Coalmossian's 1960 Traveller Restoration '91-'13?

[Coalmossian]

I am currently thinking that I might possibly put the restoration of my 1960 Traveller onto this section if there is any interest? As a pensioner, I belong to an age where one was told that it was unseemly to blow your own trumpet, and really no-one but your friends and family has any real desire to know what you're up to! Unlike today where everyone seems to think that, via Facebook, Twitter (neither of which I use!) and other social networking sites it is imperative that you let the entire world have access to all information starting with what was eaten for breakfast, how many times one's been to the toilet and whatever garbage is planned for the night's TV viewing!
So, by now you will have gathered that I am a bit of a trending philistine, and probably a pretty boring old-fashioned git! Well, what do you expect of a retired biology/science teacher? So sorry, no "lol" ( I had a feeling it wasn't Lots of Love, but I thought it was Loads of Laughs!) or "lmao"( whatever that is!) in my wee story ( what's a "thread"?)
Anyway, back in 1990 or so, I purchased one or two Morris Minors with the intention of getting them free of rust and up and running, neither of which I succeeded in doing! I was reasonably handy, having bought an old farmhmouse with outbuildings and an acre of land in rural Aberdeenshire, and I had turned it from a barely habitable dwelling into a much extended, comfortable and reasonably well appointed modern home with space for myself and my wife, our three children and my wife's mother and grandmother! Yes, that's right.........4 generations in one house (plus the cats and the Newfoundland!)........does that allow me to be slightly off the wall? It probably explains my patience and my desire to have a "sheddie" where I could do my woodwork and my barn where I thought I could restore my cars!! Any way, having slated, installed windows, having wired and plumbed, pointed, stripped, plasterboarded, taped, insulated and goodness knows what else, how difficult could it be to restore a simple wee car like a Morris Minor!?
Anyway, having as a tweenager (the next decade after "teenager"!) been absolutely convinced that I could do pretty much anything that I set my mind to, ( after all I'd stripped and rebuilt the engine on my Mk1 Cortina GT and fitted a Piper ( or was it Pyper?) high lift cam and done many other repairs.......sadly often involving aluminium mesh and Cataloy!) I soon found out that perhaps there was a bittie more to this restoration lark than I had imagined!! After all,I had bought Practical Classics every month for ages and read all the articles. What else is necessary!
Now, it so happened that in the early '90's my wife, Anne, and I had made the acquaintance of a wonderful old Englishman of the name Charles Fripp, probably down to the fact that he had a wee business in one of the fishing towns of Aberdeenshire from which he sold Minor parts etc.Initially, not knowing who he was, I had written a letter to "The man who sold Morris Minors, somewhere near Banff, Aberdeenshire, Scotland" and, all credit to the Royal Mail, I received a reply about a fortnight later! Charles was a wonderful guy, but was bit like a fish out of water living in a wee parochial fishing community like Portsoy where you weren't regarded as part of the community unless at least five generations of your family had been born and bred there!! He was a frightfully proper English-spoken bachelor with a great handlebar moustache and mutton-chops whiskers who fitted into the Portsoy social hierarchy about as well as Robert Mugabe at a Ku Klux Klan meeting! Except that there wasn't an unpleasant bone in the man's body! He just wanted to get on with his life and have one or two friends, but up there people didn't even pass the time of day with him. In the two years that he lived there I believe that, apart from Anne and I, no-one ever even invited him for tea! If anyone knows of his whereabouts now, please let me know. I have tried to find him a couple of times, but I'm none too able at a lot of this internet malarky! Still trying to negotiate my way around this MMOC site, to be honest!!
Anyway, Charles, who had a Daimler Conquest, a Humber Hawk and a lovely Porcelain Green Minor convertible ( which he offered to sell to us.....how I wish I could have afforded it!), had been down on a visit to Englandshire to sell the Humber, and had returned with an Almond Green Traveller of '60 vintage. This he offered to us, and it came into our possession before he even got the vehicle registered in his name, so I am actually only the third registered owner.
She was a sweet running wee car, as she should have been having done only 54,000 miles and having been well looked after all her life. Charles, had he had time to get his name onto the logbook (buff) would have been the third owner, but instead, that privelege fell to me. The previous owner had been a lady in Sonning Common, near Reading in Berkshire. This lady had owned the vehicle since 1965 so had had it for about a quarter of a century, and when I got it in 1991, I got in touch with her to ask her one or two questions about it.
