It's here! (Bedford RL)

[john1950]

Great to hear from you. 

[ltwtbarmy]

Good to hear you’re still plugging away. It’s a long slog, until suddenly, it’s done. Keep at it and well done so far!

[Tamber]

Still taking short bursts at it; I've started rebuilding the rear corner panel for the passenger side which is coming along quite nicely when my welder plays nice. There's something screwed up in the torch that even a new liner didn't fix, so I've got a new welding torch on the shopping list, and in the meantime I'm using the TIG. More metal-forming and welding to do yet before I get it to the stage I can hang it on the truck, but it's all progress.

Did take a trundle down to the unit to drop off more workshop equipment (nothing too fancy, just a proper bench grinder because it's a real pain getting things done without one.) and will myself into poking at something, while I was still capable of standing; which turned into scraping and peeling paint 😀

The really big news for today is that thanks to that, I have finally got confirmation of something I've been pretty confident I was right about. So, I took the little body tag off the nearside to let me clean up that little bit behind it to make way for new paint...

And on the back side of it, I found some magic words stamped in!

TRACTOR 3 TON FA 4x4 RLW CODE NO 43490501361

This not only confirms my suspicions of Field Artillery conversion; but IMO also puts a line in the sand as far as date of conversion, in the form of the vehicle code number using the system that -- according to sources -- was phased out by VESPER from 1964. So, the mystery timeline gains another data-point!

[attleej]

It is easy enough to start a project but completing it is another matter.! You just have to be extremely determined and avoid getting side tracked into some other task, however, attractive.

You just have to keep plugging away at the job and eventually it gets done.

I can't wait to see it done.

What was the field arty conversion?  Was it a light gun tractor?

 

John

[john1950]

Health problems don't help. Great to see you are keeping going. There was a load of RL and S type cab panels and bits on Facebook's Bedford site recently.

[Tamber]

6 hours ago, attleej said:

It is easy enough to start a project but completing it is another matter.! You just have to be extremely determined and avoid getting side tracked into some other task, however, attractive.

You just have to keep plugging away at the job and eventually it gets done.

I can't wait to see it done.

What was the field arty conversion?  Was it a light gun tractor?

 

John

Thanks! I have plenty of stuff to get side-tracked into, but these things are sent to try us. 😀 I'm extremely excited by the idea of getting it done; even though I'm slowed up by health troubles.

Best I can tell, it would have been towing a QF 25pdr; entirely likely it would've been doing so for training purposes more than anything. (I uncovered the remnants of a marking on the front of it -- and I wish I'd known it was under there, or I'd've been more careful in stripping it back and maybe found more of it -- that I'm now about 95% sure is a Royal Artillery red over blue flash with a flaming torch overlaid.)

The differences over the standard cargo variant are detailed in Supplement No. 5 of EMER WHEELED VEHICLES F172 (issued in, apparently, May 1962.)

3 hours ago, john1950 said:

Health problems don't help. Great to see you are keeping going. There was a load of RL and S type cab panels and bits on Facebook's Bedford site recently.

Indeed! Most weeks, it's all I can do to survive through work; but I've got an appointment with the rheumatologist upcoming, and hopefully can start coming up with some answers even if not solutions.

Good to hear that parts do still keep coming up! I do enjoy having a rummage through what's available, but I'm not on facebook (As annoying as it can be, sometimes, since so much stuff is siloed within its digital walls.).

Thankfully, I'm fairly sure I'm out of the woods as far as needing panels; everything else I need to do should -- and this is where I curse myself, I'm sure -- be a case of relatively simple panel repair and letting in new metal.

As far as exterior-facing cab metal goes, I have:

• a small patch to make underneath the passenger side cheek vent (this will take some shrinking work)
• the back corners of the cab (basically the rear portion of the front wings! And I have both of those where I cut them off, and just need to let in new metal again before reattaching.)
• the roof (Which is a bloody teabag. But I think I can do it in small sections, with relatively simple forming.)

