1959 Ford Thames camper van restoration

Last weekend i got back to the garage. I wanted to start straight away but because i left the place in a dump i thought id be best to clean up and start fresh. The toilet was disgusting, When the pipes burst the plumber warned us not to keep the water tap on as because the place isnt in use often then there was a chance it could burst again (im not so sure how reliable that information is). I think a few people must have went to the toilet and left it unflushed, the water was minging and there was actually mushrooms growing along the walls. That all got bleached and swept up. The workshop was also a bit of a mess. when i left the last time i never expected to be gone for so long so there was old milk bottles and cups with mould inside, bleurgh! I never got one bit done to the van except stare at it and work out where to start on the bodywork.

On another note, This Saturday was my little nephews three year old birthday so i wanted to make him something special. I stayed behind work a few days last week and took a day and a half off to make this digger for him. He loves watching them and looking at pictures of them.

I started with the dimensions. I dont have any kids of my own so working out the sizes was a bit of a hit and miss. I thought bigger rather than smaller would be better, he could always 'grow into it'. I made a couple of crappy sketches to get a rough idea of the sizes.


Then when i was happy i made a real scale drawing of the side


and front/side


I work at a salvage yard, mainly restoring old georgian/victorian casts. They always get extended and I use 3mm plate for that so i had plenty of scrap off-cuts. It may seem heavy duty but it was free. I started by cutting the panels for the cab out with the grinder and tacking them together. Then i used 25x50 box for the chassis rails. I like asthetics so i rounded the ends of with some 50mm pipe cut in half and welded on.


I never really took any detailed photos of the build ( which i should have) For the treads i but out 3 inch strips of 3mm plate. I used a bit of 90mm pipe to bend round for the ends and cut out a plate for the centre. The base was cut out and the ends formed around the 90mm pipe again. I took some more 25x50 box and cut out a long triangle in the centre and welded it back together to create a smooth 50mm to 25 mm taper.


I got an old leather jacket from my dad and wrapped it along with some foam over a bit of plywood to create a seat.




I never got a photo of the underside but i made a basic chassis underneath, pretty much a rectangle with an extra brace in the centre using 25x50. Two wheels at the back are fixed and two at the front can roate so it has some steering. I realised at this point that the track was quite narrow so i had to think of some stabilizing for it I later welded on some plates to the side with 40mm castors so it still had ground clearance but wont tip over. I also tacked on the main boom.

Again i forgot to take more pictures. At this point i had completed everything and took it home to paint. I chose 'traffic yellow' for the cab and arms and a gloss black for the track and base. For a bit of detail i bought some fablon (black vinyl) and printed out his name 'Ruaridh' (pronounced roo-a-ray) and used that as a template to cut around. I also photoshoped the JCB logo to his initials RRB and cut out some windows. Oh, my house isnt always this messy, i had no time to clean up as i had about an hour before his birthday party to finish everything.




Starting to build it all up now. I started getting excited seeing it nearly finished.




And that was it finished. I was really happy with how it turned out.


The paint was still a bit soft so i wrapped it up in an old bed sheet so it wouldnt stick. Seeing his wee face when he opened it made it all worthwhile. I was a bit apprehensive as to if he could actually use the levers as its quite a bit of weight. He managed it ok but it will be better in a few years, right now he can get the bucket out a bit but any further and it drops. He should have a bit more strength soon enough to get the full reach.










And heres yours truly getting a well earned shot.


Im really happy with it, i know i could have went and bought one but its not the same is it. This is a bit more personal and it should last 10 times longer than a plastic one.


Today (24/4/11) i went to the garage and started on the metal work (Atlast!!!!) The paint that is remaining on the body seems to be in areas that im goping to be cutting out or working around so what paint is left i will deal with as i restore.

I thought the best place to begin would be with an easy bit. The passanger side of the van is'nt as rusty as the drivers so i started there. Just above the passanger door the channel is quite rusty at the front.



So i cut it out.