Sadly, it seemed that she had been the victim of a couple of conmen who had approached her with a view to purchasing this rather nice Frilford Grey Traveller with a view to cherishing it and looking after it for a long time to come! Having persuaded the good lady to sell it (probably for a song!), they promptly sold off the registration number (WJB 699), gave it a quick blow-over with Almond Green to make it more desirable to punt it on ( some parts inside being left grey, and other parts, including most of the interior and the engine bay, being brush painted with all the care and effort one would expect of a two year old!)!
The good lady also informed me that her husband had religiously rubbed down and re-varnished the wood every Autumn, and that certainly explains why the wood was in such excellent condition structurally, even if the inner beauty was slightly obscured by the layers of varnish!! In fact, the wood proved to be in such good condition that during the current restoration ( ongoing as I type!) it has been decided not to replace it or even remove it from the vehicle.
The interior of the vehicle had also clearly been carefully looked after, and so it is that Newton Commercial are going to be making very little money out of me for this restoration as the only thing I shall be buying from them will be a new set of carpets. WJB 699 had, when I took over ownership ( she had been allocated one of those awful "A" suffix numbers by now; BLJ 533A) been appointed with one of those rubber floor coverings which are, of course, unobtainable now, and so carpets will be the order of the day when she is finally completed.
After purchasing the vehicle from Charles, she was used as an everyday runabout until tax or the MOT ran out ( can't remember which!)
Then I took her off the road with the intention of doing some cosmetic work to her This started in summer 1991, when I removed the interior, started to strip the passenger side woodwork of it's layers of varnish with a hot airgun and scraper, and I removed all four wings. Then the engine and gearbox came out, followed the rear springs and the back axle. Most things were removed from the engine bay, and the rear sliding windows also got separated from the shell. Off came the driver's side shocker, kingpin and hub.
She sat on the chassis tilter looking somewhat sad and denuded, and occasionally I would suffer a wee pang of guilt that might see me take a piece of abrasive paper to a section of wood, or try out a new type of paint/rust removing aid on a door or in the engine bay. Never did it enter my head that actual restoration would be so far into the future that I should have left these areas painted to keep the surface rust at bay! I didn't realise that I was making so much more work for the restoration when it did finally happen!
Basically WJB 699/BLJ 533A which had now become SSU 377 ( I had applied for an age-related number before the Aberdeen branch of the Vehicle Licensing Office knew that such things existed!) sat upon the chassis tilter for the next 21 years, I am ashamed to say!
It's only now that I am retired and have a wee bit of cash to spare that I have taken the plunge and decided that the only way restoration of this vehicle is ever going to happen is if I enlist the help of a professional! I am now 63 years old, with a bit of arthritis in my left ( gear lever!) shoulder, and I want to have the time to enjoy my Morris before I am only capable of driving a vehicle with with power steering and an automatic gearbox ( God forbid!!). I used to despise those who I regarded as being guilty of doing chequebook restorations, but, as there had been absolutely no progress in the last two decades, I felt itwas my only option
So, about three months ago, I put the shell up to Retro Restorations near Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire to see what he thought was possible. While he didn't quite recoil in abject horror at his first sight of my treasure, I got the distinct feeling that he would really prefer to be getting on with the FHC E-type or the Mk 1 Escort that were in his workshop, and that he was just taking the job on as a kindness to a nostalgia-filled old (-ish) man who had a project that he couldn't seem to get done elsewhere!
The photographs attached to this article show what the owner, Graeme, was taking on!! Shall we just say that it looked, at first glance, like something that had been stripped and left in a damp barn for almost quarter of a century!
Now, all that writing wot yoo 'av just read is an introduction and brief history of myself and my Traveller. I don't really know whether I am boring the pants off people who look at this website or not, so I will go no further than this other than to say that I shall monitor any comments and feedback on what I have written so far, and if anyone is actually interested and cares to read any more of my verbal outpourings then I shall consider writing some more. However, having been a teacher for three and a half decades, I know how easy it can be when talking about something that interests the speaker to go on ( and on...and on.....and on!) without realising that half the audience can't wait for the end to come!!
Your comments and feedback determine whether or not I write any more, but someone said that it would be a good idea for members to tell the tale of their restorations!! Bet he/she's regretting it now!!!!!
I shall just say that things have progressed apace since "The Beastie" went into the Moggy hospital! [frame][/frame]

[jagnut66]

Hi,
Would love to see more pictures of before as well as after, plus what colour have you chosen? Back to the original grey?
It doesn't look that bad from your first picture.......
Best wishes,
Mike.

