equally easily. More difficult was straightening the bits of bent tin that make up the operating thing, but a good soak in penetrant helped. Unfortunately by straightening them up, the two parts of the arm's hinge now didn't line up with the screw holes in the back of the flap. An hour's fiddling frustration followed as I bent everything out of proper shape to get the screws in, then bent it back again to get it to work. Now, though, when I "open" the flap, something akin to ventilation might actually occur. It got a fresh coat of paint and some grease on the hinge pins too.

Then I had a poke around, literally, to see what damage this water leak has done. The metal behind the top of the bulkhead was weeping brown droplets through pinholes in a couple of places, and a probe opened up several larger holes. This is Bad News. Defender bulkheads are notorious for rotting at this point and the only real fix if not caught in time is a new one - the whole bulkhead, that is, not the cosmetic cover-up panel that many go for. I used a boroscope to look inside and it wasn't promising, so took a 20mm hole cutter and opened it up a bit....

After using a magnet and air gun to clean out the cavity, things aren't quite as bad as I'd thought. Small areas of the internal skin are weak but the external skin - the bit that really matters - is solid, if a bit flaky. I used the air gun to blow-dry everything, squirted a liberal dose of Kurust converter in and left it to dry again. The next step was to spray as much as I could get at with cold galvaniser and I followed this with a liberal dose of Waxoyl. I'll leave the hole open for ventilation , closed by a rubber blanking plug with a few holes in it. Can't think of anything more I can do now except to try to stop the water getting in and provide some ventilation in case it does. This might mean trying to add some sealant to the bottom of the windscreen, either under the rubber or over it, but I'd prefer it all to be dry before I do that, but the sub-zero temperature and lying snow isn't helping me achieve that happy situation....

Brickbatts and Bouquets - the Best and Worst of 2018.

The Best and Worst....? That's the title of this post, but having given it some thought it probably isn't the best way to begin the New Year - moaning about poor service from mail order suppliers, I mean. 

 

However, it is worth lavishing some praise on those who've done what I'd expect them to do, though:

Yes, the suppliers of the troublesome Wallas hob. I'm not giving anything away by mentioning their name at last since there's only one place in the UK that supply the kit. Brett, the chap I dealt with, was on the case straight away, arranged a Return-to-Base repair and had the hob back to me within a week. All this at the company's expense. Well "so it should be", you might say, but in the world of commerce this no-nonsense Let's-Get-On-With-It response isn't exactly common and very reassuring when it happens. While it was a pity that it was U/SOOTB (UnServiceable Out Of The Box), mechanical things do break so it was good to find that the people who sell them stand by their promises and sort any problems out.


FloatYourBoat, the new eBay name for JayWolfe marine chandlers.

A satisfyingly quick response to my report of a damaged-in-transit product. Not their fault that it takes a week to get anything from Anywhere South of the ISO-Carriage Charge Line...


DK Salvage- the dealer who replaced the U/SOOTB Landrover jack that I bought on-line. No quibbles, they just sent another one, tested and working.

Then there's the star of the show (or year)....

Larry presents the Fruits of his Labours before going home for breakfast.

Larry Butterworth of LVB OffRoad in Doncaster. Fitted the AluCab roof....you can read the previous posts on this, but enough to say that he and his team did a sterling job, when he said they would, at the price he agreed and delivered on time despite working all night. Top service!

I had high hopes for the pocket-sized jump start pack - see the previous post. Disappointed, it went back to them and I was expecting a lengthy period of debate over what was wrong with it. See below. Not so; I had a refund probably within minutes of the unit arriving back with them.

                   A Happy Customer, will use them all again.


That's the bouquets handed out. I think I'll forget about the brickbatts...and the people who deserve them. Anyone who's interested can find out who I'm talking about by reading the previous rants. Waste of time commenting further; nothing's going to change.