A lot of the front of it had rusted out completley. I Started to make a template to replace the area and think really hard about how the bits that are gone would look. Wow, i never realised just how long it took to think about, mark and cut a basic template out. It was made a little harder as the bit that had gone was curved and raises up slightly. Looking at it from the top it also curves slightly from where the door would line up. I must have spent atleast 3 hours figuring everything out and making a cardboard template. I realised you also have to think about how everything is placed together, like what over-laps what and where spotwelds will go.





I then placed it upto the body using masking tape to hold it in place and made a few slight changes but thankfully it all pretty much lined up.






Now i need to get a sheet metal folder. Ive looked at ones on the internet and i dont have a spare £200 for a decent one and the likes of machinemart and screwfix they all look a bit flimsy and poor quality. So , i might just have to make one. Thats probably what il post next time.

Sweet work on the digger. If I was a kid I'd have wet my pants over getting that present. COOL! I used to haul equipment for a JCB dealer and I got to play on the real Excavators a lot. Nothing like diggin up some dirt!

I hear you on the sheet metal equipment. I'd love to have some bending tools here. I bead roller, a shear, a box brake, shrinker-stretcher, would all be nice to have. They can get very expensive very quick. I can never afford all the tools I want. Looks like I'm going to need a new mig welder next. I believe mine has bit the dust. It's always something. LOL.

Keep us posted.

Duane in Tennessee

Thats awsome you did that for your nephew! Its definitely something he will remember.

You have talent!

great job on everything........................

cheers for the replys everyone, it really helps to keep the enthusiasim going and make me feel better, really appreciate it.

Well, i made my own folder. I looked around the internet at mass-produced ones and ones other people have made and ive based it on a mixture of both.
Its made from 50 x 50 x 5 angle, 50 x 10 flat bar, 2 x heavy duty door hinges and other bits and bobs. Its a metre long over all and will fold a sheet 600mm wide.



Here you can see i used a M12 bolt to clamp it down and i made a stop so the 'sharpness' of the bend can be consistant. The hinges are heavy duty rated to 120kg, I flipped them upside down so that the centre of the hinges is exactly at the corner of the angles.



Theres a triangulated brace on the angle that folds up. I used a bolt for the centre so i can adjust how much tension is on at the centre.



It will fold upto 125 degrees which is plenty.



My battery ran out so i cant show you a good picture of it actually folding something but you can kind-a make out a fold in the first photo.

I still need to weld a couple of handles on but i can do that later, the brace works as a handle just now.

I'll attempt the upper body repair section this Saturday so i'll see how it goes

Nice sheet metal brake. Is your break bar hardened or just plain mild steel? Would love to know how much capacity (18 gauge?). Are you getting much play/slop with just using 2 hinges? Thanks for sharing your work with us, you are clearly a very talented fabricator.
Cheers

312

Being a lover of the Thames van also I'm interested in your updates and look forward to more. Are there Thames clubs over there??? If so welcome them to come over here for us

Thanks, its not hardened no. Im using it to bend 18 gauge (uk, 1.2mm) and the hinges i used have no play, They are for heavy duty doors and use bearings inside.


A little re-cap,

I started by cutting the rusty section out and making a cardboard template.





I then had a think about how to make it. As you can see it has a slight curve in it the whole length and theres also a curved lip. I thought the best way would be to make the bottom section out of 3 folds then cut the upper 3 section seperatly and weld it all together. Like this.





As I was welding I think I may have done it too quick as it did start to distort slightly. I managed to tap it near enough back into shape. The only thing is the part that holds the gutter in place is still a bit warped. I don't know if I'm trying to make it too perfect or if it is actually crap. The part that will be seen once its all back together is ok and so no one would know how it looks. This is how it looks just now.













