Life at the orphange

[Terry]

Hi,

a bit slack, nearly 12 months to the day since I last wrote something in here.

After almost 3 months my special taps and die finally arrived from the UK via Air Mail.

These are 5/8" x16tpi in Whitworth Form or sometimes referred to as BSW specials when searching for them and managed to get all four and postage for the same price as buying just one through one of the UK Mini sites so after some months of pretty much giving up on them I am happy to have them now.

What makes them special is they can clean up the thread at each end of the A series crank and the associated bolt. So the day I got them I tested them out on any crank and bolts laying around, even though some of them didn't need it, but still I know the crank in DS is pretty tight when doing up the flywheel bolt so next time it is out of the car I can tidy it up.



Terry

[Terry]

Hi,

I have been thinking about building a trolley for wheeling engines around on so I can clean them outside and then the idea and the requirements kept growing into a trolley to remove the whole front end assembly. Being in lock down I had to improvise with some off cut of metal for the legs, some old BBQ trolley for braces and a pram was demolished for the wheels and handle.




Although the pictures show it is possible to have the engine and sub-frame on the trolley for getting out from under the car, it really is too heavy and not practical for that purpose. The wheels are only plastic, the handle is too short and the engine rocks back and forth a bit. When it came to cleaning the engine the sub frame is in the way and then un doing the engine from the sub frame the trolley gets in the way so it was a bit of a failure in that sense.

However it is a great trolley for dismantling the sub-frame and for rebuilding the bits of the sub-frame at a nice height and can be moved around easily when the weight is on it. The two pieces of really soft packing wood onto of the trolley stop the sub-frame moving around without having to bolt/hold it place. I haven't done a rear sub frame on it yet but I did measure it up with that in mind.

So I still need a trolley for moving engines around for cleaning and maybe working on but happy with my sub-frame trolley.

Terry 

[Terry]

Hi,

I started playing with a small Moke size trailer that I acquired recently with the intention to convert it 13" wheels and make it a bit more practical. The trailer has been passed around a couple of Forum members over the years so some people may have seen it before.


And the wheels in the trailer came off a previous conversion i did for SpiceMokes trailer 10 years ago and gave the redundant wheels away only to open up this trailer and find they have found their way back again, now I have four useless little wheels.
 

The lid doesn't shut properly so I have undone a hinge and a strut for now to make it sit properly but will need to improve the set up before it hits the road.

Took the tub off the frame and put it on the hoist because I can.


First job has been to make the hub work with the Moke wheels and fortunately on these trailers the PCD is 101.6mm so instead of re-drilling four new holes to take standard Moke wheel studs, which I can't do this time because of some metal missing in the flange. The wheel fits over the hub which is good so I decided to machine down the original wheel studs to Moke size which although time consuming it will be less trouble than fitting Moke rear hubs and machining the axle to suit.


Once I finish converting the wheel studs I need to widen the axle.

Terry
 

[Terry]

Hi,

and a recent removal of some excess vehicles and spares required me to drag out a couple of Mokes I haven't seen for a long time so I took the opportunity to give them dry clean and reacquaint myself with their features.

The yellow Moke is one of the Darwin Fleet and is a pretty bog standard 1980+ model that is mostly complete but has body damage on the passenger side that has been repaired but the filler is bubbling up. The bonnet also shows sign that it was part of a BBQ at some stage. The hardtop is made of aluminium by an aircraft engineer so it is reasonably light and well constructed.


Came up not bad after the dry clean. I didn't use water as i wanted to keep them dry before putting them away again.



The second Moke is sort of the start of the Moke collection. I had built my first Moke and I went to an ex-MOA member who was selling out, including a new engine in a crate. He also had a set of sunraysias, this Moke and a body shell, which became DS a few years later, so I bought the lot and addiction began.


The Moke is called Merlin and sported a sort of Yellow and Red colour scheme and had an engine with red dots and for a 1975 it has little rust considering. The 998 has a couple of 1.25' Su carbies but otherwise it looks standard under the bonnet but has some chunky old school tyres on the front. The hardtop is an ex Melbourne City Council Parking inspectors roof that I acquired somewhere else and just lives on this Moke for storage. Considering the hardtop has been on it for about 15 years the front donuts are still sitting quite high as they are at least 40 years old.

