Flash

By now I was seriously committed. I've done a number of bog and fiberglass jobs in the past myself, but realised that this van deserved far more than that. My welding skills are close to non existent so I needed to find someone who would do the old girl justice without breaking the bank. After chatting to a number of folk and getting some ridiculous estimates that were literally pulled out of thin air I finally stumbled across a metal magician called Barry. I must have spent almost two hours at his place while he went over the bodywork with a fine tooth comb and we discussed various approaches. Barry's bread and butter is structural WOF repairs, but he offered to undertake the work on the van in between his regular customers at a very reasonable hourly rate. We agreed to an up front engagement of 20 hours and I could then assess how things were going and we could take things from there. It sounds crazy now that I should have taken such a blind leap of faith, but sometimes you can just read a person right and this was one of those cases. I'll try not to bore you to death with endless photos, but hopefully the ones that I post will give you an idea of the skills that Barry possesses and the amazing job that he did on the van. So firstly a few pics of the carnage. Lots of swiss cheese and lashings of dodgy repairs that were hidden under layers of luscious bog.

yep, they sure seem to be a popular choice.

A week later I was back at Dave's shop to re-assemble the van and get it home. A few images of the overall result.

That is pretty thirsty for a 2 barrel browndog. My mate is running a 302 with a 2 barrel Holley in his Bedford van and on a trip back from Kawhia last Sunday he averaged 12.8 litres per 100km. I drove right behind him so our speeds were similar and I ended up averaging just under 21 on the same trip. His van is running a C4 and a 3.0 diff ratio. Only difference is that he is running 15 inch rear wheels with a 50 profile tyre compared to my 14 inch 50 profiles. My van is running a TH350 and a 3.0 ratio diff. Revs are around 2700 at 100km/h. I had my Quickfuel professionally setup by a local V8 specialist (I won't mention any names, but they have a pretty good reputation). It wasn't a cheap exercise. I've done about 8,000km since I had the dyno setup done. Everyone I've spoken to blames the crap aerodynamics of the van for the high consumption but my mate's van proves that decent economy can still be achieved.

So I took a trip over to The Shore for a quick chat with Dave from Autoblast and quickly realised that swapping some cash for a professional blast job sounded much more attractive than spending 4 months sucking in lung fulls of dust. Its only money after all. My plan was to strip it down to the basics at home and then drive across to Dave's shop where I would then strip off as much as possible before Dave worked his magic.

Quickfuel 580VS Neil, gotta admit I should have done more homework before making that choice.

It was a damn good guess browndog. I'll post more on the mechanical side of the build over the coming days but in summary I'm very happy with the V8 conversion although she is exceptionally thirsty at the moment. The donor van was very economical, but I made the mistake of replacing the carbie and she is now averaging around 20 litres per hundred kilometers on the open road. Still better than the Vauxhall 2.3, but not as good as my original Holley. But that is something that I am working on resolving.

On close inspection of the rest of the body I could see signs of previous bog work and a number of rust patches. I'd used a bit of detective work to track down the original owner and discussions with him had revealed that the van had lived outdoors for the first 20 years of its life and over those years he had had a number of rust repairs done. I was faced with two options, first option being my original plan of a quick and nasty bog job on what was visible, the second option being to remove all of the paint and start from scratch. After much deliberation I decided to go for the second option. I purchased a sandblasting pot and proceeded to line our garage with sails to turn it into a blasting booth. We had a pretty good technique going. I'd blast as much of the paint off in one go as I could and then I'd mark the entire area with a black sharpie before going over it again. Its not easy to see in all that dust so any sharpie lines left give you a good idea of where you have missed the second time around. You can see the levels of air borne dust in one of the pictures of the bonnet. I was probably getting about 5 minutes of blasting out of a full pot. I'd then have to stop, sweep up the garnet into a red plastic bucket and take it outside where Mrs Flash would sieve the garnet with a flour sifter before filling up a green bucket for re-use. We had a chain of about half a dozen red and green buckets going. Each time you refill the pot you have to drop the pressure and then re-pressurise the filled pot afterwards so it was pretty time consuming. After two weekends of blasting all that I had managed to clean was the inner and outer bonnet, inner and outer grill and half of a back quarter panel. A quick calculation pointed towards about 4 months of weekends to complete the entire shell. Despite my best efforts at lining the garage our new house had turned into a dust bowl and even although we were using high quality dust masks I was starting to cough like a cowboy and had grit in places I didn't even know I had. I guess by now that you can tell how this is going to end.

By this time I'd realised that a windowless van was something of a rarity, so the quest was on to return the cargo door to its original factory condition by getting rid of the sliding window. After months of searching for a relatively rust free windowless door I gave up and compromised on a fibreglass replacement panel that I sourced from Aus. The plan being to graft this panel onto my relatively straight cargo door. After trimming and massaging the panel a bit it was epoxied in place and then reinforced from the back with chopped strand.