And now, onto more interesting things. Top of the list was the fix for the heater blower. As predicted, the bodge repair of a few weeks ago didn't last more than a few days, so I pulled it all apart again. Although I have some spare connectors they are a right pain to assemble, even on the bench, and I had no intention of taking the loom out to do that. Trying to do it outside in the rain and wind on the wing top wasn't going to work either, so I just cut them off and remade the connections with standard M/F spades and some heat shrink. Since I shouldn't (Hah! I bet I'll regret that) need to remove it again, the fix was easy, it works again and should stay that way.

The new side locker is in. This goes in the space freed up by the removal of the wing water tank, which we've now sold to a chap in Belgium. There are 2 commercial options on the market that are specifically for the Defender , but neither would fit into the space we have available now that the Wallas pipework is under the wing as well as the waste water tank. They're also bloody pricey for a metal box.

A bit of careful measuring is needed to make sure the wrong bits of skin aren't cut, but other than that it's a simple job and makes useful extra storage space. We used a "slot cutter" from Lidl to do the job, and it worked like a dream.

 The hole was marked out using a template, which allowed for accurate positioning to avoid the ribs and flanges inside the wing. With the little "nicks" filed around the edge to accommodate the rivets in the box, it fits perfectly. There's enough space to carry a gas bottle, recovery kit or anything else that should be kept handy and accessible from outside. The box is waterproof and sturdy enough to resist all but an attack with an axe. There's also some useful space behind it, between the box and the chassis rail, which we'll make use of somehow. I considered making the box a little deeper to take up this space but it would've compromised the waterproof qualities. The sides of the box aren't completely true and flat and potentially hard to seal effectively.

The latches are lockable. We mounted this the opposite way up from its larger brother on the other side as things have a tendency to come loose and jam the locks if they're at the bottom. I'll probably re-arrange the other locker eventually.

Another bit of useful storage hangs off the back door.

This is our cheap version of the popular and expensive "Trasharoo". It cost nothing as it was a bag from a discarded shopping trolley. Now past its best we replaced it with another from a charity shop for a tenner. 

This one came with the frame and wheels which we intended to remove, but it fits the spare wheel perfectly, provides a stable mounting and, removed, gives us the ability to go shopping without having to carry heavy stuff like 5 litre water bottles all over town.

OK, so it's not a particularly "gnarly" colour, it isn't made of heavy-duty ripstop nylon and canvas, and it isn't some kind of camouflage colour, but at the price it isn't a bad alternative.

It also does away with the present method of attachment - the spare wheel cover - which just gets in the way of a wheel change, particularly when it's windy. The last time we did one in Morocco the cover, plus bag full of rubbish, took off across the desert like a frisbee....

A quick blast of black paint and bungee straps and we have something less garish and quickly removeable for those moments of retail therapy or gash ditching, as the Navy say...

The "new" jack was replaced with one that works, as I said, which left me with the broken one to dispose of. Never inclined to just dump anything in the bin, I put some heat on the end of the plunger and got the cradle off. This was then welded to a length of steel tube....

...not the prettiest welding in the world, but it works and I tested it with a hammer to be sure it wouldn't fall apart. With the tube cut to a decent length...

...it fitted over the ram of my old jack. 

Since this actually has about 5cm more "reach" than the Landrover item and is rated to 5 tonnes, guess which one I'll be carrying? Does anyone want to buy a genuine Landy jack, now surplus to requirements?


  The re-shaping of the "office" has begun since the headlamp flasher stopped working a week or so back. I reckoned that as I was now forced to start working on electrics again, I might as well do several jobs at once given that they'd probably all need me to take the dashboard apart. What joy!

We made a decision to provide some means of checking the engine oil pressure and temperature, and the coolant level. I didn't know it, but the oil pressure light on the dash doesn't come on until the pressure is almost zero, which is a Bad Thing, in my opinion. we need some advance warning of this kind of problem. As for the coolant, this is achieved by this little kit:

 Basically it's a float switch, buzzer, LED light and a Press-to-Test switch to give you the nice Warm an' Fuzzy feeling that it's actually working. It was dead simple to install, even for an electrical idiot like me, and removes the worry of loosing coolant and wrecking the cylinder head.

