The J4LC3 Bedford Blog

A bit of a brush up

Brakes are sorted on the Yellow Truck, and we hope that I'll be sent into the local panel beater's for a bit for some CoF essential patchwork.

Yellow Truck is currently at home having some of the surface rust stripped off and a quick spray of primer.

On the road... almost

Our owners drove the yellow truck to their Mechanic yesterday, after finally figureing out what was up with the rear indicators, tail and stop lights. Went remarkably well considering the yellow truck has very poor brakes (using the hand brake instead). About a 20km trip.

The Mechanic reckons that the master brake cylinder needs looking at, while we think that the wheel cylinders may also need some attention.

Brakes

We attempted to inspect the brakes, which seem to be binding.

Unfortunatly the wheel nuts are all quite solidly siezed, and the badly bent wheel nut spanner that came with the Yellow Truck provided no leverage at all. Might still be able to get them off as I may have a better wheel brace in my tool box, otherwise it'll have to be a job for our local mechanic.

Being a bit clever, we looked through the inspection ports on the inside of the wheel hubs. Depressing the brake pedal causes no movement on the front shoes, which seem to be siezed 'out', while there's some slight movement in the rear shoes.

So, they'll need to be inspected...

It might be easier to figure out the electrics first...

The J4LC3 Bedford Blog

After driving in circles and pumping the brake pedal, the brakes have improved to something drivable. Rather than disturb things too much, we'll just drain the brake fluid and replace it with fresh and bleed the brake lines.

The next trick will be figureing out the electrics, as the headlights, brake lights, etc. don't work.

The horn works, we can tell as the wire shorts out in the column and jams them on. Disconnected for the moment.

The Yellow Truck Runs

After replacing the points (which were the orignal Delco-Remy part, and seemed to be conductive at all parts except the contacts), emptying and rinsing the fuel tank and unblocking the fuel line, and priming the pump and a big shot of ether into the carb, he runs.

We then flushed the radiator, though it will still need to be done 'properly' and maybe a new thermostat would be a good idea. We're going to have to do an oil change and replace the filter too, but we're going to need quite a bit of oil (~8 litres) to do that properly.

Runs very well actually, one cylinder might not be up to par, but good enought to get about with. This means that it will be reasonably easy to get the Yellow Truck on the road.

The next step will be to overhaul the brakes, as they don't work at all. Most likely the master cylinder will need refurbishing and the slave cylinders will need replacing, fresh fluid too.

We also need to look at the electrics, the horn gets stuck on and none of the lights work.

Bedford support groups

There are a couple of Bedford vehicle support groups on the internet.

Yahoo groups has a well established mail group, but I find it very difficult to search through the archives (the search engine searches messages in batches, it's somewhat painful). Also, the bits that Yahoo stick on the end of messages can sometimes cause spam filters to falsely identify email as spam.

http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Bedford-vehicles/

There is also a very new group at:

http://groups.google.com/group/Bedfords

The J4LC3 Bedford Blog

The new truck is here. Unfortunatly it's in excellent condition, and provided that it runs and can be warranted (not a CoF, it's 'small' enough to be registered as a utility vehicle) it's not just going to be a donor cab for me.

Our owners have put in a charged battery and it turns freely, so it's not siezed. Something about the iginition coil being busted.

PS, photos taken with a Clie, hence the image quality.

From the drivers door. The interior is in excellent condition (for a 1978 truck) nothing's bent or broken and it's almost complete (the jacking bar that clips to the front of the seats is missing). The wingnuts that hold the seat in are all there too.

The deck. It's about 1.5 x 2m.

Drivers side, that's a 54 litre tank full of what now smells like paint-stripper. Ohh see those 16" rims, the rice-boys will be jelous. Note the tare weight, 2140kg.