Well that was a waste of a weekend. In a misguided attempt to correct bad welding, I propose it is my ground. Turns out that was wrong too.
So we filmed a lot of wasteful effort to get the floor bed installed.
I received a lot of help from people emailing me and messaging me. The consensus, the welder is not hot enough. I need to turn up the voltage.
This is an exercise in frustration. My next video will be with hotter settings on the welder and hopefully some welds that stick.
I’m pretty sure the bracing is in the wrong place on the frame supports too. There is a bow in the bed that can only be explained by these braces being in the wrong place.
In this episode I diagnose a non-starting Range Rover. Turns out it was actually pretty simple. I do some mostly-questionable things in this video. When working with gasoline (petrol for those of you in the “other English” speaking countries) you need to be VERY careful. More careful than I am in this video.
First, I try to catch fuel from the return line, which would not have come out of that line, it would come out of the rail on top the engine. In itself not terribly dangerous on a cold engine. The second is opening the fuel lines from the fuel pump. Again not terribly dangerous in itself, but not smart either. A little static electricity and this may have been my last video. So don’t be stupid.
SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read the next paragraph if you haven’t watched the video and still want to be surprised by the cause of my non-starting Range Rover Classic.
Ever run out of gas? Well, I have now for my second time in 44 years of driving. I ran out once when I was 18 years old. I was 2 miles from the gas station and just forgot to fill up the FIRST time I passed the station. My dad was cool, and came and got me, chastised me the 2 miles to the gas station and was kind enough to drive me back to my 1973 Ford Maverick.
The second time I ran out of gas…was apparently last week after I parked the Big White Bus. I guess I had just enough gas to get her back into the garage.
Yeah, my non-starting was due to an empty fuel tank. I put 8 gallons in and she started right up. LOL.
I took the rest of the day and finished welding the Z bar on to the rear floor pan. Then I painted it. I spend a little extra time spraying paint into the gap between the Z bar and the floor pan. The idea here was the liquid paint would go between the metals and hopefully coat between the two pieces. I will also file the space with rattle-can rhino-liner, chip sealer, or whatever you want to call it. Then I will fill the gap with seam sealer.
I got to some length about perhaps melting some wax and making it run in there. Sounds like a great idea, but probably not a great idea. I’ll stick to seam sealer.
In this episode. Grady and I get the Z bar welded to the floor pan panel. After the debacle of last week was finally solved, we had some new tools and great grounds to work with. These allowed for our plug welds and our panel butt-welds to hold.
I also noticed I had the heat up too high on the welder. Once I lowered that, the welder didn’t blow through the panel. There were a LOT of welds. We went through a half tank of shielding gas. And in the end we ran out of gas. So next weekend I’m going to need to get down to the welding supply house and get a fresh tank of gas.
If you remember the first video we determined we needed to cut about an 1/8th of an inch off one side. It turned out to be closer to 1/4th of an inch when I finished. We used the pinch vise clamps, some hammering, and a lot of bending to get the panel flat enough to make good welds.
Grady got to weld quite a few welds. I think I need a second welding mask so I can watch his technique and help him to get better. He did a pretty good job after he got the hang of it. Its fun for me to see him engaged and wanting to learn.
We have 2/3rds of the sides on now. Our first task will be to get the last one welded on and to fit it ONE MORE TIME. We fitted the panel and I’m 92.6% sure the panel will go in cleanly and fit properly.
That’s all for this week.
We wish you all a very Merry Christmas.
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This week is part two of Grady and I trying to get the damn Z bar attached to the bed. We had a helluva time getting our welds to stick. In the end it came down to me removing a lot of the primer and paint I spent so much time getting into place.
The welds were not taking because the ground was poor. It required me to grind off a lot of paint and to get new vice clamps to hold the steel together.
Taking that paint off was no challenge for the power tools. It was painful to me because my ultimate goal in all this was to put this floor bed back together BETTER than it was before. The better is that I don’t have to worry about it rusting out.
Once I get it back together, I am going to spend significant time getting it recoated with paint and rust preventative coverings. This may be challenging with winter now upon us. It was 70F today but it is in the thirties in the mornings. I’m hoping for a warm spell around the new year so I can get the paint applied.
That’s about it for this episode. Like and Subscribe.
In this post my grandson and I work on the floor bed to get it to dry fit. The first thing we needed to do was to get the Z bar into place. This required us making the side rail straightened and in some places cut some useless steel off.
The next thing we needed was to tack weld the Z bar into place. This was quite the challenge. I tried tacking and it didn’t take. I finally got my weld to hold. I let Grady weld too. His welds would not stick either.
After some frustration we determined that likely we didn’t have a good ground. I put in a lot of effort to get this steel painted so it wouldn’t rust. That unfortunately also prevented us from having a good ground for our welding.
I ground off a lot of paint. This is going to be a problem. The whole reason for the paint is to prevent the damn rust in the first place. So once I get the Z bar in place I’m going to need to paint everything again.
We finally got the Z bar into place and tried to fit the panel. We are about an 1/8 to a 1/4 of an inch off. This is going to require some additional cutting and more fitting to make sure we have it right before we start attaching the braces.
This is part 1 of 2. We spent WAY too much time with welding and prepping. So I cut this down to under 30 minutes.
In this episode I change the oil the my Range Rover Classic. My grandson Grady came over to help so we tried to make this mundane task fun!
The good news is we got the Big White Bus running and drove it out of the shoppe! This was huge. It’s been a while and to see her running and driving was pretty awesome.
Not much to say about the oil change, I done this somewhere around 73 or 74 times. Every 3,000 miles, or in this case, after sitting for 4 years. I know, I know, but it all worked out. It’s got fresh oil for now and we’ll be starting and running the Range Rover Classic every week from here on out.
We also gave her a bath. 4 years of dust had settled on her and it was badly needed. Also helps me keep a cleaner shoppe.
That’s about it for this week. Hopefully Mrs. Okierover has won her third straight Oklahoma Senior Games Over 55 Women’s 3v3 Basketball tournament. With a win, they advance once again to Nationals. I’ll report back next week with the results.
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