I wasnt too happy with it but after showing my dad and a few other sheet metal workers they say its quite good. I tweaked it a little from when i took these photos and i feel happier about it aswell. I do self doubt myself a lot which can be a bad thing at times. It sort of hit me when one of my friends who does this stuff for a living said that people spend years and years with the proper tools to achieve a perfect flawless repair part. I dont have that much time. I havent fitted it yet as i need to fix up the A post first, its rusting quite badly all the way down from the inside but the way the panels are joined im having to take my time and think about the best way to go around fixing it.

To be honest. The first part of the van i done i wasnt happy with so i never posted it but seeing as i think i'll re-do it i'll show it here. I really started on the metalwork one night when i was bored and went to the garage instead of home. It was a little bit around the windscreen that had rusted quite badly.



I cut it out and made up a patch, it has a slight slight curve to the panel which i managed to get.





Then i tacked it in and welded it up. When i dressed it all off i realised i never really lined it up very well on the left. You can see its about 1/2 - 1 mm lower, thats why i never wanted to show it at first but hey, we all make mistakes and its all part of learning.



Anyways, back to the better stuff.

I went and bought some really good rust convertor,



and after filling a couple of holes and cleaning up the top channels i brushed it on. It turns the metal black like this.



I then went and bought an underseal probe and ghetto attached it to my weed killer pressurised spray bottle.



I diluted it with water ( you can dilute upto 50%) It meant i could then spray it inside the channels that i couldnt access so i can help stop whatever rust is in there and it would run down the seams and help stop the rust there too.


The next thing i started on was one of the brackets that the roof bolts down to the body, i forgot to take a photo of it on the van but here it is once i had cut it out.



I made up a cardboard template, cut it out and formed it then tacked it into place.



I then welded it all around. I decided to really take my time with this one. I need to have more patience with the welding so i done a few 10mm bursts then worked on something else whilst it cooled. Done a few more, let it cool, bit more let it cool etc... It seemed to have done the trick, once i ground the crap away i was quite happy with how this section turned out.







I just need to drill a couple of holes and fix some nuts on it now.

I also started on the driver side upper channel. I was amazed to see that although the drivers side is a lot worse along the full length of the van than the passangers side , the channel was not so bad as the passangers?!?! The part that the gutter attaches to was quite rotten but the rest of it was ok. That was actually pretty good because i never really wanted to go through the hassle of making another complete panel. So i cut it out.





I then went over the inside with a wire brush and painted on the rust converter stuff inside. I cut a 19mm strip out of metal and tacked it to the bottom curved section first then to the top. This section really did try my patiance as its about 450mm long so having to start and stop all the time was annopying but it paid off (practise makes perfect).

I also feel quite happy about this repair, i still need to continue it forward and back but i need to fix those other sections first.







Thats all i got done for today. The good thing is, from the 16th of may i took a weeks holiday to get more done on the bodywork so expect a bigger update in the next fortnight.

Like I said before impressive metal work

Wow nice work. keep it fun......

Nice work! I am a bodyman with over 33 yrs experience so I really enjoy your updates. |Keep them coming.

kgdb

You are a very talented fabricator and the photos help me a lot on how to make some off the pieces I am going to need for my project. The "digger" was a real nice gift and as you say will last a lot longer than "store" bought, and will probably be passed on.

Man,you've got a talent there.We enjoy the pics.I''d have a pile of scrap iron and a bunch of sore fingers.Keep up the great work.

The fabrication work you are doing looks great, don't sell yourself short. I have seen guys with journeymen papers using state of the art machines make a lot of scrap metal..lol..Keep cruising forward and YES keep the pictures flowing, you are an insperation to a lot of us who have to deal with rust issues... Now I need to make a metal bender, again thanks for all the pics.

End of a good weeks worth of metal work on the van. I wanted to get the upper part of the van done so I could get ready to attach the guttering but I didn't quite get that far. I only have the front, above the windscreen to finish off but I think I made good progress none the less. First thing I started on was the upper channel just behind the drivers door.

This is how it looked.




So, I had to cut the crap out which left me with this.





