03/03/24 – Making more sawdust

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us. As with the past few updates, we’re still pushing on with the Palvan, though there has been some activity on Madge this week. The van was turned during the week to allow better access to the next set of doors, thanks to the Ops team for doing this for us.

With the van spun round, I was able to get better access to the bottoms of the repaired doors to finish them off. The main jobs here were to mount the lower door bolt and put some reinforcing structure in to support the re-designed door bottom. I started with the lower door bolt, which required a hole to be drilled vertically upwards through all 10inches of wood!

Nick and Ernie made a start on the other side, getting the doors to the point where they would be ready to remove. They then go carried away and took the door off anyway, I think the rationale was to take it off before it fell off.

Nick, Ernie and Charlie then stripped the door down to its component parts and started to clean up the back of the hinges.

The Swapmeet caused some distraction on Sunday morning, but the team were soon in full swing to continue. Oliver and I made a start on cutting the first bits of new wood for the door that was removed.

One horizontal piece was manufactured, until the attention had to turn to the uprights. This side was the west side, so is in slightly worse condition than the east, and its showing. The bottom 5 inches of the upright was rotten, so I’m having to graft a new bit onto the bottom. This will be well treated before being glued and doweled onto the bottom of the upright.

Nick, Tom and Mark looked at the free hinges to straighten them out. This required the use of the heat gun, with some novel solutions to protect the side sheets and get the hinges straight.

Mark and Tom also fetched two more bits of ply from our stores which will form the backs of the doors on this side of the Palvan.

Dave, Dan and Jack undertook some work on Madge, the Scammell Scarab. Dave continued removing parts for refurbishment, while the rear portion of the chassis was needle gunned and scraped by Jack and Dan respectively. The Hydrovane took some coaxing into life, but settled down once warm.

That’s the work this weekend covered. Thank you for reading and join us next week, where I’ll probably be making more sawdust and sticking the door back together!