The rest of it is mostly structural parts that won't be seen unless you crawl up under there, and I'm painting all of that black anyway! 😀

[ltwtbarmy]

https://www.alamy.com/army-learner-driver-training-in-a-bedford-rl-towing-a-25-pounder-field-gun-1950s-image263027714.html

Just found the other thread you'd  started. Very interesting indeed actually - 

 

Edited March 13 by ltwtbarmy

[Tamber]

Speaking of making way for new paint...

Technique that appears to be working the best at the moment is a hot-air gun and a wide scraper. The paint softens nicely and just peels off, rather than turning into dust and fragments.

And a first coat of heavy zinc primer, after beating all the pitted spots and filler patches with the wire brush to see what happens

Thankfully, none of the pitting or filler turned out to be hiding any big trouble, so I'm hoping I can blitz through this side fairly easily. Only the rearmost section of the body, and the locker doors, to do before I can start thinking about laying on yellow paint.

And I'm pretty hopeful that I can get away with not having to repeat the whole process on the other side, thanks to it not having been painted over with the mystery brown paint. 'course, I'm also still undecided on whether (and how) I want to do a tilt, which would then mean I need to add mounting points for that before painting... Would be nice to have a covered portion over the back, though. Maybe I'll just add the brackets, then it doesn't matter if I can't make my mind up.)

While I'm waiting for next week's paycheck, so I can pick up the new welding torch and some other assorted bits (New nuts & bolts for the locker I removed, in particular. ...a locker which I need to give a coat of black paint, come to think of it.), I'm giving serious thought to attacking the insides of the lockers with the powered wire brush and hoover... Clean them up and get them at least in primer, because I'm sick of everything being a shower of rust flakes all the time, especially into wet paint!

Will have to get a bucket of white paint for the locker internals, too, when I can. (Lockers are a lot more useful when painted white. Especially if there's a light fitted! Now there's an idea...)

[Tamber]

I have now almost completely stripped and primed the nearside! Only the locker doors to do, now. Interestingly, the paint is a lot harder to strip where it's only the yellow (and brown); where it's painted over the top of the DBG comes off lovely. Well, I guess the DBG comes off lovely, and takes the rest with it. 😁

Just after 2pm today:

And a few short hours later:

I reckon, tho, that I'm only a couple of hours away from having the whole nearside in primer, which is a good thought. Less fun is the thought of having to do the front of the body, too, but I really should while it's easy enough to get at.

Also some tinkering with mockup-bracketry for a tilt happened, because the more I think about it, the more it seems like a very good idea (if only to give me more space to dump stuff 😁), so that took up the rest of the evening.

I'm thinking having it only extend over the length of the lockers, which still leaves the area around the crane exposed for working in; but provide some covered space on the back of the truck, out of the rain. Also considering having the cover made out of the same PVC tarpaulin that tautliner curtains are made of, in a similar sort of yellow to the body.

I know, it's a lot of yellow in one place, but anything else might look out of place; and I feel it'd be a plausible commercial modification.

[Tamber]

23rd Mar.

Have I mentioned that my phone's white balance drives me round the twist?

Anywho. Turns out, I need more yellow paint anyway.

I know I said I wasn't planning on painting the side of the truck 'til I was sure about bracketry and whatnot, but I had an oopsie and my brush slipped.

First coat always looks pretty grim; seems like the opacity isn't really there when brushing this stuff. I had enough in the tin to give a second coat to that centre panel, and that looks significantly better; but I suspect I'll probably be three or four coats in before I'm happy with it. And it seems to take about half a litre of paint per coat, give or take.

And if I force my phone camera's white-balance to play nice, it's pretty good.

And when I got back from doing that, my bolts had come in for putting the locker back on the side; so I'll have to get that in a couple of coats of black and fitted up! Hooray!

[Tamber]

Anywho! I've had a fairly productive week/long weekend so far, away from work (Which has been the land of gearbox/clutch hackery...)

