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Oct 12, 2019 19:39:32 GMT
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Keep up the good work. Colin Will do, assuming they keep inviting me back. I liked the early National with the pod on the back. Always thought it was a good looking machine. From what I've read more recently I think I may be the only person in Old Blighty that does like them. The people that worked on them seem to be quite critical. I'm not sure I've ever been on one though. My childhood seemed to be full of Bristols. (Ooh missus!)
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Oct 12, 2019 16:09:12 GMT
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Prepare to be educated in the details of rear axles… And old bus brakes. Sorry but it has to happen. It happened to me and I don’t see why it shouldn’t happen to you too. Actually it’s really interesting, you might enjoy it. The actual job here was to fit the newly lined brake shoes and clean the adjusters, drums, bearings and so on. On your car with a live axle there is a bearing inside the end of the axle tube. The half shaft comes through this and the brake drum and wheel bolt on the end of the half shaft. So the half shaft supports the weight of the car. On a commercial vehicle it’s different. The wheel bearings are on the outside of the axle tube and the wheel hub / brake drum goes over that. The end of the axle tube is threaded and it’s all held together with a large threaded collar. Here’s Ian, working so fast his hands are a blur, removing the threaded collar from the axle.  Indeed, he’s so fast the collar has already gone and the camera missed it. What you can see inside the hub is one of the bearings. Behind the hub…  One end of the brake shoes swivel on the pins (red arrows). There is a phosphor bronze bush in the shoe. The green arrow is pointing at the cam that applies the brakes. There is an adjuster between the cam and the shoe. More of that later… The brakes on the bus are actually closer to a car than a modern commercial. These days (as I understand it) the brakes are forced on by springs and then air pressure pulls them off. On this old girl the springs hold the shoes off and the driver puts them on. This drawing might explain things a little.  Again, the pins at one end of the shoe are marked in red and the cam is in green. The arm on the back (marked in blue) twists the cam and applies the brakes. You’d expect there to be an air actuator on the end of the arm. Well there isn’t. That’s a story for another day. Here are the shoes and one of the adjusters.  The bit marked red is the adjuster. The brass bit screws onto the thread (green arrow) on the shoe. As the linings wear you just screw the adjuster off the shoe a bit. Taking it all to bits to adjust the brakes would be a bit of a pain in the botty so…  The adjuster has a bit (the red bit) that sticks through the back plate of the drum. There is a worm gear on the end and a corresponding gear machined on the brass bit (green in the drawing). As you turn the red bit you slowly turn the green bit and screw it off the brake shoe. There is one adjuster for each shoe. Eight on the whole bus. Nothing automatic here. You have to manually tweak the adjusters regularly. The cam that puts the brakes on was pretty stiff so while Ian stripped that off, cleaned and lubricated it I set about scraping 80 years of thick grease out of the hub.  And then I started cleaning the bearings and spacer. The old thick grease in the spacer had slivers of metal in it so I reckon the old girl has chewed through an odd set of wheel bearings in her lifetime.  Ian poked the oil seal out of the back of the hub (right side of the photo) and replaced it. I cleaned the roller bearings and the spacer that sits between them. South Eastern Coachworks have a parts washer and were kind enough to let us use it so the spacer and adjusters all went through it. It would have been nice to put the drum / hub through the washer but it was a little on the big side. In fact it’s stupidly heavy and was a bit of a sod to put it back on while trying not to mangle the new oil seal. The roller bearings carry the weight of the bus but they don’t set the end float of the hub. The third bearing (on the left) is a ball bearing and that’s used to control the end float. An interesting design. You’d have expected taper bearings or thrust races or something. But it’s done with a simple ball bearing. The roller bearings went back on as they were in good nick but Ian had a new ball bearing so it got replaced. Here it is with the shoes fitted before we humped the hub back on.  You can see the thread on the end of the axle tube that the collar screws on to. And then we did the other side? Sadly no. We would have done but we ran into a problem. The phosphor bronze bushes in two of the shoes were too worn to put back on so they’ve gone off to have new bushes fitted. So why do we have a pair of shoes that have good bushes and a pair of shoes that have knackered bushes? Surely you’d change all the bushes at the same time? Well I guess that when the bus was in service they had a pile of relined shoes on a shelf and just swapped them around as they wore out. It’s anybodies guess how many miles each shoe actually did but you can guarantee none of them were delivered with the bus in 1939. All this actually happened weeks ago, before other events took over. The next session will probably be in a week or two. I’m so excited I have to sleep on my hands to keep from clapping! James
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Oct 12, 2019 15:55:54 GMT
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I had a nose around that at the last transport weekend. There’s always some interesting stuff at on/around the SEC workshops. If you come next year we'll have to meet up and chew the cud for a few minutes.
