Coachmen Leprechaun

It'll be welded to the chassis legs Pat. Exactly the way the original cab was.

It wasn't slid fully into place in the photo I shared earlier today it was just barely sitting on the front of the chassis rails, but it's in place now. It was a fair oul squeeze to get it into place I'll tell ya. It still needs a little adjustment here and there, but it's looking very good right now.

I'll get back out to it once the Ireland V Scotland rugby game is over.

I should have it jigged & clamped in place by this eve.

Time for a beer

During the week, I decided to have a look at the torque converter and automatic transmission. Both have been living under the workbench in my shed up to now. After removing the old road grime & rust, and tidying them up a bit with a wirebrush, I gave both a coat of paint.

This eve I decided to remove the pan from the transmission and have a look inside. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but when I removed the valve body, I found small traces of a grey pasty material in the maze of fluid galleries. I'm figuring its a combination of water, trans fluid and sludge. So I'm at the tipping point now, do I just clean up all the galleries, make sure every trace of sludge is removed and put it all back together, Or do I drop another €250 and order up a full refurb kit and do a complete overhaul? After speaking to a few pros, I'm told there should be no need considering there's only 60k miles on the clock, the plates and bands in the transmission should be fine for another 100k miles. Decisions decisions...

I'll continue with the de-contamination for now and see how I get on. I have the transmission specs, so I may go ahead, dig deeper, and remove the friction plates and measure them to make sure they are within spec. Seeing as I have it torn this far down, I may as well..

Only a couple of pics to share...


Grey sludge -


After reading through some forums this evening, I've read that the grey sludge is normal for AT's. I only need to worry if the sludge is brown/black (apparently)...

My dad told me that the transmission was fine when he parked it up back in 2006 so this is giving me hope.

After I got the engine running in 2012, I checked the transmission fluid levels and the ATF was clear red in colour at the time. I drove the camper back and forth slowly in my folks garden and it pulled fine on level ground, but when I tried to turn it on a slope at the bottom of the driveway it wouldn't pull uphill. It was at that stage that I discovered the fluid had changed colour from clear red to a pink frothy milkshake texture.

I dropped the pan and removed as much contaminated fluid as possible -

I cleaned the filter, re-fitted the pan and filled the trans with new fluid. New fluid helped a lot, but it still wasn't pulling strong on the slope, it was kind of pulsing...
I didn't drive it more than a hundred metres or so. But I do remember giving it welly trying to get it to drive up the slope. So I'm not 100% sure if the slippage was purely hydraulic (no pressure), or the clutch packs slipping... but it's likely the former.

I spoke to a couple of lads with a lot of experience of American cars and they figured it was more likely to have been either a clogged trans filter or aeration in the fluid due to the mixture of water in the trans. I recall there was a lot of bubbles in the fluid that I removed...

So I might get away with just a flush, and I think that's the right approach.

One of the lads recommended I add a product to the ATF called Lucas stop slip which will condition the clutch plates.. For €30 it'll be worth a shot.

What I need to do is find out how the water got in there in the first place. There's two potential points of entry, through the dip stick tube above the engine, or through the transmission cooling system which is connected to the main radiator. There could be a leak in the radiator core. The rad needs to be replaced anyway so that's on the to do list also.

€250 is for the transmission rebuild kit only (seals, plates, filter, gaskets & delivery). A new torque converter would be another €200 ish (incl delivery).

Picking up a good cheap secondhand trans is the question... Devil I know better then the devil I don't springs to mind...

There seems to be plenty of TH350's about but not so many TH400's...

I'm going to take a chance with the cleanup and see how I go. It's not a big deal to drop the trans again should there be problems down the road.

Two steps forward and one step back...

I made a bad paint choice... I was very pleased with the silver rustbullet paint, it's very durable, however, I didn't like the silver coloured chassis so I decided to topcoat over the rustbullet with triflow high gloss black. I had a full can of it sitting idle on a shelf... Bad idea. After a while I noticed the black paint starting to chip. After fitting the cab, I noticed way too much paint had scraped off while we were sliding the cab into place. Then, after running a screwdriver along the side of the chassis, the paint flaked off with no resistance at all. Not good. Either I didn't give the rustbullet enough time to harden off, or maybe I didn't sand it down properly between coats. Either way I made a bollocks of it and had to fix it.
So I removed the cab and stripped off the triflow paint.

Ah well... live & learn.

Got that done last weekend. Not much fun about it, but job is done now. Here it is wearing it's third coat of rustbullet blackshell...




I also stripped the paint & rust from the engine and gave it a couple of coats of hi-temp paint. I resisted the temptation of painting it in bright Gaudy colours... I despise blingy engine bays. I settled on plain black. I'll fit the chrome rocker covers and chrome air filter housing once the engine is installed.