The 26th

I got my new MIG torch in, so I celebrated by welding on my remaining two side-marker light brackets on the offside. Which, if my doctor's reading this, involved exactly 0 crawling or kneeling on the floor the day after having some exploratory work done on my knee. (Did you know they made needles 80mm long? Neither did I 'til then!)

One at the front.

And one at the back.

Happy days.

The 28th

Got some tracing paper in, so I could take advantage of having put the truck too far away from the wall, and trace out the signwriting on the offside.

Well, what's left of it, in some cases.

See, I managed to wipe out the same bit on both doors before I managed to get a tracing of it. Thankfully, I have enough pictures that I can reassemble the missing bits pretty close to how it used to be; they won't be exactly identical, because I'm probably going to move the "vauxhall" and "bedford" bits down to miss the mirror bracket, but...

...that's alright, because they weren't identical to begin with. 😁

The 29th

Dragged the locker out from the nearside, and stripped all the old mud, underseal, and paint. It's in pretty good condition underneath, all things considered. Much better than the locker in front of it.

A nice heavy couple of coats of primer...

The 31st

Not a lot of pictures from today, because my phone was on music duties again. I did interrupt it in order to grab a snapshot of the whole ridiculous mess that was reftting the locker. I should note, this was 2-1/2 hours into proceedings; I had to give every enclosed side of that locker a coat or two of black paint, which thankfully dried pretty quickly in the warm sunlight. And while it was drying, I made up a mounting bracket for my air manifolds. (Unpictured. I'll have to grab a snap next time I'm down there.)

I also went and tack-welded in the bolts at the forward end of the locker, because there's no way to get a spanner on them in order to prevent them spinning. I'm not entirely sure how they were originally put in, because there's a floor above them and they're inside a C section in such a way that you can't hold a spanner in from the side even if the forwardmost locker wasn't there!

This was round two of trying to fit it; the previous round, the bike jack launched itself out as I tried to squeeze the locker into place atop it, and I ended up making an attempt to fit the locker by lifting it a bit at a time and blocking it up... only to find out I only drilled the mounting holes to 8mm, and the mounting bolts are 3/8. 😒

Redrill holes, reassemble the whole silly stack. Discover that all the bumping and banging has tweaked two of the mounting bolts... Make up a special tool (bent stick) in order to reach in through the narrow gap and pull the bolts back into place, then pump the jack to shove the box over the bolts before anything else moves out of place! And, of course, this results in scraping off a non-zero amount of the paint I put on this morning. 😒 ...but most of it's still painted so that's something. The worst of the paint damage is on the underside, which I can still get to in order to repaint it.

Tada!

I will, of course, have to clean and paint the inside of that; which promises to be fun. Oh, and strip & paint the face of it that has the door on, of course. But I might leave that 'til I've pulled the door off and repaired/re-made it, because it's suffered quite badly from The Rot.

Then, three hours of tin-bashing, heating & forming, welding, grinding, more bashing... and we finally have the nearside-front rear wing put back on!

It's only partially welded in place, the rest of it's just tacked for now, and I've just hosed over the welds with the zinc primer for ... I don't know why I did it, really, I'm only going to end up taking a bunch of it off when I grind them down. Makes me feel better, I guess? No it's not pretty. More work to do on it, which will neaten it up a good bit; but even then it will probably still show the scars of the repair, and I'm fine with that. 🙂

Still some bashing and fitting to do in order to close up gaps before fully welding, but it's on now which is good news for multiple reasons:
1. It's not floating around for me to trip over and damage
2. Another piece goes back onto the truck!
3. It's been holding up figuring out where I can put the compressor's air supply and unloader return pipes. So now I can make the bracketry to fit those! (Just in time for me to run out of gas for the TIG welder, I'm sure.)