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Oct 12, 2019 15:52:48 GMT
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Is your prop new new or the old one reconditioned? Can't imagine where you'd get a new prop for an old truck, but then I don't really move in old commercial circles. Slowly working on it though.
What's the doofer to the right of the prop? Winch drum?
James
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Not sure much has changed. Old service buses are pressed into service to run rail replacement services and such like. I've been on a few when the railway got dug up at the weekends.
As an aside, I notice Wrightbus in Ballymena went bust. I know very little about the subject but I've read enough to believe that some operators are struggling and I guess its now translating to the manufacturers. I'm not actually sure who's left. Alexander Dennis, but I'm not sure who else.
I went to Belfast earlier this year and loved it - but then Harland and Wolff went bust. I believe they were recently bought for peanuts so there may be some life left there. But between H&W and Wrighbus it does make you worry about the UK's manufacturing industry and particularly in Northern Ireland.
Anyway, a short video...
For the last 'transport weekend' GKE was rather hidden in the back of the South East Coachworks garage. It needed to be moved forward a little to make it more visible. Easy. Start it up and drive it forward. Except the engine isn't plumbed in and the gearbox isn't even in the same town.
So how do you move 7 or 8 tons of bus that has no motive power?
Well it turns out this is an old school problem. Bus maintenance workshops would have had the problem of shifting dead buses around since the day bus was invented. So there is an old school way of doing it.
You'll like this...
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I am certain you are certifiable Welcome along for the ride! (See what I did there? It's a bus. Ride, geddit? Oh never mind... Wasn't actually funny.) Yeah, I've not asked about that ^ on grounds that you may be right. There is an update to come. Stuff I did before our world got turned over and didn't get round to writing it up.
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Thanks all. I'm sure we'll get over it. There's going to be a lot of changes over the next year or so but let's not go into that just now. Those gutters look lovely by the way. House proud type objects. I had to take them out of the garage and stack them outside to make way for painting the next bits. I really didn't want to do this because it was raining and they'd get wet... Er, guttering... You prat!
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Back in the late 90s... Wet carpets on the near side... The front sill drains had blocked so if the car was slightly nose down the sunroof drains filled the sill. The sill was connected to a box section across the car under the passengers heals so that flooded too. That in turn was somehow connected to the little strengthening box that runs down the centre of the floor plan so that too filled with water. It got into the car via a crack in a spot weld joining that box to the floor.
You'd be surprised how much water can get through a crack in a spot weld over a rainy evening.
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I'm trying to remember but I'm sure Toyota tuck the bottom of the membrane back through holes in the bottom of the door to reduce those sort of problems. They run what looks like a piece of packing tape across the bottom to hold the membrane in the holes in the door.