[Coalmossian]

And another!!
And the colour I have chosen is Old English White......more of which later![frame][/frame]

[Coalmossian]

And another![frame][/frame]

[DAVIDMCCULLOUGH]

Keep up the good work Ian, we all love seeing pictures of hard work and shiney paint!!

Will it be ready for the National Rally in Oxford this year??

[George Smathers]

Frilford Grey is a grand color. Thanks for background.

George

[Coalmossian]

I can only assume that all those who fell asleep reading Part 1 have not yet awakened, as no-one has, as yet, told me to stop and shut up! What a polite bunch you all are! Must be the festive goodwill and all that! In fact one member from the USA kindly thanked me for the "background" to the restoration, and David McCullough has encouraged me!!
As I said before, "chequebook restorations" are something that I am rather ambivalent about, and while I have had to seek outside help to allow me to achieve my ultimate goal, it is my intention to as much of the rest of the donkeywork as I can, so that at least I can own and drive a vehicle that has a little of my blood, sweat ( not much of that so far as the weather's been b***** freezing and I've been working outside in 3C below zero!) and tears. That way I can justifiably, I hope, feel a little pride in my accomplishment. The guy who is doing the welding and paintwork, Graeme Morisson of Retro Restorations (http://www.retro-restoration.co.uk) has been working on a rather nice FHC E-Type for someone, and the guy has paid several tens of thousands, but done nothing himself? Where's the fun in that!?
I left you last time saying that I had taken the shell up to Graeme one rather unpleasant day during that seaon laughingly known as "summer", and we had unloaded and pushed it into a corner of his rather large workshop. He had looked at and passed a number of comments on it, none of which really led me to believe that he was really relishing the task ahead. Eventually it was left that he would treat it as a job to be done in progressive stages in between other jobs that he had on his job-sheet; a couple of early Escorts, the E-Type, a Mitubishi Evo and various rally cars.
That was fine by me, as it gave me time to raise a bit more cash, mainly by sorting stuff out ( I've been a bit of a hoarder and also, when my dad died 20 years ago, we had put a lot of stuff into our lofts where it had remained untouched!) and seeing if anyone wanted it out there in eBayland. It also gave me time to get some stuff prepared. I already had a lot of repair panels as well as new front and rear wings, but as most of it had been lying around for quite a few years ( some as long as the Traveller had been there!) most was suffering from varying amounts of surface rust, and they would all need to be cleaned up!
I thought little more of it really, and then I was completely caught on the hop when, on the 14th November, I received and email from Graeme asking me to give him a phone as he was thinking of making a start to the Traveller! I phoned and arranged to go up to see him the next day.
Graeme lives and runs his business from the top of Mormond Hill, near Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire, about 30 minutes drive from where I live. Mormond Hill was famous for being the location of one of the main radar stations in the North of Scotland for the four minute warning in the event of enemy attack, and housed a number of masts, revolving radar dishes and domes that made it all seem a little sinister and mysterious. Now, all that has gone, and the summit is the home of a number of telecommunications masts and boosters ( I get far better mobile reception up there than I do at home!) and the only thing seen to be revolving are three large wind turbines that one passes on the way up to Retro.
This was to be only the second or third time that I had been up there, but this time when I opened the door and looked in, there was the Traveller sitting on a wee wheeled frame, and Graeme was just finishing vacuuming out years of accumulated rust, dust and bird-droppings ( my barn is usually home to at least two pairs of swallows in summer, and I can't bring myself to shut them out!).
He looked up at me, grinned and said those words that filled me with hope.....something along the lines of "You know, this old girl really isn't in that bad a nick! The wood's bloody marvellous and there's not that much welding needing to be done!" I KNEW that I'd had faith in that wee car for a reason!!!Suddenly there was chance of [frame][/frame] which was the drivers side A post finally having the repair panel which I had prepared 20 years before actually welded in place!
