Coachmen Leprechaun

Thanks Paul!

Hopefully he can help!

K

I'm more or less finished priming the cab now. The doors are fully primed and colour painted (on the inside only), but before I fit the doors to the cab for the last time, I need to paint the frame around the door opening as I won't be able to shoot paint on all of it after I have the doors fitted.



I also needed to fit and sort the panel gaps on the scuttle. It wasn't too bad, just needed some minor adjusting on the driver side:




Fitted the headlight buckets and indicator lamps. Fiddly job.


When I removed the door striker pins to get them out of the way during prep, I decided to wire brush them to remove the paint and rust, dip them in acid, and then zinc plate them:


With my favourite finish, yellow passivate:


Next weekend, I'll be fitting the doors and bonnet (or should I say hood ) and getting the door gaps right. If that doesn't take too long, I hope to fit the 1/4 glass, regulators and windows to the doors also.

I've been looking for ideas for the centre console.

I recently watched a custom car show on the telly, where the fabricator installed a very neat "media centre" that looked like it'd be perfect for my needs. A bulkhead mount that held an ipod mini. I think it'd fit in the space where the radio goes on the coachmen, but I'd need to measure the space available.

Here's the best bit...... as a screen saver I could put a photo of an old AM radio!!

Right now it's only a fanciful idea, not entirely supported by my budget, but who knows, maybe down the road...


I'd need an additional amplifier to get decent sounds from it through the speakers I suppose. And an interface to connect a rear view camera would be handy too.

It was around €75 including delivery.

Very handy for making those small, rusted parts look good again.

Fffffudge.....

I sprayed a little too much paint around the door openings! Resulting in lots of paint runs... A rookie mistake of not correctly adjusting the volume of spray from the paint gun before commencing.

Luckily there are no photo's of that mess!
(Well there are, but you sure as hell aint going to see them! )

I put the heat lamp on it for a while, but I'll still leave it dry for a couple of days before I can sand back the paint runs, so unfortunately, no doors fitted this weekend.


So... I got on with a few other bits...

This bonnet latching-pin was in bad shape. It was so badly rusted that I didn't think it'd be salvagable. But after I stripped off the paint & rust with a wire-wheel and then acid etched away any remaining traces of rust, I slowly began building up the pot-holed metal with my mig. Followed by an hour or so of grinding and polishing... I spent waaaay too much time on this, but I am pretty happy with the end result despite burning up time on it. I may paint the main body of it in black as I think I'm starting to go overboard with the zinc plating and don't want the refurb to look OTT with too many yellow passivated parts.


Windows...

Both of the original 1/4 windows were rusted badly:



The replacement doors I bought a couple of years ago had good 1/4 windows, just a little surface rust only. I'm not a fan of the tinted film that was on the donor windows, so I removed the tinting and cleaned the glass & bottom frame.

Removing the tinted film here:


surface rust treated and then re-painted:


It's the little things...

Roll on next weekend.......

I had a fairly productive weekend.

I sanded down the messed up paint from last weekend, repainted the door openings and I didn't fudge it up this time.

The original door handles from the camper weren't too bad, a little pitted, but the handles from the donor doors were better and had a nicer channel profile along the front.


I also dug out the chrome badges that fit on the wings. The chrome was (and still is) pitted, but I did what I could. Giving them a lick of black and red paint made a big difference. They're not perfect, but the'll do fine.

At a guess, I recon around 1000 hrs so far.

Based on 8-10hrs every second weekend, for 4'ish years.

Maybe I should have gotten the "Car SOS" crowd in to turn it around in 3-4 weeks like they always do?!!

I know I started out strong on the project putting +30 hrs per week into it, but I burned out quick and lost interest on occasion. It also had an impact on my health which wasn't cool. The pace I'm going at now is fun and suits my work/life schedule!

In recent weeks I picked up the pace of the project a bit, and I'm putting more hours into it than I have done in a long time. Simply because I really would like to get it on the road this summer.

But who knows, I may get fed up with it again and slow the pace down, I just don't know... It all depends on whether I'm enjoying it or not. But for now, it's full steam ahead!

Ah, I'm really just waiting patiently for the price of petrol to drop below €1 per litre again....

But yeah, I do feel a bit guilty when I'm in "off mode" and not updating the thread, nothing more disappointing than following a build thread and it goes quiet for ages. I follow a few other build threads myself and they are just the same as me. Years in the making...

