September  &  October          Activity this month has been rather disappointingly limited in comparison to previous months. The afore mentioned un-loader, pressure regulator and compressor valves have been cleaned and serviced along with the accelerator linkage and now await refitting. More areas of the chassis have been cleaned, under-coated and painted especially behind the nearside locker panel which gives access to the master switch.

Trusty scrapper and wire brush on the go

To achieve this it was necessary to remove an engine oil header tank which was fitted in Yelloway days but had (as the years had passed by) been disconnected probably as a result of an engine change. The removal of this tank made it much easier to get at the oily, mucky mess that had accumulated around the wiring conduit leading from the master switch. This time consuming job was probably something which should have been carried out before we replaced the body framework and panels…….

Having acquired the seats last month, Steve spent a few hours removing the seat belts which were fitted to them and carted the legs off to work to be shot blasted. Once they were back in the workshop the offside legs and a couple of seat frames were located on the floor rail to determine the correct spacing of the seats and where the 3 interior heaters should go.

Positioning of seats and heater units

Now we know this, the replacement water pipes can be cut to size and bent to shape. We have decided to fit 45 seats instead of the original 49 primarily because it gives a few more inches of leg room but also just in case we don’t have enough seat material for 49!

A trip to the West Midlands towards the end of the month proved very worth-while as we were gifted 4 brand new aluminium wheel arch edges to replace our rather ‘tired’ ones. A big thankyou to Paul for this donation – another item we thought we would never be able to source. We hope shortly to take our damaged offside locker panels down to his workshops to be used as patterns for replacements as we don’t have access to facilities to add the ‘roll’ at the bottom edge of these panels.

The repaired offside emergency exit door framework has been put back into position to check clearances before it is re-skinned – this being a pointless exercise previously while the coach was up on jacks and the body ‘in twist’. A few minor adjustments are required and then Steve will ‘bite the bullet’ and tackle the complicated folding of the outer skin.

Repaired offside emergency exit door framework