I left Graeme's, having dropped off umpteen repair panels including sills, chassis legs, rear suspension hangers (front and back) and a crossmember, hinge pillar covers and God knows what else, and headed for home feeling elated that, after all this time things were going to happen, and a tad apprehensive as I really wasn't used to spending such huge sums of money ( we reckoned about 4 to 4.5K!) on something such as this!
The next time I went up, I took up my NBN Chassis Tilter, along with a few other wee odds and sods, as Graeme reckoned that, though he hadn't seen this particular make of roll-over jig, it would make his life a wee bit easier!( For those of you folk, by the way, that took any for of umbridge at my use of the earlier mention of "Englandshire", think what's that impertinent wee Hieland git doing using such disparaging terms, I was actually born and bred down there, only moving up here to Aberdeenshire in '69 to go to university. I liked it so much that I never really went back, and the language has kind of rubbed off on me!)
We put the Tilter together ( it is an impressive piece of kit) and then put "The Beastie" onto it, and immediately he saw it, Graeme knew that it would make life easier!. Unlike a lot of the other roll-over jigs that I had seen in Classiccar magazines and for sale on eBay which rely on bolting onto one front and one rear wheel, this jig bolts onto both the front bumper attachments, and both of the rear bumper attachments too. It allows you to raise and lower the vehicle as you wish, and also allows you to rotate it like a chicken on a spit. 'Tis, indeed, a brilliant piece of kit! You can remove the back axle and both front wheels and hub assemblies with suspension and just have a naked bodyshell to work on
I then left with the purpose of ordering a new, non-laminated chassis crossmember as the one that I had had for years gathering dust/rust , although it would clean up reasonably well, I felt that the more precautions taken against future rust, the better.
A few days later, armed with the new non-laminated crossmember, a couple of jacking points and a couple of other things, I went back, and found that work had started on "The Beastie" in earnest.
20 years ago I had removed the door hinge pillar covers and a rusty part of the rear flitch plate on the offside and had chopped a flitch plate repair panel to fill the void. Except it didn't! The angle between the two parts of the panel was wrong, and it wasn't a good enough fit! Someone else who knows more would probably wielded a large hammer and made it fit, but I was too nervous.
Now the void I had created had been filled, and all was as it should be.
Work was progressing on the sills too, and one or two other wee bits in the flitch plates and front wheel arches were undergoing repair.
The engine bay, while looking pretty dark as Graeme had buffed it and treated it with some form of rust killer, was beginning to look as if it would, one day, be all painted and shiny again.
Front chassis legs and tie plates and the front wee crossmember were all sound and needed no welding![frame][/frame][frame][/frame][frame][/frame]
The next time I went up, which was just a few days leter, a large part of the underside and the engine bay had all been primed, and things were looking good. I also noticed that Graeme had been busy with a drill and angle grinder removing surface rust and primer paint remnants from one or two of the old "new" panels. They were now nice and shiny, but I admit to a little annoyance at this as I really didn't see the point of him doing this and me paying him for it when I reckoned it was a job that I could easily do myself, thus saving the money for work that I was incapable of doing. I said as much to him, and to that end took away one of the front wings to do myself.
The weather was cold ( it was now December!) and I had to do most of my stripping/cleaning either at the entrance to my barn with the door open to let some light in and the dustrust out, or actually outside!
However, several hours later, the wing looked quite good! I, on the other hand, didn't! I was pretty black and frozen solid![frame][/frame]
Suppose I shouldn't complain though! It wasn't raining, it wasn't snowing and it was nice and still with no wind at all! One of those lovely, cold December days!
However, I hadn't anticipated the bonnet, of which I shall fill you in in part 3!

[DAVIDMCCULLOUGH]

Great pictures Ian! Thats a really neat repair thats been carried out on the A post, obviously a very skilled restorer.

[lambrettalad]

it's going to be a good un (very very ...etc.)