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First the bad news. Shortly after we got back from our holiday my wife’s dad went into hospital near their home in France for a fairly serious operation. Sadly there were complications and a few days later we lost him. To be fair, if they hadn’t operated we’d have lost him anyway so it wasn’t like there was much choice. The last couple of weeks have been an emotional time with a house full of close family. And the next few months aren’t going to be a barrel of laughs either. Anyway, after a lot of hard work the funeral was last Friday. We gave him a decent send off and hopefully a funeral that everybody who attended will remember. Certainly wasn’t your average crematorium job thank God. I hate those places. They are like a production line for dead people. A friend of ours, the Rev Jo Richards took the service in one of her churches in Canterbury. She was good enough to allow me to set up some decent speakers and a projector so I could play in music, photos and some messages from the grandkids who couldn’t attend. They separately recorded a reading on their phones in New Zealand and emailed them to us. I used lines from each of them and set that against some photos which went on the projector. The wonders of modern tech. Some of the stuff we did was quite simple, but powerful and, to be honest, emotional. I'm pleased we did it. 'Dad' would have wondered what the fuss was for. It was for him... God rest you Ken. You’ll not be forgotten. That all means that not a great deal has happened to the garage and nothing to the car. I went for a blat to the shops in it yesterday which was fun. But no work. I might have to try and install some sort of pollen filter into the heating duct though. Every time I put the fan on the cabin fills with all the detritus that’s slid down the windscreen and through the intake. I'd forgotten that used to happen in the old days. Just before our emergency dash to France the guttering came back from the blasters nicely primed.  The first sections are now in black paint. I was hoping to get it screwed to the wall this weekend but ran out of time yesterday. And I ran out of weather today. It takes weeks to paint… You see, I’m using old school oil based gloss and it takes ages to go off. But it looks absolutely lovely. I tried the modern “does what it says on the tin” quick drying gloss paints and, well, it didn’t do what it said on the tin. It dried quickly but you couldn’t call it gloss. If I was generous I’d describe it as satin. But, in reality, it was on the matt side of satin. Whatever, it wasn’t a bl00dy gloss so I refuse to use it! I’ve finished painting the front wall of the garage too but I’ve not got a photo yet. The mounting screws…  …went through the sand blaster and came out like this…  Some of the goo on them was seriously hard. Of course, last time I had the sand blaster out I swore I must change the glass ‘cos I couldn’t see through it. I really must change the glass ‘cos I can’t see through it. And finally, you remember I plumbed my compressor around the garage using normal water fittings? I’ve sprung a leak. Not a serious one but the compressor was starting up occasionally and it didn’t when I first plumbed it in. Today I noticed a hissing from one of outlets and figured the PCL connector hadn’t seated. Bunging a hose in it didn’t fix the problem so I took a closer look.  If you look really closely at the winged tap connector thingy you’ll see it’s got a tiny crack across it where the boss screws into it. Well now, 110PSI didn’t crack a brass fitting. I suspect a ham fisted installer over tightened the adaptor. I always was of the opinion that you should tighten something until the threads strip and then back it off a touch. Easily fixed. I’ve got a spare in my plumbing drawer. Job for next weekend. James
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No reason what so ever you shouldn’t contribute ,should you so wish 😊 I just can't think of anything sensible to say, that's all. My gast is properly flabbered. Your electronic work arounds for no longer available 80’s engine management tech is inspirational...😊 You're being jolly kind, thank you. Interestingly I'd forgotten I'd done this ^^. I was out in the car this weekend and it seems to work so nicely that you don't notice that it's doing it. Not wishing to blow my own trumpet but it's quite pleasing when something I did blends relatively seamlesly into the background.
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Blob of chewing gum'll fix that. Or Tigerseal if we are being official...
Seriously, I read this thread and keep thinking I should contribute but, frankly, I'm so blown away by the workmanship that I can't think of anything useful to say. Have the same problem with @grumpynorthener 's threads. Makes my idiot ramblings in the garage look like, er... Idiot ramblings in the garage.
Keep it up, I'm paying attention.
James
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Sept 22, 2019 20:55:36 GMT
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I'm having a problem with the Quote and Bookmark buttons dropping me to a an earlier page in the thread I'm in. I suspect it's the same thing. It clears if I restart the browser but comes back pretty quick.
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Sept 22, 2019 20:41:20 GMT
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Dunno if it's just me but I'm having real bother with quoting people... And Bookmarks and Profile for that matter. Anyhoo... jpsmit , 1976 Midget? Really... Blimey. I stand corrected on the 'very old' thing... strangersfaces , I think that would roughly be the plan. But actually doing it may not be so simple. Firstly (and I'm guessing here...) I had to put my feet on the spanner to undo the shocks. The nuts on the ends of the U bolts are going to be seriously tight. And probably not easy to get to. And secondly the U bolts are the other way up to the way you'd find in a car. The U bit (if it is even a U) goes under the spring and the bolt ends go up through the casting that forms the end of the axle. As such they go through quite a long hole so I reckon they could be tricky to get back out after 80 years. It's not going to be a "knock the nuts off and the U bolts drop off with a sharp tap with a hammer" sort of job. If Ian doesn't get fed up of me slowing him down and keeps inviting me to 'help' then we'll all find out one day!