The shiny copper tube in the background is for the new oil pressure gauge

 
Having recently dismantled the thermostat housing it was clear that if all the coolant drained away, the temperature gauge in the dashboard would still read, but air temperature, not water. Not good, since the only indication I might have of a hole in the radiator or plumbing would be rising temperatures on that gauge. The light and PTT will go into the new instrument binnacle on the dash.

Now, a product review:

The Tacklife portable jump start pack. It may be that I got yet another U/SOOTB thing, but it didn't perform as advertised. This unit is supposed to provide enough power to start a 6.5 litre diesel engine with a flat battery. It doesn't. In fact, with the 300Tdi engine rated at less than 3 litres, the lack of ability to get it going was "disappointing". It might be that the boost selection wasn't working as it should, but I don't care. I need this thing to work under conditions where 1. the main battery needs some help (cold camping) and 2. when I don't have the spare juice in the aux battery bank to give me that extra "oomph" which, normally, I get by linking the main and aux batteries together. This might be the case if we were to camp in one place for several days in Arctic conditions- cold, not much daylight, negligible solar input, lots of need for lighting etc. In other words, the Scottish Highlands for 9 months of the bloody year. 
Oh, and the natty carrying case isn't big enough for everything that's supplied with it. The zip failed the first time we used it....A pity, 'cos it had such promise...👎

The construction of the new dashboard will have to wait until next time as I'm still waiting for some of the components to arrive, so to finish...I've had a Facebook Experience.😠

Never a fan of this Devil's Spawn, I decided that if we wanted to stay in touch with modern comms, Social Media couldn't be ignored any longer. A few months ago I began linking this blog to Facebook and at the same time decided to break a promise to myself to keep my head well below the SM parapet...
So I joined some Groups, posted some stuff that I thought might be useful and tried to support others that had the same philosophy. One group in particular got my attention and interest. If you visit the site you'll see why. To get the full story here, you'll have to join it. You can have my place.

So, one night after reading about someone's attempts to do what I'd already worked on (the flap-down table/track carrier), I tried to share my idea via a link. The response was, you could say, rather "precious". Or bloody rude, abusive and foul-mouthed, and that from a so-called "moderator" of the group. I could've just let it go, but that's not my style.

There were half-a-dozen or so Snowflakes who couldn't cope with the effort to get some value from my suggestion so I responded:

  "Thanks for the comments...
...the blog that the link might’ve taken you to has been ongoing for years and includes all our DIY modifications made to two overland expedition vehicles....
My reason for doing this was not to “get hits and referrals to (my) blog.” I don’t make any money out of it and it isn’t an ego trip. It’s there to save people like me – us – making the same mistakes as we’ve made and maybe be a bit of use to someone. It appeals to our “make-do-and-mend” outlook and promotes self-reliance and initiative, not to mention an element of recycling and re-purposing which is apparently becoming popular nowadays.

.... publicising our failures as well as our successes seemed like a Good Thing for other people like us. Save them time, frustration…and expense – theirs, at ours.

Some folk have located our blog from the corrupted link that appeared. I’ve PM’d others who expressed an interest. Good for you, guys. A pity that those who moaned about it and used such abusive language didn’t make the same effort....
Admin has “removed the post as it led to a pointless log in”, not because of the unpleasant and plainly arrogant comments that arose from it (from Mr Woodier). Message received. I’ll continue with the blog, but not the links." 

I've edited my original riposte to make it a little clearer. So, that Group has lost my support because I don't need the grief the Moderators and their mates gave me. A pity, it had such promise...and my suspicions about some people who use social media have unfortunately been confirmed.

I normally don't give free advice, but I'll break that rule too:

Mr Woodier, don't post when you're pissed. Up or Off.

                                         Happy New Year.

'Tis the Season to Be Jolly.

Tra-La - Lala - La. Doesn't feel too wintry here at the moment, though, and certainly not very white...unlike the smiles that we hope we've helped to give the kids in Morocco. 

And Malawi. Since Sue retired in September we've had her surgery chair taking up space in the shed.