[alexandermclaren]

looking great so far keep up the good work

[Coalmossian]

Well, I last finished as I had just spent a few fun hours getting covered in rust, dust, dirt and paint while freezing a few of my bits off in and attempt to clean up a brand new BL front wing. Let it be a somewhat cautionary tale! I tend to be an exremely enthusiastic person.......in the initial stages, at least, and this leads me to immediately start to acquire the necessary parts/tools/comsumables etc which I think I will need to get the job done when I have a project on.
However, when things start to get a little difficult, the enthusiasm not-so-much plummets as simply evaporates as I find my self-confidence levels disappearing!! When I was young, I could do anything! Now, with experience and a reality check, I realise that some of those things are not quite as easily accomplished as I at first thought they were!
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that twenty odd years ago when I was on a high, I purchased a lot of repair panels and these wings as well, and over the next two decades, sitting in an unheated and, at times, damp, barn, they started to deteriorate. They all developed varying degrees of surface rust, and that has made for a hell-of-a-lot of extra work, as we all know that rust under paintwork shows itself eventually! But there's no way that these perfectly sound panels were going to be wasted! So, out came the polycarbonate strip-discs and out came the determination! Combine that with the fact that, if Graeme did them, I'd be charged his hourly rate, and the fact that, while I live in a country that has a totally undeserved reputation for "grippiness", I hail from the North of England where canniness is genetic, and these panels were going to be cleaned back to shiny metal!
You've seen the front wing that I did in Part 2, and on top of that I had to do the sill kickplates, the sill finishers, a couple of doors ( not that these were new, but they still needed to go back to bare metal, and the sunvisor and the bonnet![frame][/frame][frame][/frame]
I find that the word "bonnet" tends to bring shudders these days after stripping it over a couple of days at the entrance to the barn ( I know; I shouldn't complain as many folk carry out these jobs in an unheated garage that barely has enough room to open the car doors, let alone swing the proverbial cat!) with the door slid wide open and over the whole time the temperature never got above freezing!! But I HAD to get it done as, some 25 or 30 miles away, Graeme was beavering away having finished the welding and now busy with the spraying.
The bonnet has a surprisingly large surface area, epecially when both upper and lower surfaces are taken into account, and to make the job worse, the whole of the underside had been given a very thorough covering of Adup Bronze Superseal! Try removing THAT with a four inch diameter polycarbonate stripdisc! It softens with the friction and then smears delightfully as well as clogging up the disc!
So, out with the heat gun and a scraper, and, of course, the only one I could find was a 4 inch wide straight edged one. Perfect for bi-curved surfaces......not! Then, of course, the person who had applied it was very thorough, even to getting it into the back of the support strut and the rest of the underframework! To facilitate the job, I cut off the main crosspiece with an angle grinder and dismantled the frame into its component parts. The strut was then later welded back together after stripping and before painting.
I tried thinners in an attempt to remove the underseal, but eventually it was simply a matter of heat and scrape and get the last bits off with the stripdisc! As for the paint......it came off the underside along with the removal of the last bits of underseal, but on the upper surface it was simply a case of slow and methodical removal with the stripdisc, square inch by square inch.
All in all it took about 18 hours work to strip the bonnet alone, and at the end of each session ( usually five or six hours was the most I could manage!) the bonnet looked better while I looked a helluva lot worse! [frame][/frame][frame][/frame]
Anyway, having stripped various parts to take them up to Graeme for spraying, I loaded them into my Golf and took them up to him.
He had emailed a wee while before to ask me what colour I wanted the car to be, and I was a bit torn between the original colour of Frilford Grey, and and Old English White. Now the upholstery of this Traveller is in excellent overall condition, and is of the slightly darker red leather. I had every intention of keeping this although it will be renovated with a kit that I have already bought. Bearing in mind the actual date of registration, and the colour of the upholstery, I had the Frilford Grey choice or Black. Now I also have a 1949 Lowlight which is black, and although it is in desperate need of a respray ( resprayed by its last owner a decade or so ago using one of those antique vacuum cleaner spray attachments...........ask your grandad!), I intend to keep it black when it is rebuilt, although minus the runs, drips, blisters and crazing ( next project.....and, true to form, I already have many of the bits I need courtesy of years of internet searching; old habits die hard!), so I really didn't want black. The only other possibility, if I stretch the time period by a few weeks, was Old English White, and that is what I chose. I must confess, though, having bought a copy of Ray Newell's Morris Traveller book, which features a well restored Frilford Grey Traveller, I almost reverted to the original!
However, when I arrived at Graeme's with my newly cleaned-to-bare-metal pieces, I felt sure that I had made the right choice [frame][/frame][frame][/frame].
Even with the masking tape still in place to protect the wood, I could envisage the contrast between that lovely paint and the honeyed golden-yellow of the ash! And look at that engine bay! I could see it with its BMC green engine and all its other wee bitties gleaming in there!
And there I shall leave it for the moment. I am actually getting the whole saga nearer to the stage that I am currently at, but a wee bittie to go yet!