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Sept 22, 2019 17:48:04 GMT
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llwynogmon You would appear to be correct, it is ex Crossville. Some info...I was trying to "quote" you in the usual way but it's broken... Ah well.
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Sept 22, 2019 13:56:59 GMT
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I feel the need to go and you're not helping!
Nice writeup, thanks!
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Sept 21, 2019 21:48:55 GMT
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I should apologise, I didn’t take many photos this time. And what I did take were rubbish. I promise to do better in future. So the first time I met Ian and actually got my hands dirty the job was to get the shocks off for refurbishment. By the way, if you want your hands stupendously dirty, play with a bus. Er, no, the shocks aren’t like the ones on your car. Have a diagram.  I suppose they might be like the ones on your car if you have a really old car. Just how effective these things are has to be debatable. Ian reckons there probably isn’t a lot of movement in the springs anyway and most of the ‘ride’ is in the sidewalls of the tyres. Safe to say this isn’t your modern, air sprung bus. People were clearly tougher in 1939. And if they weren’t, they would be when the war ended a few years later. One of the front shocks had been removed some time ago as I believe one of the arms was bent. Ian had taken the other front one off when I turned up to slow the procedure down. “Have a spanner” he said and indicated that I’d find the shocks by sliding under the old girls skirt. Ok. Thrown in at the deep end then. Learning on the job. I can go with that. That said, you don’t need to be too portly for this. There isn’t a great deal of space to slide under the side. Luckily Mrs Sweetpea keeps me on a strict diet of raw carrots. So, one castle nut and and split pin at the spring end and a couple of nuts and bolts at the chassis end. Of course the split pin wouldn’t come out of the right side so we wound the nut over the top and will have to clear the hole out later. A bit evil I know. But this thing is big so shearing the pin off with the nut isn’t a disaster. And, of course, I was too much of a girl to get the nuts undone ‘cos they are stupidly tight. Eventually, by twisting myself round I could get my foot on the spanner. Right side done, we moved to the left and ran into a problem.  Sorry that photo is just rubbish but it’s the only one I have. Once you’ve slid under the side there is a surprising amount of room under here. I can sit in a hunched cross legged position. The shock has been unbolted from the chassis and you can see the two arms (blue arrows) coming off the the left of the photo. The red arrow is the castle nut (the split pin did come out of this side). And at the joints are rubber bushes that have failed and need replacing. The diff is offset to the left side of the bus and is hard against the spring presumably to keep the floor as low as reasonably possible in the middle. It’s also not a hypoid gear set on the input to the diff. The drive shaft comes under the diff and is a worm and gear type. The spider thing that the yellow arrow is pointing at is the casing of the rear bearing of the input shaft. Guess what. Yup, it stops the shock bush sliding off the pin on the spring plate. Hmmph. About this time, as I was sitting under the bus wondering what to do next, I realised that when I looked up I could see light through the floor. Hurray! There is an access hatch in the floor! I gave it a push and it popped out. There was a loud clatter from the Henry hoover that was on top of it as it fell onto the back platform. But hell, no more sliding under the side. Since the rubber of the bush had come away from the inner crush tube we could slide the tube out and remove it by cutting it into sections. That gave us just enough wiggle room to twist the lower joint off the pin. Hurray! However to put it back on we are going to have to dismantle the U bolts (which I don’t think are U shaped) and remove the lower plate. Apparently that’s not an easy job. That said, Ian suspects that the spring shackles are sloppy too in which case a lot of the suspension will have to come apart anyway. That’s probably not an easy job either. James
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Sept 21, 2019 17:55:20 GMT
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Sorry folks. We've had 'issues' (as they say at work) at my house. I've not been ignoring you all. We are not allowed to have breakdowns or faults or cockups at work. You have 'issues' instead. Anyway, Yeah... I'm new to this imperial spanner malarkey I strongly suspect that it'll be 'resolved' ('cos you aren't allowed to 'fix' things either...) by using the words 'bigger' and 'littler' ('cos, in a last ditch stand against being told what to call things I'm refusing to use the correct word 'smaller'). "Nah, it's littler 'an that." Sounds better than. "I believe we can resolve the issue by using a tool smaller than the one currently in my possession." Well, I think so anyway. You never have time to restore an MR2 let alone a bus! When I was talking to the chaps a year ago I thought exactly that... Oh well, too late now! I wasn't actually sure how this thread would be received. After all it's not really the stock-in-trade of this site. And, worse still, it's a bus. Now just because I happen to have a thing for a half cab double decker I wasn't sure what you folks would think. So thank you all for your positive comments. I do appreciate it! James