 Too good to throw away, we wanted to sell it but given our location just on the Wrong Side of the Arctic Circle, no-one was interested in collecting it, even though it was worth ten times what we were asking for it. A chance conversation with our dentist provided the solution, much as a similar conversation had generatd the idea for "toothpaste to Tan Tan" earlier in the year.
To cut a long story short, Sue's chair is now en-route to Africa under the control of these guys:

We were very happy to see it go, not for the space it was taking up but more because it was going somewhere it was going to be useful.

Back in the workshop, things were not all going according to plan. 

1. Water supply. I had a long play about with the pump and decided, after dismantling everything related to it, that it was going to be more trouble than it was worth to rearrange plumbing etc to get the pump down to the same level as the bottom of the tank. It woud seem that the thing doesn't have the "suck" to draw water up through the filter so it's easier to remove it and use a submerged pump instead, like this:

 Not only did this work well, it's made more space under the sink for storage and maintenance, which is always a bonus.

2. The sink came in for some modification too, as I noted before that it didn't drain completely. Even mounting it at a slight angle wasn't going to solve the problem as it needed some kind of recess around the plughole to get all the water out. Having given this a bit of thought I did an experiment with a similar bit of plastic, the careful use of a hot air gun and a paint tin. This did the job and now the sink has the proper "dimple" around the drain. I thought I'd taken pictures of the process but they've gone Walkabout, so maybe these will appear in due course.

3. I'd congratulated myself a few weeks ago for overhauling the heater system and getting everything sorted for winter. Tempted fate a bit, there, I'm afraid. Not only was the air now coming out of the vents with some force again -a good thing - it wasn't exactly hot. In fact it was barely above body temperature for the first 15 minutes. Time to investigate the thermostat....

This bit of chewed-up plastic isn't normally found inside the thermostat housing. It's another Special Modification carried out by the Previous Owner. It's actually the remains of the top plug which has been broken off at some point in the distant past and left inside the housing. Since there isn't a lot of room in there and that which there is only just allows the thermostat to operate properly, I suspected that this bit of detritus might have affected matters a bit. I removed the old thermostat and, not surprisingly I suppose, the witness marks on the remains of the plastic plug matched the edge of the thermostat frame exactly. I think it got jammed under the frame and stopped the valve from closing. As it happened, when I tested it the thermostat was jammed open anyway so no wonder it was taking the coolant an age to warm up. With a new unit fitted, "hopefully that'll be the end of it"....I thought.

4. Wrongly. A few days later the fan stopped working on slow speed, and a few days after that stopped altogether. Fuse checked, nothing wrong. Ho Hum - yet more electrical fun to be had trying to track down the fault. I got back under the bonnet and luckily found the problem pretty quickly. While checking the connectivity to one of the funny little plugs the movement of the loom produced some reaction in the fan. A bit more pulling and twisting of the wires revealed a very iffy connection in the 3-pin plug. I pulled this apart to find 2 rather burnt connectors which I can repair but not with the wiring in place - there isn't enough space to work in for such a fiddly job. I found that by a bit of bodging and ty-wrapping I could get the connection to work, so that's how I've left it for now. A two-speed fan again, though for how long?

5. I had a thought about the heater control as well - the hot/cold air selector, that is. Any "slack" in the mechanism would lead to cold air leaking past when "full hot" was selected. I loosened the pinch bolt on the arm, pulled it hard over to the hot position and re-tightened the bolt. I gained about 15mm of travel in the process, which must improve the heat output....mustn't  it?


6. More mail-order fun. I bought a proper Landrover bottle jack - the one with the proper "horns" on the top - from a salvage yard which arrived as planned but a bit dusty.

In fact it was full of crud and cobwebs so hadn't been tested before posting...and it didn't work. I've done my best with it, of course, but the seal's gone inside and it won't pump.

  
7. The same day the new side locker arrived. 

Great, I thought, an easy job for the holidays. But no. Unpacking the box I found that somebody had been using the parcel as a seat while they ate their sandwiches. 