[George Smathers]

Looking good!

George

[alexandermclaren]

awesome
outstanding work

[moray]

Looks fantastic

[Coalmossian]

My last episode ended with a photo of the Traveller as I saw it when I arrived at Retro Restorations with some stripped panels for Graeme to paint. It still had its masking tape on the timber and so the contrast between the ash and the paintwork was still a surprise in store. The only thing that disappointed me a wee touch was the fact that a), the cab- to-rear-roof sealing strip had had to be masked as we were not replacing the wood,( and therefore I didn't want to have to bear the expense of stripping off the rear roof and guttering etc,) and, of course a masked off rubber strip never gives such good reults as when it has been removed, the roof painted, and then a new one replaced, and b), it's very difficult to get really good edges between the rear painted panels and the wood! They never look 100% neat! Still, we can't have everything!
Re. the roof seal, I did have an idea that it just might be possible to remove all the bolts/screws holding the front vertical wooden pillar to the B-post and, leaving the guttering in place, perhaps somehow lever the wood away from the B-post to open up the gap a tad between the two roofs and thereby extract the old seal before painting and then, afterwards, replace it with a new one. However, we didn't do it. Has anyone else been courageous ( foolhardy?) enough to try it?
Anyway, I duly stripped what masking tape remained on the vehicle to expose the sanded, flat-looking wood, but even in need of more sanding and devoid of any varnish, it looked good![frame][/frame]
The wood was in superb overall condition, although there were a few black stains on it where a couple of joints had opened up over the last 53 years, and, of course, in the pieces of wood framing the rear wheel arch where those damned bolt sockets had been fitted to take the rear wing bolts. They fitted them so close to the outer edge and, being where they are,inevitably corroded, staining the wood indelibly. I had thought about bleaching them with oxalic acid or some other preparation but, having purchased the new Morris Traveller book by Newell and Foreman, and indeed having spoken to Steve Foreman on the phone while ordering some parts, the consensus seems to be that they will soon return! Apparently the sun helps to fade them a bit, so maybe if we actually see it this year.........? Anyway, they are provenance of the timber's age and originality! Steve Foreman says that there are very few Travellers around these days able to boast that the timber is the original factory-fitted ash! Wonder how a concours judge would view them!?
[frame][/frame]
Anyway, the next job was to get the timber sanded down, and to this end I had bought a wee palm sander as my other power sanders are a bit too bulky and heavy for this job. The one I had bought was a wee mains Palm sander made by Wolf ( good pedigree) and it came in a case with velcro sanding sheets in various grades from a supplier on eBay for the princely sum of £14.99p with free postage! Can't expect a better deal than that!! Anyway, while I did use it a bit, I have to confess that I mainly just used the sanding aid that I was born with, my right hand, aided and abetted by a cork sanding block! I found it rather therapeutic, less dusty and infinitely more satisfying as I worked my way up from 120 grit, through 180 to a final sand with 240 grit! I felt more "connected" with the job and the car and I am aware that sounds a wee bit "precious" and smacks of tree-huggery!
The next job was to remove the dust and get on a generous coating of Cuprinol clear wood preserver, but first I wanted to give as much protection as I could to the window runner channels as I could. I was surprised at the amount of bone-dry bits of black gubbins that fell out of each drain hole when I poked them with a screwdiver followed by a drill bit! It had obviously sat in thos holes for over 20 years!
Crud removed, I then put a piece of masking tape under each hole and, using a wee plastic pipette that I had inadvertently liberated from the school that I taught in, I filled each one with Cuprinol and left it to soak in, occasinally topping each up if the level fell.Having dealt with the sanding and the drain holes, I then left for home to let the drain holes ( or at least, the timber surrounding them,) drink their fill.
I returned a day or two later and removed the masking tape from the bottom of the waist rail, and was somewhat surprised at the relatively small quantities of Cuprinol that still remained unabsorbed. The ash, being a hardwood, albeit a pretty open-grained one, had absorbed a lot more of the stuff than I had expected! High absorbancy usually applies to softwoods!! All to the good!
