January update
I haven't put up any pictures recently as , well, it doesn't look like a lot has been done. Just before christmas I got a bit more the blasting done.
You can really see just how well it highlights the bad Areas to be cut out
During the christmas holidays I got a phone call at 8:30 in the morning to tell me the garage had a burst pipe and it was flooding the whole place. Within 10 minutes of waking up I was doing 70mph..... (or there abouts :P) down the motorway to get to my van. As I was driving I was thinking the worst. Maybe a pipe above the van had burst and my nice shiney un-protected paint work that I had blasted was being ruined, or my welder and plasma cutter were now submerged under 2 feet of water. When I arrived I was so relieved, turns out the spot where I placed the van seems to be on a little incline and it was bone dry. What was damaged were 2 bags of grit for the media blaster, they were lying in a little puddle and the moisture had managed to get through and make the grit damp. I wasn't about to let £20 worth of grit go to waste so I went about drying it. I took it home and placed it in the airing cupboard for a couple of days. That never really worked, so I took the grit back to the garage and laid it out in a thin layer on 2 large sheets of wood and left it to dry. In the mean time I tried to get some more but the guy I get the grit of was closed for the holidays and I didn't want to pay 3 times the price at machine mart. I didn't want the day to go to waste though so I got the wirebrush on the grinder and attacked a few spots on the lower half of the van.
That night I was thinking that I might actually be better to prepare the underside of the van before I blast the rest. On the reasoning that all the sticky underseal could land on the bare-metal. Its funny how you can say in one quick simple sentence "prepare the underside" , its straight to the point and sounds so simple, "prepare the underside". Even thinking about the task it sounds easy, which it is. What it doesn't capture is the monotony and dull-ness of the task. Its one of those things where you put a lot of effort and time into it but visually its not impressive at all.
My first attempt with the underseal was to use a wire-cup brush in the grinder and go at it, Wrong! All that does is cause friction which heats up the underseal into a nice swirly pattern. I then moved on to the 'kill it with fire' approach and bought a nice fancy self-starting blowtorch with paint striper attachment and also 3 different sized scrapers. This method does work but my god its boring. Step one, point heat at a 2 inch square, let it bubble. Step 2, Scrape it , then scrape it again, and again. Then you can use a flat wire-brush attachment in the grinder to clean the thin layer of remaining underseal off. This method only really works on the flat areas, i.e , floor pan, wheel arches, chassis rails. When it comes to corners and inaccessible areas ive been using the blow-torch/scraper then going over it with the media-blaster.
I know I wont get 100% of the rust away, even using the blaster and wire brush there's still some areas that have heavy pitting. So I think that once I have as much done as I can im going to buy a rust converter and spray it on the whole underside. Ive been looking at rustbusters fe-123 and it seems to have good reviews. I think I will also use their epoxy mastic 121 as the paint for the chassis and underside. The original was designed for off shore oil rigs and its been adapted for automotive use so should be good enough to protect it for a long time.
On another note, my Ford Consul had been losing water for a while. At first I thought that maybe the radiator cap wasn't working right as I always had a lot of pressure in the cooling system. At first it wasn't bad , id maybe only have to top it up once a week but leading up to christmas it got to the point where I was having to put at least 2 litres back in just after driving to and back from work. During the cold temperatures it started to become obvious that water was getting in somehow, when I stopped at the traffic lights I would be surrounded in a cloud of white smoke. I then thought that maybe the cylinder head gasket had blown, what threw me off though was that the oil was still nice and dark, not creamy as you would expect. I spoke to my dad about it and he suggested it could be a cracked cylinder head (there goes 2 days worth of lapping the valves last summer). I had thought about buying a new gasket and using the cylinderhead off the van engine when my dad came up with the idea that I should just swap the engine that came out the van with the consuls. Another one of those short and simple sentences.....
So basically it was swap this:
For this:
I had taken photos as I was doing this but they are on a different camera that I don't have access to right now. So I will upload them here later.
On the Saturday I got to the garage about 11am, I started by striping the whole front end away, the grill, trim, bonnet, radiator, battery etc.. Then I removed all the electric cables (yes, all 3 of them) , engine fan, alternator etc.. I guess the last person who changed this engine made life easier for themselves by cutting the front panel away so I done the same. Now, came the pain in the arse bit, removing the gearbox from the engine, you can get to the 9 bolts underneath easily enough but there's 3 which are sandwiched between the engine and firewall, (if you have done this to a mk2 you will know what im talking about) I had to sort of straddle the engine and bend over at a degree men find very uncomfortable, find the bolt and using an open ended 9/16 spanner, get a grip at an angle and get maybe 1/16 of a turn then take it off and struggle to do the same, ofcourse the bolts are about an inch and a half long so to remove one bolt ends up taking half an hour. Anyway, with the engine off I could get some rope around it and put some tension on the engine crane and then remove the engine mounts.
With the engine out I moved on to striping it of everything and putting it on to the van engine. I forgot to mention to those that don't know but the Consul and Thames used the exact same engine block. I thought it was the exact same engine but there a few differences that I never knew about until doing this swap. The van engine has a single down-draught carb where as the Consul has a twin, so that had to be swapped, I swapped it along with the intake manifold as well as the exhaust as they also differ in length slightly. The oil filter is also shorter in length. Luckily I had bought a new filter for a 400e as apposed to the consul when I was looking on Ebay as I thought they were the same. I swapped over the distributor as I eh well, managed to break the van one when taking it out the van.... And also the plugs, coil , ht leads. The water pump pulley is also smaller, I was hoping to use that as that would turn the water pump over quicker but after checking id need to find a smaller belt to go with it. The van also has a 4 blade fan so I used that instead of the consuls 2 blade. By this point it was 9pm and I was starting to feel really tired. I phoned my brother for sympathy and it must have worked as he said he would come and pick me up then drop me back off again in the morning, legend!.
On Sunday I arrived about 11am again. With the engine ready to go in I tied a rope around it and hoisted it up with the crane. I pulled it over then somehow, I managed to line it up with the gearbox shaft, twist it to line up and lower it. It did take quite a few attempts and about half an hour of swearing but I managed, I even done that thing where you take your anger out on an inanimate object, for some reason I threw the crane jack handle at the ground and swore at it (poor thing). Eventually I got it to line up, I bolted the engine mounts on, set the timing and put the alternator and belt back on. I got the engine to a state where I could test it (I forgot to mention that I had no idea if this engine block was OK. I never heard it run before so I was quite apprehensive as to if I was wasting my time).
Before I started welding the brace back and putting the radiator together I crossed my fingers and prayed ( no im not religious at all so I don't know why) with a flick of the key the engine turned over , almost instantly it fired up and a great feeling went through my head, Im sure a lot of you will know it, that feeling of getting an engine to run that hasn't ran for a while, or it was broke, but now, it is fixed and its all OK again. After that I was so happy to know it atleast ran so I welded up the front and put the radiator back on so I could start it up and let it idle properly.
Once started I did have a little problem but at the time it was huge, a huge puddle of brand new expensive oil was streaming onto the floor. At first I thought that the engine block was maybe cracked but upon further investigation it turned out I just never put the oil filter on the o-ring properly , oops. Anyway, after all that I put it all back together and its been fine since. Its still just as slow but I haven't fixed the exhaust yet so its a bit noisy and ropey/lumpy sounding which I quite like. I don't know if its just me but at some points it has a nice echoey splattery lazy V8 pitch to it (yeah its probably just me).
