Our LRDG Chev

[Andrew H.]

Great!
Can't wait to hear more on your great adventure!
Andrew

[Andrew H.]

Lately we have been working on the badly rusted floor pan. The seat riser was removed and the floor pan sent away for sand blasting. I love sand blasting because it works so well on thicker steel where there is no risk of warping and it only cost us $20 to blast both sides ready for priming.

[Andrew H.]

Rust is the enemy!! The seat riser was not quite as bad as the floor pan, but still required some repair and rust removal before it could be primed, painted and assembled back onto the floor pan. The rear cross-panel was so badly rusted it had to be replaced with a new one. The petrol tank is also quite badly rusted, so it will be some time before we are ready to install it under the seat.

[Andrew H.]

Molasses for rust removal has been a revelation to us. Its great as long as you are not in a hurry. See attached pics

[Andrew H.]

After attaching the seat riser to the floor pan, the next step was to make new "battens" for the rear cab panel. The original ones in pressed steel, "top-hat" section were too rusted and too expensive to buy new, so we used square section steel tube welded to a 50mm wide strip of panel steel. They will be stronger than the original and serve the same purpose.

[Andrew H.]

We found that the "feet" attaching the firewall to the chassis were rusted through in places, so the rusted bits were cut out and replaced with small, welded-in patches. This was "fiddly" work that required a lot of patience.

Also one of the "toe panels" was so badly rusted that it was not useable, so a new one was made from scratch. This was also quite fiddly work as it is a double thickness panel with lots of bends and angles. The yellow one is the original panel and the red one is the new mirror image copy. All the bending and folding was done in an ordinary vice, as we have very few tools. We have not done this type of work before, so it was a steep learning curve and some things have had to be done twice before we get it right.

[Andrew H.]

So that brings us more or less up to where we are today. The truck is now on its wheels, so we can push it around the workshop, but there is still a lot to do. The next items are to finish the panel work on the rear of the cab and then make a start on the rear Godfriedson "ammo" body. The motor is away being reconditioned.

We decided also to see if we could make a Vickers machine gun out of wood and I think we achieved quite good realism, at least from about 5 metres away.

Future posts will be less frequent, depending on our rate of progress.