The next job was to treat the rest of the woodwork to several coats of Cuprinol, and this was duly done over the next few days. I think I gave it three in all, and one of the joys of doing this was to see the immediate effect on the colour and "depth" of grain of the wood. They (whoever "they" are, always say that if you want to see the full beauty of a piece of wood before you finish it, just wet it ......water will do!) Suddenly the wood started to come to life and take on an appearance akin to what it would be like when varnished.
One other thing that I wanted to do before varnishing was to sort out a few places in the woodwork where the timber joints had opened a wee bit, as these would obviously be prime candidates for rot to set in.
[frame][/frame]. To this end I filled them with a home-made mix of polyurethane glue and ash dust. This produces a self-expanding filler, and if you want more details find "Coalmossian's Traveller; Minor Woodwork Issues" in Restoration Projects.
After the coats of preserver, the timber was left for about two weeks to thoroughly dry out. I hadn't intended that it be that long, but that time coincided with thew Christmas/New Year period and, what with visitors, tradition and the world seemingly closing down for two weeks ( apart from the shops!), I just never got back up there.
Just before Christmas I had received the aforementioned Morris Traveller book, and had spent some time reading certain sections, particularly the one on finishing the woodwork. This had recommended a varnish, assuming that one was not going for a semi-permeable, "breathable" type of finish, by a Dutch company called "Epifanes". I duly purchased a litre ( eBay again!), and the first time I visited Graeme after New Year, i took with me this plus more 180 and 240 grit aluminium oxide paper and a tack rag and brushes.
The first coat went on after sanding again with 180 grit followed by 240 grit and dust removal with a wee brush followed by a tack rag. I was surprised at the thickness of the varnish, and I wonder if, with hindsight, I should have thinned at least the first coat? Anyway, I completed the first coat, and tried hard to brush it out to a degree where I wouls get a nice overall gloss coat but without runs or sags.
Returning a few days later, there were one or two sags to sand out, but as I was intending giving it a good rub down with 240 grit between each coat, it didn't really matter too much.
It was beginning to look good, and all that I can say is that the appearance improved after each rub down and new coat.
So far I've put on four coats, and I may just leave it at that. It takes about two hours to rub it down and "tack-rag" it, and another hour to apply the varnish so that's probably a good twelve hours spent on the wood not allowing for the initial sandings and the gap filling and Cuprinol, but best to do it right, eh? I'm hoping it will pay dividends in the future!! [frame][/frame][frame][/frame].
While all this has been going on, I've been busy cleaning, stripping and painting all bits front and rear suspension and steering with the hope that I can soon turn it into a rolling shell ( Next entralling episode!). The only disadvantage to this is that once it's at that stage, I think Graeme wants me to take it home! Trouble is, although I took three Morris's out of my barn over the last year, I've nowhere to put it, as my eldest son has managed to fill it with quads, trikes and an RS Turbo shell! I'm just hoping that I van persuade him to take the shell to Graeme for a spray, then I shall have a bit of space into which I can put my Traveller, and HE'll have to then hunt for a space for his Turbo once it's sprayed! It doesn't seem to matter how much space you have.......it just seems to get filled!!!

[jagnut66]

Cheeky so and so! I'd tell where to put his Quads and Trikes and reclaim your barn!

[Coalmossian]

Aye, I see where you're coming from, but we're quite a close family and we do what we can! Outside there's a 1000l tank of SOBO, a degreasing agent which he got for nothing from his work! Very handy for cleaning and degreasing parts prior to painting! And there's a nice trailer for transporting cars which is also useful! And there's a 12m by 7m prefabricated shed that will soon be going up here which he bought, so I will soon get my barn back, though perhaps it won't be in the next few weeks!! I think it will take a wee while to erect!
Plus I'm 64 in a week or so, decrepitude awaits, and maybe he won't put me in a home if I'm nice to him!!
Seriously though, he's ever so good at repairing our cars ( I don't understand these modern contraptions with these sideyways emgines and no propshaft!) so it's a give and take thing!
It's all a case of give and take!!