Not designed for some lard-arsed Hermes bloke to do this, it'd collapsed on one side and popped the rivets. Another mail-order disappointment. At least the company that sent it reacted quickly to my complaint but, of course, the last post had gone and it was a Friday, so I wasn't going to see the replacement "until Tuesday next week". Make that Thursday, actually. So, what with the wiper motor, the jack, the side locker...not scoring well with long-distance purchasing at the moment, not to mention the non-Landrover related stuff that Hermes have delivered, got a signature for etc etc...but not from the person it was addressed to, ie me.😠

Given nothing better to do, I started work on the side rack for the sand plates and fitted the jerrycan rack. The latter needed a bit of inventive thought since the original position just aft of the window relied on the gutter for support, and now that's gone with the old roof, I don't think the Alu-cab replacement is really up to the job of taking the weight of 20 litres of diesel at 3g+ as we hit the bumps. A few little accessories for the cargo rails has sorted it, though.

These work in the same way as the ones I designed for the seat mountings inside before I realised these were commercially available. The "proper ones" fit better than mine and have a load spreader, so they'll take the weight of the fuel can if it's hung off the tracks.

The rack for the sand plates is formed from 2 strap hinges, suitably bent to clear the tub cappings but able to hinge downwards. 

 









A bit of scrap aluminium plate will do as a table top for the time being until I can find something a bit longer which can be used as a flap-down surface outside the NAAFI flap, and it'll need some wires to hold it up or the hinges will bend. The space behind - presently packed out with a blue box lid -  will be used to store another folding table like we had before, but made of some kind of waterproof board, if I can find something suitable.

Two ratchet straps hold it all up, and all the screws are secured with Rivnuts, some of which were a real PITA to set. I think that, in future and despite their usefulness, they'll be the fixing of last resort due to the "hit-and-miss" nature of their grip. I had two of them spin when I ran the screws in but managed to save them by whacking the edges with a punch. This gave them enough "bite" to allow me to get the screws out and have another go at resetting them, but only one worked.
The sand plates are very light and strong, and have replaced the heavy, awkward and unpleasant-to-use waffle boards. Although I doubt the new plates have the bridging strength of the waffles, they are apparently rated to 10 tonnes so maybe I'll give 'em a bit of a test soon, just to see.

Inside, we've bought a folding seat to go onto the "library chair".

It's just the right width to fit the space and much more useful than the re-purposed lounger cushion we had before.Like the lounger, this also folds flat but can be set at all the angles in between without the need for a separate back support, so it'll provide a seat for relaxing, can be slid towards the table for eating and be laid flat for sleeping, if necessary.

The newly-discovered, by me that is, Facebook Marketplace has  provided 4 new tyres and some rather tatty modular steel wheels this week. The tyres are 235 BFGs - brand new, never fitted and half price!

The wheels needed sandblasting at our local outfit in Mosstodloch, and they put a coat of primer on for me as well for £25 a wheel. This is the first time I've had this type of work done - I normally spend a few weeks, wear out a few wire brushes and DIY it - but I think it's worth doing the job professionally this time. In fact as the wheels cost £15 each, by the time I've put more primer on and the topcoat and lacquer for the few quid I've saved I might as well have bought new ones.

Anyway, I've made another useful contact in the sandblaster and had some good tips on finishing the wheels so they won't rust as quickly in future, and maybe the final finish will be better.

These steels rust quite badly around the inner part of the rim,like the ones on at the moment:

The rust around the outer part of the rim is easy to remove, but not the stuff closer to the centre and around the dummy beadlockers.

Here I've been "striping" the areas where the sprayed primer won't have penetrated, as well as the sharp edges that always show rust more quickly..

...and a line of sealant in the gap ought to keep things cleaner for longer.

Finally, the Engel has a new coat:

Sue made these up - top cover, fridge and freezer - from the same material as we bought for the window insulation. They fit over the camping mat insulation we fitted previously and are held in place with velcro and thin bungee cord. I don't know how much difference having them on will make, but the insulation is now much better than the commercially available jackets which are marketed as mere covers "to protect the finish and enhance the resale value". A lot of money to spend on cosmetic protection, so a hell of a lot cheaper and better value to make than to buy.  
The Engel's being used, as I type this, as the overflow fridge for the Prosecco...Happy Christmas!