I considered cutting further down the panel, just below where the gutter would meet as it is quite pitted. I went over it with the wire brush in the grinder and it stayed in one piece so I left it as it is, if its strong enough to take wire hitting it at 11,000 rpm then that's good enough for me. I will fill the pits with filler later on.



You can see the panel that I cut out is missing what remained of the face that held the gutter. I cut it off so I could get a better gauge as to the curve it has. Its a very slight curve but just enough to make extra work for me. As the panel is 880mm long I decided it may be easier to cut two pieces at 440mm long and fold them separately.



I marked and cut them out. Notice that one them has the bracket that gets folded and bolts the roof down. I took a bit of extra time to work that out on the panel to where it should be. Then, halfway through folding it I realised I had folded it the opposite way to how it should have been, doh! . So I cut it off flush and decided to just cut one out and weld it in place when it was finished.

Now, I don't have any fancy shrinking/stretching machines and my skills aren't quite up to that task manually yet. I can do a wee bit of basic stretching but anything that has more than two faces just confuses me so I cheated. I cut strips into the panel so I could bend it then fill the gaps with weld later.



I tacked it to the body and clamped a bar inside to support the new panel and minimise distortion.



Then, after learning my lesson with the previous channel I made. I welded very patiently and checked it at every stage. It never distorted as much this time. I mean its not perfect but its passable.

A good tip for filling bigger gaps. Copper, its a welders dream. I never really thought about using it before for helping to fill big gaps until I read about a talented fabrication on the retro rides forum. You can see in the previous photo where the new panel meets the body just above the windows I had gaps that were about 10mm big in some places. Instead of cutting a strip and welding that in I used a bit of copper pipe that I flattened out with my hammer and held it on the inside. Then give it a few spots of weld and because the mild steel doesn't stick to the copper it just gives it something to rest on instead of blowing through. ( I don't know if I explained that very well).









With that done the next thing on my list was the rear. One of the corners was ok and just needed a good wire-brushing and a coat of the rust-converter. The other side, well.....



I began by cutting off the rust ( beginning to be quite a theme)



With the crap out the way I managed to clean it up the best I could and sprayed some rust converter inside the box section using my ghetto pressure gun.



Its quite a tight bend so I decided to make it out of individual flat panels and tack them together.





Using the copper pipe trick it made it a lot easier to fill the gaps and as it was all tacked together to the body it never really distorted anything.





Here is the other side that I never had to do anything to for comparison.



Whilst I was at the back I remembered about all the rust that was spreading through the spot welds at the seams.





I drilled out the spot welds so I could separate the panels and clear out the rust and prepare the panels.



I then clamped them tight to weld them back up.



I also went around all the spot welds on the drivers side of the van and done the same to all the areas that needed it.

So far, the rear and both sides of the upper van are now ready for the guttering (which I still have to fold) . I was now at the stage to start on the front, above the windscreen. To do that I needed to attach the channel I made previously, just above the passengers side. After looking at the A post and humming and hawing, general procrastinating and filling my time by filling in some pinholes around the front windscreen.....





....... It occurred to me that it would be silly to attach the channel before I fixed all the holes going down the A post as they both get attached at the top left corner to each other.



The A post has an inner channel that is covered by the outer body panel so the only way to properly get access to it is by *gulp* cutting out the nice un-damaged body panel. I thought long and hard about any other way of fixing it without having to do that but in the end I don't want to do a half-arsed job, I want to do it properly and then I can forget about it.

I drilled out the spotwelds going along the inside.



Then thought about the best way to remove a section. I took about 2 hours building up the courage to cut the whole length of the A-post and make a start.



Now, here's where I feel a bit foolish. The exact moment I had cut the panel off I had a very late eureka moment. Instead of cutting down the nicely curved A-post. I should have drilled out the spot welds along the inside of the windscreen opening and then make 2 smaller cuts just above and below the opening, thus leaving the A-post intact, bollocks, oh well.

Anyway, im glad I did go the whole way and get right into the inner panel as its pretty rotten in there.





The inner channel was cut out and I done the usual, clean, rust treatment and etch primer.