[Citroman]

I had to recreate the aluminium signs on the pump controls of an Landrover Fire Egine. A lot of the letters had different withs. So i had the resize every letter.  So an handpainted lettering will be even more differing.

[Tamber]

It's all part of the charm!

[Citroman]

Yes 😎

[john1950]

One problem with these trucks is they were made for young fit people to get in and out of.

[Tamber]

4 hours ago, john1950 said:

One problem with these trucks is they were made for young fit people to get in and out of.

Absolutely.  I've lost count of how many times I've missed the hub-ring step on the way down and found myself at the floor a lot earlier than planned.

...it's even worse when you can only get in through the passenger door and have to climb over the engine to get to the driver's seat. Not a lot of places to stand!

[Citroman]

Well it has a crane...😄

Edited April 2 by Citroman

[Zero-Five-Two]

Haven't looked at this thread for a couple of years.  So just been reading up on what I've been missing.  Incredible job you are doing there and you have achieved so much.  Is that dogged determination, or too stupid to know when to stop?  Anyway, absolutely well done, and thanks for writing about it all

[Tamber]

On 4/4/2024 at 9:57 PM, Zero-Five-Two said:

Haven't looked at this thread for a couple of years.  So just been reading up on what I've been missing.  Incredible job you are doing there and you have achieved so much. Is that dogged determination, or too stupid to know when to stop?  Anyway, absolutely well done, and thanks for writing about it all

Thank-you! It's a little of column A, and a lottle of column B, I think. 😁 (Well, and a big helping of sunk-cost fallacy! But that's neither here nor there!)

As for writing about it, I think that's genuinely a big part of what keeps me going; between the people who find it entertaining, the people who find it useful as reference material, and the warm fuzzy glow of adding to the archives as it were...
(It does bring me great joy to find that others are using photos and material that I've contributed, particularly during my various teardown phases, as reference for their own projects and whatnot. Which reminds me, I do need to get back on adding stuff to my little reference site... I only started out making a chart of all the various lubrication capacities and whatnot, and oh boy did that escalate!)

---

Since my last update post here, I've not done a whole lot. (Beset by The Agonies again, alas. Thankfully, it's been a short work-week. The painkillers help, but I turn into a pumpkin when they start wearing off.)

I have got another big bucket of golden yellow paint, and that's now in my paint cabinet awaiting a paintbrush day! I have also gotten some more air fittings; two elbows to come out of the compressor -- unloader return, and compressed air supply -- and a T so that I can attach my unloader to the supply hard-line.

I've attached a little bracket to the nearside front cab mount bracket, with a bolt welded to it, so that I have somewhere to bolt my new hard-line pipe to; since the original, while also being a hard line, was formed with multiple bends that I do not have the capacity to replicate. At the other end, there'll be a tab that I should only have to drill a hole in the spare wheel carrier bracket to support.

The replacement is a straight-shot from just in front of the cab mount, to underneath the spare wheel carrier; which will have a flexible line at each end -- stainless-braided teflon, as is common on modern trucks-- to connect to the compressor and the dryer unit's inlet. The return from the unloader to the compressor's inlet, I think I can get away with regular air-brake hose, which I will support with a rod welded to the tab for the supply (But it's easy enough to change out to a similar setup as the air feed, if I have to.)

[Tamber]

Alrighty! Time for another batch update.  😁

April!

More paint! Opacity slowly building up; it definitely takes a good few coats to get there, brushing this stuff.

Managed to get one of my mounting tabs welded onto the air feed pipe, and promptly ran out of the last of the argon. (As predicted...)

Thankfully, I could get Andi to grab me another bottle (Which turned into a minor mission in and of itself; Nuts didn't have any, so they had to head over to a Hobbyweld distributor in Darwen.)

In the meantime, I decided that the time had finally come to suck it up and buy a fancier TIG welder, one that could do aluminium. Whyfor, you may ask? Well, I'm not so good with gas welding the stuff, and since I want to fuel inject the 300 I need a manifold that has holes in it for injectors, and whatnot! (Plus, I just miss being able to weld aluminium...)

