For those who don’t know us this is LottyAnne a 1976 Devon conversion late bay. We bought her 7 yrs ago as a running wreck, but after a clean up and engine renovation she runs like a dream, but like most of these buses of age other work is needed, looks are deceiving!
Read about the front panel change in the last issue.
With all this done and 6hrs into the project we decided to cut away the passenger wheel arch.
No mean feat I can tell you, but from the pic you can see how much was rust. The new wheel arch was put into place and spot welded just to hold until we could get a better position to weld. Ie. Up on a ramp to seam weld up and over without showering ourselves in weld.
Day 2. Early start and straight to it! Checked all the areas welded from the previous day. All good and onto the assembly of all the ancillaries, lights, indicators bumpers dash top and dashboard. Believe it or not this is where the time was taken as new wiring was needed for a couple of items, a bit of fiddling about we managed to get everything back on and into place.
Yes I know some of you purists will not like the lights, but hey these vans are all individuals and have their own identity so this is mine and like marmite you’ll either love it or hate it!
With everything now in place, I noticed several of the dash lights were not working, having done all the usual checks, I had to remove the dash top again to find the main wiring loom to establish where I had gone wrong on the rewire. But patience is a virtue and after several hours managed to get to the root of the issues and got everything working as it should.
With still a few bits to do I’m going to take my time and work through them. The front was mainly done to head off any MOT issues that I was not aware of, plus I needed to stop the rainwater ingressing further into the front of the cab.
I will say the whole job has seen its ups and downs, as like many vans of this age the more you dig the more you find, but hopefully you hope you get through them all to have a decent solid van, but I fear I may never get to this as time and money will play a big factor in the renovation, and besides which I want to enjoy driving her as opposed to seeing it sat on the driving doing nothing.
If anyone is doing or about to do this work and want some pointers, help or general information at various points of the job, please feel free to drop me a message on our Facebook page and I’ll do my best to answer from what I’ve learnt doing it myself.
Now I’m just going to relax and take 5 as it’s been a hectic time getting her sorted, but looking forward to seeing some of you at the shows down south west way.
Cheers for reading, hope it was helpful !