Manky's Pop.

As predicted, not much to report on the Popular front this week. Seem to have spent all my time running back & forth, collecting parts, so no photos to show you.
Loony's workshop is a 45 minute commute from home for me. One day this week I spent 2 hours sat in a traffic queue on my way there. The rest of the week I've been constantly driving around between Guildford in Surrey, Basingstoke in Hampshire & Newbury in Berkshire, sorting various parts out.
I've now got a roll of brake pipe & all the fittings I need except one, to make up the brake lines. That'll mean another trip to Newbury next week for the missing bit. Also got the use of Loony's pipe flaring & bending tools.
Bernie the metal worker, who's making the indicator housings for the front mudguards, promised they'd be done this week. Drove all the way to Newbury &, of course, they weren't. With luck I can collect them later next week too.
PD very kindly rebuilt the rear brake assemblies for me, despite having his arm in a cast after a wrist operation -thanks mate. Appreciate it. I couldn't get my head around the Sherpa van axle's self adjusting drum brake set-up. PD's a mechanic at a local garage so seemed silly not to make use of his expertise. The SVA requires at least the front brakes to be self adjusting, (taking up the slack when the pads/shoes start to wear down). The discs we've fitted up front will take care of that, but we've also got ratcheting rear drums, which will do the same at the back. When I bought new brake shoes & slave cylinders, I also picked up a new handbrake cable. It's the one piece type, with both brakes linked by a single cable, hooked up to a pulley on the bottom of the handbrake lever. We've got what we think is a Reliant lever, which has the pulley attached. With luck, it'll all work out just right to hook the Sherpa cable up to it & mount the lever between the seats on top of the gearbox tunnel, though it'll be tight for space. Would be nice to use a little bit of Reliant somewhere on this build!
Of course the brake cable didn't come with the E clips which hold the outer sleeve into the back of the brake drums, so I've spent an hour or so this afternoon driving around Basingstoke trying to buy a couple. Ended up having to buy a box of 300 assorted size ones from Halfords for 6 quid. Also had to find a sheet of gasket paper to make gaskets for the drive shaft/hub joints. Once the driveshafts are in & the drums are back on I can refit the wheels, then we can have a very careful measure up & get the rear axle properly centred & levelled in the chassis, using the adjustable 4 bar linkage.
Waited at home all morning today for a local welder/fabricator to ring & say he'd got some box section steel for me from his suppliers. Got the call after lunch to say it'd arrived -but he'd had to go out on a job. He's one of Taz's fellow Mopar muscle car owners, so we'll go & pick up the steel tomorrow morning & hopefully get a look at the car he's building too. The 25mm square, 2mm wall thickness box tubing is for the frame of the Pop's pick-up bed. Having had 2 weeks off work & not really achieving much, I just wanted to do something big that looks like we're making some progress. We'll build a framework that bolts to the chassis, rather than welding directly to it.
Late this afternoon Loony & I drove out to "Just Kampers", a local VW parts specialists, & picked up a pair of "bay window" camper van rear arch repair panels. They're about 4 feet long by about 2 feet tall & include the entire rear arch. If you flip back to somewhere near the start of this thread, you'll see pics of some we borrowed from a van repair job Loony did last year. I didn't want just a big square box on the back of the pick-up. I wanted something a bit curvier. The axle extends beyond the width of the pick-up bed & the rear wheels will be covered by "cycle" type guards, so we'll "cut n shut" the V Dub panels to shorten the arches down to a little wider than the axle. We'll still need to form the curve around the rear corners of the bed, but hopefully we can mimic the curves of the back of the cab. Looking at a camper van at the shop today, I wondered whether we could re-work a VW camper engine bay door to create a tailgate. Loony thought it'd be too much work to widen it but I might persevere with the idea as he's got an old one to play with. The inside of the box sides will be skinned with flat steel & we'll form a wide rolled top edge along either side using a couple of lengths of 2 inch bore ERW tubing.
To qualify as a pick-up for the commercial vehicle SVA registration we're aiming for, the pick-up bed interior has to be longer than the cab interior. It's a very basic rule of thumb, but easy to fall foul of. It refers to useable load space so anything in the bed will restrict that space. If we mount the original Pop fuel tank in the bed, up behind the cab as we intend to, the measurement is taken from the back of the tank to the tailgate -too short to qualify. So we'll use the Reliant tank from Taz's trike donor car, slung under the chassis, for the test, then change it afterwards, which is entirely permissable.
So we're getting there, slowly, but it does feel agonisingly slowly.