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Sept 15, 2019 19:20:58 GMT
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I walked into the office at South East Coachworks (hereafter called SEC). “Hi, I’m James, I’m here to meet Ian from the Friends of Chatham Traction.” “He’s in the garage, you can’t miss him, he’s really tall.” So I signed in and they took me through and introduced us. I’m 6 foot or there abouts and Ian is notably taller than me. Allow me to introduce him to you all…  Well that’s his feet. He’s so tall he’s actually working on the clutch at the front. Before we move on I’d like to point out a couple of things in this photo. Firstly, if you get involved with a vintage bus this seems to be a common, fairly unpleasant and extremely filthy position you’ll spend a lot of time working in. Now, look at the profile at the bottom of the sides. It’s got that beautiful Coke bottle curve and flair at the bottom. Eastern Coach Works bodies of the period were more straight sided. The curve seems to be a feature of the Weymann body. You might not be able to see it but there is also a convex section running under the windows that ends on the last bay (the one without a window because that’s where the stairs are. Anyway, because of the curve in the bottom of the panels that corner panel isn’t just a flat panel bent round the corner. I have no idea how they made it but it’s really stunning. See, buses can be beautiful too. Anyway, this is supposed to be a moan about spanners… Ian said “Oh it’s all Whitworth bolts by the way.” Fair enough. Part of my inheritance from my late farther was his old tool box mostly full of random imperial spanners. They’ve sat in the loft in the garage for years (I’m so posh I have a loft in the garage) but now they could be useful. Great. For a lot of reasons it seems appropriate to use his old tools again. Better sort them out and see what I’ve got.  I should point out that I’m of that age where I learned metric at school but dad used imperial. So I’m in the happy position where I can use Meters and Centimetres or Feet and Inches. Or occasionally a perverse mixture of both - “3’ 7” + about 4mm”. It’s one of the great joys of being however old I am. What I’ve never practiced is fractions. So I know without thought that 16mm is bigger than 13mm but I have no innate sense of whether 3/16” is bigger or smaller than 1/4”. I can work it out but I don’t just know. And then we have Mr Joseph Whitworth. Before about 1840 there were no standards for nuts and bolts. So while one manufacturers nut would fit his bolts God help you if you tried to put it on a bolt from somebody else. Whitworth came up with the first national standard. Thread pitch, angles, even how big the nut would be for a particular diameter of shank. So spanners were marked with the diameter of the bolt shank because from that you’d know how big the nut was across the flats. It’s in the standard. The man was undoubtedly brilliant and should be celebrated with an annual day off work. However, my dear children, then it evidently went a bit wrong. Somebody decided that you didn’t necessarily need a nut that big and started making them one size smaller. And then during WW2 the idea became almost standard apparently to save metal. So some of dad’s spanners are marked Whitworth (big nuts) and some are marked BS (small nuts). Some are marked with both. Sometimes they don’t tell you what the markings are. Some are perversely marked AF (across the flats). Some are marked in imperial and mm for goodness sake! And one seems to be marked with something totally random ‘cos it doesn’t marry up with any of the above. Damn it Janet! How’s a man supposed to put together a set of spanners when you don’t know what all the numbers mean… And I have no idea if any of them are ‘bus sized’.
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Last Edit: Sept 15, 2019 19:23:32 GMT by Sweetpea
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Sept 15, 2019 16:59:17 GMT
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...but for now, I should probably get back to replacing the radiator in the Skoda, then I can resume using it to lug tools & parts around. (Yet another casualty of the broken motor mount, it seems.) I misread that for a moment and thought you'd broken the bumper of the truck by hitting the Skoda which escaped with just a busted rad. I was mighty impressed with the Skoda for a moment. Anyway, I've got it straight in my head now so not to worry. Good luck with the compressor rings. Sounds promising if it's sucking your hand down the bore though. James
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