Next job is to make a new roof skin for the cab.
I tried to make one from scratch using flat sheet metal, but I don't have the tools/skills to make nice compound curves at the corners of the roof. SO - Plan B was to go scouring some scrap yards to find a car with suitable pre-formed panels..

This is the roof skin that I removed from the old cab. It's just placed on top of the donor cab for the photo. It's too badly rusted to re-use.


It didn't take long to find something suitable up in McCarthy Car Pats in Watergrasshill, Co Cork. The top corners of the rear quarter panels on this 2004 VW caddy van should fit the bill nicely. The lads are going to cut these out for me this week. So the roof will be the task for next weekend...

Thanks guys, much appreciated.

I made good progress over the weekend. Mostly rust stripping & painting.

I had one alarming issue when I started to do a bit more with the engine. I decided to drop the oil pan to give the oil pump screen a good cleaning. As I was cleaning the sludge from inside of the oil pan, I discovered some bits of metal in the sludge. Not good. I have no idea what they are. I stripped back as much of the engine as I can to see inside and see if I can find where these pieces came from, but I'm stumped. I have no idea what they are or how they got into the engine...




I've posted photos of these pieces on a couple of Chevy forums hoping someone may be able to identify them. But for now, the mystery items are still unidentified...

Not the timing chain.

Yeah Pat, I tend to agree, but I'm going to cut it open anyway just for a look. Any filter I've ever seen has stacked perforated tubes inside so I'm not expecting to find the source in there. Curiosity has the better of me.

I had a look through the component parts of several engine rebuild kits on the internet last night, trying to identify any consumable parts that these objects might be from, but I couldn't find anything that looked similar. Most of the engine bearings are yer standard shells and the lip seals are the old type with the one piece tension spring. I went through each link on the timing chains and every tooth on the sprockets and there are no signs of any damage, so I wonder how the little clips got beat up...

The items do look worn around the edges so it'd appear they were tumbling around in the pan for quite a while.

Dammit, I think I may have found the source of the fragments -

Oil scraper ring -

(Photo from internet)


Maybe, maybe not...

Yeah, What I need to find out is - does the oil scraper ring drop below the lower edge of the cylinder when the piston is at bottom dead centre? I'm just trying to figure out how the oil ring could get into a situation where it could break and fall out of the groove in the piston? I would have thought it'd always be within the confines of the cylinder through its entire stroke cycle!

I know my dad did some work on the engine back in the late 90's when he had some overheating problems. I'm sure he sent one of the heads away to be skimmed. I don't believe he did anything with the pistons/cylinders...

More investigation is needed.

I had a quick look at the back side of the pistons this evening. Even at the bottom of their stroke, the oiler rings are nowhere near being exposed. Piston's look good, cylinders look good on casual inspection. I still don't quite understand how fragments of a damaged oil ring could make it's way down into the pan? Even if the ring were cracked, you would imagine it'd still be held captive within the cylinder...

Here is a couple of the piston's at the bottom of their stroke -




Still nothing concrete. I need to flip the engine upside down and do 100% inspection on all pistons all cylinders. But not tonight. Now is time for drinking some sorrows.

Yeah, it was the first thing I thought of too, but I made the mistake of going on the internet and looking at NEW scraper rings for comparison. The style & design of the new scraper rings are quite different to the factory originals, so I got thrown off the scent there for a while. It wasn't until I started looking for photos of old used pistons that I found the photo above and the penny dropped.

I didn't find any bits of piston in the sump so that gives me a bit of hope. I spoke to my dad about the work he did on the engine years ago and he only changed the driver side head & head-gasket. He didn't go down into the block at all. He's never taken the sump off the engine. He made a remark about the engine never using oil or blowing smoke out the exhaust pipe while he owned it so this is good. Maybe the previous owner had engine trouble and got it fixed before selling it to my folks? Its the original engine, matching numbers.

I did a compression test prior to pulling the engine out, and all cylinders seemed ok at around 120 psi. #3 was a little low compared to the others @ 115psi but it wasn't a big enough difference to concern me at the time. I might do another cold compression test and be more particular about #3 this time around...

I got a bit pissed off over the whole thing last night and I wasn't in the mood for going out to the workshop, but I'll crack on with it tonight. I'll know for sure when I do the 100% inspection. I can't seem to get in touch with my friend with the endoscope, so I'll probably have to do the inspection the hard way.

Yeah, hopefully I don't find anything bad during the inspection and I can move on without having to overhaul the bottom end!

Fingers crossed.

If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck!