Surviving on nothing but the finest cheapest instant noodles for a couple of weeks until my bank balance recovered from that was absolutely worth it, though. 😁

I know, I know, not the usual subject for this forum, but I think it's worth a go anyway!

Anyhow, in order to lay that out properly and figure out how much room I've not got, that means the engine cover has to go back on. (Not for the final time, though. I do need to make some slight changes to the hinges so they pick up both mounting holes on each side.)

In the process of doing that, however, I've discovered a broken spot-weld that's supposed to be holding down the rear panel of the engine-hump, and which has allowed everything to slump backwards to the extend that the cover no longer latches properly; so I'll have to do something about that before too long. No big deal, but it will mean a *little* more damage to the paint I thought I was done with.

Still nice to fill up some of the gaping hole in the cab, mind. Makes it feel a bit more finished, just for a moment.

At some point in the week after that, I had to find myself a piece of heavy plate I can use to make a jig for manifold welding, try prevent it turning into a pretzel that won't seal. (And if I use my brain, I can make it match all the ports and bolt-holes on the head... Not that I foresee there being a great demand for manifolds for a Bedford 300, mind! 😁 But it would help with perhaps sorting out that slightly wonky front manifold that pulls up a bit funny and tends to blow the gasket out if I don't tighten the bolts in the right order...)
 

A big plate like... so?

A 33" long piece of 100x16mm should do nicely.

 

Spend an hour and a half measuring, marking, re-measuring, re-marking, re-re-measuring, head-scratching, drinking coffee and thinking real hard, then measuring again just to make sure. It's recommended you do some swearing when you find out that the 3 pairs of studs that clamp down the inlet manifold all have different spacings.

 

Thankfully, their exact spacing isn't critical, as long as they don't interfere with the flanges on the manifolds. But this does explain why I had a bigger gap than expected between two manifold flanges; I thought I'd just screwed something up with the welding somewhere, but the bolt-holes lined up!

 

Speaking of bolt-holes, that plate needs some!

...it also needs 3 48mm holes drilling in it, which was as about as unpleasant as expected.

 

But until I could get to that point, why not stick one of those little proto manifold runners on the engine just for giggles?

This also demonstrates that the engine is settling into its home quite nicely, plenty of grot helping tone down that fresh paint. You can also see that the exhaust for #3 is blowing, and has destroyed its gasket; something warped during welding, and if I don't tighten them down in the correct sequence it won't seal. I'm hoping to fix that, hence adding the exhaust mounting holes to the fixture plate.

 

In case you were interested, there's about 2-3/4 inches between the top of that proto-runner and the bottom of the engine cover at the rear. I'll make it work somehow

 

I know that's a bit hot-rod for this forum, so don't worry, the next update post will start off with something a little closer to factory. 😋 (I could be persuaded, however, to make replacements for stock manifolds if someone needed them, though; since I've gone and made the fixture, and all...)

[Tamber]

Compressor belts replaced. Thankfully, the B series belts are still easy to get and quite inexpensive! Does remind me that I need to sort out a different pulley for the alternator at some point.

And more paint! While I had the brush out, I gave the front wing another coat, too.

In more modernising works, I needed to find a place to mount air manifolds for the two brake circuits. Thankfully, there was a convenient pair of bolt-holes in the chassis right about where I needed them to be!

Nylon air pipe may not be pretty, or very classic looking, but you have to admit it's effective! (A couple of years back, I had to salvage a load-sensing valve from a scrap truck that had been stacked in the corner for two or three years, having parts cannibalised from it. I was incredibly startled to find -- the hard way -- that the air tanks still held a considerable amount of pressure even after that time.)

There's an extra, currently open, port on the top block for taking air to run things like the factory fitted winch dog clutch, and whatnot; much like how the truck was set up to begin with.

May!