With the inner cut out I could get all the sizes I needed to make a replica.



I cut and folded the basic form of the panel.



You can see at the top it spreads out and also curves in both directions. I cut the channel down one edge and spread them out. I even managed to do a little real stretching/shrinking along with the old cut and shut. I cut a V out of some sheet and curved it a little and tacked it into place. I must have lined it up with the body 100 times but taking the time to do that pays off in the end. The bottom detail of the original panel wasn't actually rotten so I was able to cheat a little and cut that piece off and attach it to the new panel.





A little bit of a clean up and voila, a new-ish panel to weld back in.



A little bit of a de-rail but if you intend on cutting a lot of sheet metal I really recommend buying one of these.



I got mine from machine-mart for about £45 . I haven't really seen it anywhere else but its came in really handy. In fact, its what I turn to most when cutting sheet. It can handle up to 1.6mm sheet and can cut slight curves. It works by placing the sheet between the two discs, the upper wheel is serrated so it grips the sheet and the bottom wheel is a blade. When you pull the lever down it pulls the sheet into the tool and slices through he sheet easily without distortion, It even handles slight curves.



Anyway, back to the A-post. I tacked the inner panel back in and seam welded it up.



After I cleaned it up I was able to spotweld the upper channel I had made previously above the door opening.





Then came the other moment I was dreading, the reverse of cutting the length of the A-post. The attaching of the A-post. I really really really did not want this to get distorted (obviously) so I took even extra more patience with it. I tacked it along the seam then as I couldn't clamp the spot-weld area I went and bought some rivets and riveted it to the A-post.



After about 2 hours of careful welding, and waiting for it to cool down then repeating I was left with this.



After cleaning it up I got this.





I don't want to blow my own trumpet but I think after all this practise and time spent on the van im getting quite the hang of it. Its obviously got a few slight bumps in it but nothing a light skim of filler wont fix.
I could then attach both new channels together at the corner.



And a view of what I was trying to achieve in the first place. (don't mind the lower part, that will be dealt with later, im sticking to the top 1/3 of the van first)

before:


After:




That's pretty much all I got done on my week off. I spent about 42 hours this week doing all this. It feels great to have gotten so much done in a short period of time. I wish I never had to work and I could do this all day long but alas, life doesn't work that way.

Also, ive said it before but i really do appreciate everyones comments and suggestions. It helps to keep the momentum going and makes me feel pretty good about what im doing, cheers!

I hear you. Making a living sure gets in the way of having fun. LOL. Great to see you making some progress. Excellent job on the A post. Just keep taking little bites and you will be on top of it soon.

Duane in Tennessee.

Is there any part you can't make!!!! LOL Impressive

Great photos as usual. Very impressed with the amount of progress you are making, it makes me look positively lazy....!!!! Can't wait to see this van at some shows in the future... Keep up the good work...
Sy

outstanding work sir...................................

I havent actually done anythign to the van this weekend but, i did buy the donor vehicle for it.



Check it out, 1994 LS400 with all the goodies. 107,000 miles which isnt much on this V8. The cars good but it has a bit of slight damage to the front drivers side and a bit of a crack in the windshield. The idea is i will drive it until i need the engine so i can get used to the power and see if there is any niggles with the engine.







Heres the damage, apparantly during the winter the guy couldnt get it up a hill so he left it at the bottom and someone hit it and drove off with out leaving detail. Its not bad, just need to bolt the bumper back in place. It does have a crack in the windshield though, which i hope wont get worse.



And the reason i bought it.

Can you come fix my van? I can do mechanicals, but damn that body work. toad

What's it look like now??? it's been awhile since you posted pic's

kevbarlas,
I have to say that your undertaking the restoration of that van is amazing and the work you've done is first rate I can't wait to see how your going to retrofit that Lexus engine in. Keep the updates coming!!!!

Dan

I seen one of these out at a pick a part in rialto ca. not long ago. . . . didn't know what it was.