I did my inspection and found the source of the fragments... There's good news and bad news...

The bad news is the pieces of oil scraper ring are from piston #1.

The good news is the cylinder doesn't appear to be damaged. I can't see or feel any scoring on the cylinder wall (trying to keep positive here ). The joys of restoring vintage vehicles eh...

I couldn't get in touch with my friend that has the inspection camera, so I went on ebay and bought a €25 kit there for the sake of having one. It arrived on Thursday. its basically a 7mm camera on a 2m lead which plugs into the USB port on any laptop or PC. This one is very basic, but incredibly handy. I've been having a lot of fun with it, trying to find things to look inside. Chassis rail, engine coolant galleries, radiator core etc. Take out some sparkplugs and have a look inside the combustion chambers, that kind of thing... Its a whole new world maw! The picture quality is quite good considering the cost...

Anyway...

This is what the oil scraper ring should look like. This image was taken from up inside the piston casting, looking up at the inner surface of the oil ring on piston #2 -


And this is the inner edge of the oil scraper ring in piston #1


I don't like surprises, but sher, it'll be no harm to give the engine a full overhaul anyway. :whistle:

Full engine teardown and overhaul now firmly on the 'things to do' list... Probably need a new piston too at best.
But I'm guessing it will be more involved than that.

For any of you wondering what my new toy looks like? Here it is taped to the top of my inspection light -



Very handy for getting into inaccessible areas -



Plugged into an old crappy laptop -

No Pat, cylinder #3 was the one that was down a little in compression.

The best course of action would be to do as you suggest. Hone, new rings and fit a new or secondhand piston.

I need to be careful just how deep I get into this engine... You're absolutely right, Having done a quick sum up this afternoon, I could sink a couple of grand there easily. So I'm going to go carefully and only replace what needs to be replaced IF a refurb is the best course.

I've put the engine back together for now and wheeled it back into the corner. It's a distraction to me right now and I need to get back to the metalwork. At least now I know the engine needs more serious attention. I'll deal with the engine later.

A refurb... or MAYBE replace with a more modern engine. I'll have to weigh up the cost options...

Here's a few photos of the problems:

#1 scratches on cylinder wall



#5 rust pitting on cylinder wall

Thanks Paul, that's a very generous offer! I'll see how I go.

Not much to report on the camper project as I've been busy elsewhere, but I did manage to do a bit with the roof skin from the Renault Kango!

The guys in the scrapyard cut the whole roof off the van, through the pillars (not just the pieces I wanted) so I have plenty of spare material left over. With the 5 pieces now cut from the roof they are near perfect without any reshaping. The front corners were almost perfect!



I only need to tweak one part over the middle of the windscreen and weld all 5 pieces together, but all in all, they fit very well


Here I cut out the roof skin and cleaned it up a bit for future use. Its nice material to work with, easy to form shapes.


The first pieces harvested from the roof skin are needed for filler panels behind the B pillar. I have two panels to fabricate, one on each side of the cab - Unfortunately, the side panels aren't just flat steel sheet. I need to continue the body lines of the door right through the side panels. So I made up a steel form to reproduce the shape of the body line. You can just about see it in the photo below. Then I just welded it to my welding bench, and bash bash bash it with a hammer until it was the correct shape.



It didn't turn out too bad. Only tacked into place here. It still needs to be fully welded in and blended into the surrounding shell, but with a bit of fillers here and there, it should look right at home.


Then onto the other side.

Thanks for your nice comments!



Feckin crazy innit...

Not quite "over 2 years" yet, but we're getting there! It was late August 2012 when I first put a spanner to the camper, so that's what, 20 months in total... Technically, I've only got about 14 months in it to date. That's 14 months worth of weekends and the odd evening. I rarely get to work on it during the week days! I stood back from the camper almost completely at the start of 2013 while I searched for a donor cab and there have been a few lengthy gaps here and there... I find it hard to stay 100% focussed on a project like this, it gets a bit overwhelming at times so I need to step back and regain composure! Life gets in the way too! I gotta admit though, Carol and the kids have been fantastic through all of this and they're very understanding to put up with me being out in the workshop working on the camper "all the time" (I've been told) ! I only hope the payoff at the end of this is MANY happy evenings of wildcamping with comfortable deckchairs and bottles of favourite adult beverages in hand...

Free time is my killer though. Not enough of it!! I really should go and find a job where I only work 3 days a week, allowing me to devote more time to the camper... That'd be handy...

Got around to forming the panel on the passenger side last weekend... Held in place with magnets here... I'm getting the hang of this now... There's something very satisfying about taking a flat sheet of metal (what was the roof skin from the Kango) and shaping it the way I want...