Good riddance to bad rubbish
Sailing types say that when you buy your first serious boat, it’s the happiest day of your life. Then comes an even happier day when you sell it. For a couple of years I lived aboard a 35ft ketch in Brighton Marina, and there was indeed toasting in champagne on both the buying and the selling days.
That’s also how it worked with my Dodge campervan, albeit on a smaller scale. It always drove clumsily, and would never take off smoothly, despite weighing 8500lbs and having a six-litre V8 with an automatic transmission. The van also sometimes just didn’t work, for no rational reason. Copious fuel + fat spark = zilch. It was cleaned up and sorted out for visiting British friends to use for a trip around BC, and although it had been working fine for weeks, it refused to even fart, let alone start, when they arrived. So they had to borrow the MX5 instead, which was not quite so roomy.
I left the van in the garden for a few years, then decided to recommission it and threw serious money its way to get the problems permanently sorted out. How hard can it be? Radiator, tranny cooler, new brakes, new timing chain and gears, new engine electrics, another carb rebuild... I even dug deep into obscure Bubba Mopar dragster lore to find that a clogged or missing carb heating duct in the intake manifold could cause mixture freezing and bogging, so I stripped and cleaned the carb again, but it was still not much better. Old Chrysler products, apparently, are either crap or magnificent. My Jeep Cherokee, bought for $2000 14 years ago, has withstood 200,000 kilometres of abuse and neglect with indifference and impeccable good manners, and has just yet again dug itself out of the garden in low range 4WD to have the green kak and spiders washed off, and is back in daily service, no worries. Magnificent.
Covid has meant a boost for campervan prices, so at least I could now get rid of the Dodge without losing too much money. I sold it to Bronwen from Bowen Island, listing all its ills like a proper honest Canadian and knocking a chunk
off the price. It stalled a few times and then lurched away, presumably getting her home as there has been no anguished or abusive phone call. The van is completely rust free, and I advised her that if she was going to keep it, to plan for replacing the Dodge engine and tranny with a new crate Chevrolet LT engine and box. Chrysler enthusiasts will now be frothing at the mouth and jabbing needles into Iain dollies; if any of them want an apology, they can have one. Just cover the $5000 I wasted trying to get that bloody
Dodge working properly and I’ll recant.
Onward and upward on the Beast project, the supercharged 8-litre-sized Bentley lookalike I’m brewing up. I have an original 1929 Bentley steering wheel, which I need to replicate to fit the MkVI steering column. Although the 1940s and 1950s MkVI Bentleys are the base for these creations, the three-spoke 1950s MkVI steering wheel is a period giveaway as 1930s wheels usually had four spokes. The later one is also too small at 17in, when the real thing uses a 20in wheel.
Where there is expertise available I’ll consult it, but often with these things, the way to do it is just to do it. Jeremy at Moto- Lita suggested chopping up a MkVI wheel to get the boss out, then machining it to fit the new steering wheel. I wasn’t keen on that because the old Bentley wheels crack and a good one is worth £500. An attempt to cast a new wheel from my spare good one achieved a reasonable rim, but sand- casting can’t duplicate the splines on the boss. Being a Bentley, the splines are tapered in order to place the wheel to within one thou. That is very expensive (not to say obsessive) engineering. Also, while it’s fine to have the thick rim cast in aluminium, the spokes are too thin and need to be steel so that in a prang, they bend rather than snap. Cast aluminium is strong enough to make road wheels, but it’s stiff rather than flexible.
I probably need to sacrifice the cracked steering wheel in my own complete MkVI to create a boss, but again being a Bentley, most of the steering column has to be taken apart to get the steering wheel off as the choke, hand-throttle and rear damper rates are controlled by rods going all the way through the shaft. So for a little light relief, I decided to apply the Cooper bonnet stripes and side pinstripes to Pimple, my 1990 RSP Mini Cooper. This was displacement activity to avoid changing the 1990 front suspension rubber cones, which involves removing most of the air conditioning and a layer of emissions kit that makes it almost impossible to see the engine at the bottom of the rammed engine bay. Eventually I’ll just have to start digging and keep taking stuff out until I get down to the suspension bolts. Driving the best-specced standard Mini ever built is cool, but there is a downside.
Useful notes from the stripes procedure are not to leave the stripes in the car to get faded and for the glue to stick too hard to the backing paper, and also to use masking tape first to mark where you want the stripes to go. There is some flexibility in where they end up at the front, although the backing paper usefully tells you where the pinstripes start at the back in relation to the separate Cooper stickers at that end. One side of my car has slightly too much pinstripe droop, although fortunately you can’t look at both sides of the car at the same time.
The fat bonnet stripes are not super accurately cut, and trimming them before applying them would be wise. Also, there’s an option for using soap to apply them, allowing them to be moved around a bit before being stuck down. This is also wise as while there is no perfect position for them, there is an optimum position.
“Chrysler enthusiasts will now be frothing at the mouth and jabbing needles into Iain dollies”