One annihilated cordless drill later, I've put three 48mm holes in my weld fixture. With some fettling, it fits the original manifold just about perfectly.

More fiddling around with the new manifold bits ensues. 😁

I also somehow managed to get around to finishing the repair of the ... cheek panel, I guess I'll call it?

Then followed that up with a round of paint-stripping. Everything highlighted in magenta in the following pic was one giant patch of filler!

...which was incredibly funny, because the only part I could find anything wrong was right at the bottom of it, right in front of the radiator mount. Shame I didn't find this dent before I went and refitted everything, because I reckon I could've taken it out with a hammer and dolly while I had the rad brackets out of the way.

I gave it a very slight skim of filler -- a far cry from the 3/16 of an inch there was before! -- and went in with the zinc primer.

A week later, taking advantage of the lovely weather -- and not wanting to do anything too think-y after the previous day's driver cpc with the world's blurriest projector -- I did some more painting! And then a bit more, and then a bit more... And as the sun disappeared behind looming clouds, I went and bolted the front wing on. It's good for morale, y'see...

Plus, I can get to find things like missing bolt-holes and other stuff I need to deal with before I completely paint the underside of those panels.

Also loosely bolted on some other bits n pieces, like the braces that go from the footwells to the front wings; which revealed another bolt-hole I was missing in the passenger footwell panel. 😁 The intake manifold was also refitted again, so I can run the truck if needs be; which might be helpful for testing things like the compressor, or scooting the truck out to start work on the driver's side floor... which I spent several minutes staring up at. (Laying on the floor for a bit is good for getting everything realigned, gets you in touch with the world again; but getting back up afterwards is a bugger...) I'm glad it's not as bad as the passenger side, but there's still a good few hours work in it yet.

Pulled the passenger mirror arm off so I could straighten it, and prep the bottom of it to receive a new threaded section. Thankfully, it wasn't too badly out of shape, and was easily sorted.

The driver's side, however... it's a shame I didn't take a picture of it before I started fixing it, because looking at it one could almost swear it was upside down, it was that badly bent out of shape. However, with the careful addition of heat -- only burning myself twice by grabbing bits I'd just heated -- and precision violence, I got it to almost match the nearside mirror arm.

Not perfect, but a damn sight better!

I did the obligatory sit-in and daydream about reaching the finishing point with this project. Definitely plenty to do before I get there, though. Messing about with the mirror arm reminded me of how much I've got to rework that driver's door; but I'm confident I can do a better job this time, so it's not too much trouble.

Other minor things included spiral-wrapping and running the plastic fuel line up to the engine bay, which was an easy enough job. I've also dug up a filter housing and spin-on filter that I'm planning on using; just got to find a good place to mount it, and get some more fittings! Yay!

Obviously, going to fuel injection requires a different pump set-up; and I'm going the route of using an in-tank pump unit from a Mk4 Fiesta. Somewhat modified, of course, because the tank is a totally different depth. But it's only metal, so hey!
That pump unit requires a mounting ring in the top of the tank, and ... again, it's only metal! So we break out the computer-aided back-of-the-envelope drawings...

I haven't got a CNC plasma, or whatnot, so we'll have to do this the hard way... (Also, I'm broke, so I want to try and avoid using more material than I have to. 😁)

An hour with the angry-grinder results in a series of segments, which are welded together (and shaped) until the pump unit drops into it. (I'm not going to mention the saga wherein I massively mismeasured the ID of the ring and then needed to build it back up with weld; oh no, I'll not mention it at all, and no-one will ever know.)

Then layer two is welded on top of layer 1, and -- shown here before the tidy-up work with the die-grinder to clean up the welds on the inside -- provides the space for the pump unit to sit within

Layer three is the same as layer one, but will be bolted down to clamp the pump into the flange snugly to provide the seal. Lovely! Current rough plan is to install this towards the back of the tank, so that it doesn't interfere with the factory level sender. We'll see. I'm not good at sticking to plans!