Thanks Ally. That's amazing that the manufacturer didn't insulate it. Good advice.

I spent a couple of hours doing a small bit of demo on ours today. I decided to strip the paneling from the back wall, in the corner. Ours had the old "super itchy" fibreglass matting in between the wood battens... and it was soaked. So I'm glad I took the panelling off.



I didn't find any mould, but it smelled a bit funky AND some of the ends of the timber looked a bit ragged. I'll leave the heater and dehumidifer to do their thing for a few days and I'll have another look once the wood is 100% dry. I might be lucky to have caught it in time.

Iater on, I'll remove the rest of the cabinetry and ALL of the paneling on the rear wall, just to give everything a good inspection. I'll use an alternative insulation when I rebuild it though, probably some kingspan polystyrene sheets, cut to fit between the frames.

Well, I've lost a good portion of the weekend chasing leaks and drying things out, but I think it's worth doing it now, rather than leaving it to go longer and get worse...

Very little progress made on the camper this weekend.

Car:
I assumed it was only the 2 exhaust valves that were bent (from cylinder 3), and I bought two new ones during the week, but while I was lapping in the rest of the valves lastnight, I discovered two more very slightly bent valves on cylinder 4. So I'll have to order another two exhaut valve on monday morning. A pity as I was hoping to have my car for next weekend. Ah well....
The head of my car:


Camper:
As my father-in-law had given me the loan of his valve spring compressor tool for the job on the car, I figured it'd be a good opportunity to build up the heads from the camper as well. I lapped those valves in a long time ago, but I didn't have the tool to compress the springs, until now
So that job got done today: First off I replaced the oil seals on the valves (little black things by the bottle of red engine assembly lube). The piece of heatshrink on the tops of the valve stem was only temporary to prevent damaging the seals when sliding the seals down over the valve stems.


Valve spring assembly built up. I also fitted new ARP rocker studs and edelbrock pushrod guides:

I had a pretty good weekend. I finally got the 1/4 windows, manual winder mechanism's and side glass fitted to the doors. The driver side winder mechanism needed some fettling before I could fit it, but it's working like a champ now. I was playing with the idea of upgrading to the electric windows that I harvested from the donor doors, but I changed my mind and decided to continue with the original crank handles.

It's nice to have the side glass fitted. The darn cat's can't get into the cab and use it as their home any more

So this weekend I got to working on the engine. The first order of business was getting out some super fine steel wool and WD40 and giving it a rubdown. Over the last few months, the bare metal surfaces developed a fine coating of rust. This needed to be removed from critical surfaces before doing anything.
Next on the agenda was checking the ring gaps before fitting the rings to the pistons. Some tedious measuring and a little filing was needed to get the rings gapped to the correct specs. (checked at the top and at the middle of the piston stroke)


I weighed the old pistons & con-rod assemblies and then weighed them again after fitting the new pistons to the old con-rods in an attempt to reduce the amount of imbalance on the rotating assembly (crank) after I fit the new parts. I'm not sure if it matters a whole lot, but why not. I think it only becomes a problem at sustained high rpm's like in a racing car (which I won't have to worry about) , but the weights of the new piston assemblies are now as closely matched to the old as best as I could get them.


Next job was to replace the camshaft bearings. I tried to remove them last year but they wouldn't budge without risk of damaging the block. So the last time I was in the US I bought a dedicated cam-bearing tool. I got to use that tool today. If any of you Chevy guys need to borrow this tool in the future, I've no doubt it'll be perched upon a couple of nails in my shed for the next 20+ years


Bearings out:



So with the new cam bearings and cam installed, I moved onto the main crankshaft bearings. I fitted some new bearings and spent a while checking for wear on the crankshaft journals with some plasti-gauge. Everything checked out fine and was well within spec.
Then all that was left to do was clean the remaining overspray from the bottom of the block, fit the main seal, lube up the bearings with assembly lube and fit 'n torque up the caps.


I finished off this evening by fitting the rest of the brass freeze plugs.

Roll on next weekend. I'm hoping to fit the pistons and get the heads, lifters and rockers on by Sunday eve all going well...

My selection of reading materials...


Time for a beer and a bit of a read...

Ah, Im sure I 'll have this camper back together in the next 3-4 years. And then I'm taking up knitting or needle-point.