That's a bloody good question. The donor van is a newer CF2 model which has the square front end, single piece plastic front bumper and flat plastic grill. Its a matter of personal taste but I prefer the look of the the older CF1 model with its chrome front bumperettes, contoured metal grill and bull nose bonnet. Also not that obvious in the pictures of the donor van is the fact that the side panel recesses aren't original. At some stage the van had been cut for windows and later on the windows had been removed and plated over. The job was pretty shoddy with cracked bog visible and weeping surface rust around each joint. The final nail in the coffin for the red van was that it had clearly had a number of below standard modifications along the way, unlike the unmolested blank canvas that the white van presented.

The donor van looked like a bit of a swamp donkey with an awesome roller paint job, but it ran really well and I could see the value in the mechanical bits and pieces. The first thing that I did was flick on the Dragweld rims and tyres and immediatley managed to recoup a quarter of the cost of the complete van. I also removed the wheel arch extensions and running boards and then slapped on a set of Cheviot Tridents destined for my original van. As the donor still had a valid WOF and REGO my plan was to drive the donor van which would allow me to take my original van off the road to start sorting the bodywork.

The rest of the summer was spent generally hooning around ... well as much hooning as you can do with an awesome Vauxhall power package. The annual pilgrimage to Kumue in January 2011 nearly ended in tears when she started to overheat whilst we were sitting in the traffic. On pulling out the radiator I discovered that most of the fins had long gone and the inside looked pretty blocked. I splurged out on a re-core, new radiator hoses and a brand new water pump. Whilst I had it all in bits I replaced the cam belt and had the distributor reconditioned. New spark plugs, leads and a distributor cap completed the package. Although the cooling issue was a thing of the past, performance still left much to be desired. It seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for both fuel and oil and I soon realised that I was on a hiding to nowhere if I was going to try to make anything decent out of the original mechanicals. So I hatched a cunning plan which came in the form of a donor van fitted with a Chev 350 small block, TH350 auto and a Galaxy 9 inch rear.

As previously mentioned I pulled the van out of storage towards the end of 2010. The first step was to chuck a WOF and a bit of REGO on it so that I could assess the overall mechanical condition. The first issue was a lack of charging which I traced to a broken alternator exciter wire. The only other items needing sorting for WOF were a new sealed beam up front and a replacement tail light globe. I'd also managed to score myself a sorry looking set of Cheviot Tridents off TradeMe. After a few hours with some 1200 grit water paper and a tube of Autosol, we were in business

So firstly a little bit of the van's history. It was purchased new from Schofields in Newmarket in June 1978 by a gent who owned his own glazing business in Mount Eden. The van was immediately fitted with ply floor covering and was used as his daily work hack until he retired in 1998. The van was then sold to a chap from Temuka who owned the van for a further 11 years. During this time it was mainly used as an overnight camper by the then owner who was a keen fisherman. He moved over to Aus and the van was sold to a gent from Weston who only owned it a for a few months before selling it on to me. At that stage the van had covered just over 196,000 km. Apart from an aftermarket flip up glass sunroof and a sliding window fitted to the cargo door, the van was in stock standard condition complete with the original Vauxhall 2.3 litre motor, manual 4 speed box and a diff that limited top speed to 80k's per hour. Although it had an aerial fitted there was no evidence of a radio fitment, not even some stray wiring. My original plan was to give the body a quick tidy up and a lick of paint and to get it as reliable as possible. As you all know even the simplest of plans don't always work out that way and what follows is a diary of my journey with plenty of uphills and downhills along the way.

Ta muchly.

Yep, I thought the same until I got the paint off her. Standby for some snaps of what was lurking under the paint.

Just got to figure out how to link this to my build thread. Standby ....

Well I've been lurking around the forum for a few months now and have really enjoyed trolling through the Projects and Build Ups section. I figured it was about time that I gave something back by sharing some of the history of my van build. First off a bit of background: In December 2009 I spotted a relatively unmolested Bedford CF230 panelvan on TradeMe. The van was located down south in Weston so too far away for me to view it personally, but I liked what I saw in the pictures. A quick online check listed 3 previous owners and at the asking price of $2,500 I figured it was worth a punt. A quick call to Captain Transporter and the van was on its way north. The timing really sucked as we were staying in a small studio apartment in the city and were just about to start building a new house, so the van went straight into storage where it languished for almost a year. Discuss here //oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/45781-flashs-78-bedford-panelvan/#entry1413650 A few dodgy snaps of the van taken shortly after it came out of storage.

It was our first time at this event. Bloody awesome ! Thanks to everyone for making us feel so welcome.

Yep, Blair at Sterlings just re sleeved the master cylinder for my van. Top job and a great bloke to deal with.

Are you running steel rims or mags ? I have experienced similar wheel vibrations with mag rims if they don't have a spigot locating ring. They run fine on a balancing machine as the machine uses the centre hole to spin the rims up.

I'm usually there with my yellow Bedford van.