[Steam]

Time to give those old boys a new lease of life.
No time like the present.

[Drakman]

Hi Terry,

I know a pretty good shrink down in Melbourne, most addictions can be controlled if they haven't  gone too ..... Oh, sorry Terry.  Look on the bright side they got a vaccine for Covid so there's always hope!

It does seem to be spreading though.

[Halfpint]

Dave,
I think a few people have attempted archaeological digs searching for the Moking Grail at Terry’s place only to re a merge several days later unable to speak, dehydrated, coughing and covered in dust. And that’s just from one of the rooms in the shed  .
Seriously though, I think Terry has a cool story about every shell, bare or complete that he has come across. No one can afford a shrink to tell all those stories me thinks 
HP

[Drakman]

Hi HP,

So what you are telling me is that it is highly contagious and Terry is a carrier?  OMG, i think i must have come into contact with Terry then, I'm starting to exhibit all the same signs.  Ehh, could be worse!

I am working on my procrastination skills at the moment, i have the dash and wiring out of the green Moke so i am looking for things to keep me sane.

Cheers
Dave

[Terry]

Hi,

some more progress on the trailer last night with the fitting up of the wheel guards, a couple of plastic jobbies, which is about the closest I could get to the general style of the trailer and I didn't want the basic folded hard cornered steel ones on the garden variety trailers.



I started work on the axle repositioning which just needs some extra bit of metal packing to be welding on before I can test fit it all in place but I will try and remember to takes some photos to show how I have approached it. In the picture above the wheel is out a little bit further than its final placement and the rim has a 205/60 tyre which is okay as a test wheel because it was handy but trying to build it to handle a taller tyre as well.

Terry

Terry

[Halfpint]

Looks really light Terry, a great boot space behind a Moke for a road trip.
Are they the rims your going to use? Or lighter alloy type later?
Plastic guards  never ever thought to look for that before, but they look good.
HP

[Steam]

I prefer a bit of weight in a trailer, makes it more stable.

[Terry]

Hi,

on our recent Lap Around Victoria I managed to have a moment, that if it had happened a few seconds later would have been quite a different outcome, caused by a steering arm breaking. It was a hairy ride for a little bit until the Moke came to a stop. There was a lot the that happened to find a replacement and get going again which took up pretty much the whole day that I will share elsewhere.

This is the broken steering arm that normally connects the steering rack to the swivel hub. You can see from the break that the there are shiny bits and darker rusted bits in the cross section which indicates there has been a fracture in there for sometime before the eventual failure.


As for a potential cause there was one idea put forward that it is caused by the common type of ball joint breaker being struck with a hammer which has merit. I have only seen two other arms fail on Mokes and if we exclude the Moke that drove into a rock wall heading up to the Lookout at Tamworth the other one was on a similar corrugated outback road,not the road itself, but potentially the amount of driving on outback roads each Moke has done.

While others went ahead to find a replacement arm this bush mechanic fix was quite impressive not just in that it managed to do 30km on a rough corrugated road but by the number of people that provided from their own experiences the different ideas that eventual became this splint. The nut on the tie rod end was removed and the bolt on the swivel hub was loosened and a piece of fencing wire was looped around each end. A 10mm spanner was then slipped over the tie rod end and the nut fitted, the fencing wire was then  twisted and the nut tightened to pull it all together. Then four hose clamps were used to hold it all together.


An unpredictable thing to drive, ending up off the edge of the road more than a few times, but it did the job to get us much closer to the highway for the fitting of the replacement arm.

Terry   

[Halfpint]

Wow Terry,
lucky you didn’t have use an important spanner like a 7/16” 
Thanks for putting up what happened and the ‘cough cough’ Fix 
Amazing what a few ideas cobbled together, drawn from experience, ingenuity and necessity can achieve, well done to you all.
HP

[Pete Power]

Good ol' #8 fencing wire

[Mazy]

.....And who'd a thought a 'spanner in the works' could turn out to be useful?!


      Mazy