5 monkeys, 10 minutes.

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So, Parcelforce delivered the door I bought from the Daf Owner’s Forum – well, bought is perhaps an excessive term. I paid for delivery. It’d been sat in a shed and the previous owner generously cleaned up the worst of the surface rust and gave it a bit of a blow-over with some primer before packing it carefully and sending it.

Parcelforce obviously thought that ‘Fragile’ meant ‘Smack repeatedly and hard’. The new, and original layers of paint have cracked in various places where they’ve smacked it. The bottom edge of the door’s taken particular abuse – both at the very back of the door and at the very front. Molegrips fixed the front, I didn’t notice the back edge until I was ‘spraying’ the door.

But where they’d really given it their all was the front edge of the door:

This had cracked the filler which someone had applied long ago over a nasty dent. And reopened a split in the layers of metal the door’s made from:

A bit of work with the molegrips and a pile of filler and I’d achieved this:

I then spent half of last night flatting and filling. Despite my inital thought that I’d make it a bit tidier, but wasn’t too concerned, I had delusions of grandeur, imagined myself a pro bodyshop, and did my best to tidy up some other probably-not parcel-force related dents too. Flatted back the whole door and got this:

Which has some dents and bits in, but wasn’t too bad. That was until I let loose my ‘leet spraying skillz.

I’ve never used ‘High Build’ primer before, and it does what it says on the tin. Which’d be great if I’d thinned it enough, but in lieu of any actual instructions with anything, and every sprayer’s instructions on the net saying ‘use manufacturer’s thinning instructions’ – I went with ‘about the thickness of single cream’.

Yeah.

’bout that.

If you had an infinite number of monkeys, and an infinite number of sprayguns one of them would eventually produce a perfectly sprayed panel. Me? 5 monkeys, 10 minutes. I’m going to have to do a *lot* of flatting, I fear. I’m also going to thin the next coat (in 10 minutes) much more.

I thought it might get…better…as I sprayed. It, uh, didn’t.

And I realised, somewhat belatedly, that I also get to change over the lock mechanism from the rusty door onto this one, either that or I work out which key fits the passenger door by a process of obtaining all the DAF44 keys ever made and trying them all.

Poot.

Still, at least I thought of it *now*.

Incidentally, here’s a shot of my humidity & temperature controlled, forced/filtered air spray booth…

Very nice, huh?

In other news, we’re going to Brugge! (Now we are having the Jazz now…). The Europe road atlas arrived, as did ‘Caravan and Camping Europe’ which reminded me to dig out the Warning Triangle for the possibility of breakingdowningness. Guy, a friend from Brizzy who’s now in France, and whom we’re contemplating visiting, suggested that we might actually get our DAF on his drive before his friend Howard; a worrying suggestion which places a lot more faith in the DAF than I have at the moment.

Let’s just say I’m holding off putting the brand-new exhaust on the car until we get back.

I also fished out the Trangia – which still contains Meths, impressively, from when I last used it (what, about 1996). I need to check what the ferry co’s policy on transporting Meths is. I’m assuming it’s vastly-less-flammable than Petrol (Gas) state means that we can just chuck it in the boot of the car.

We also splashed out on a double sleeping bag, a couple of roll mats, a non-gas lamp (because while the Camping-Gaz lamp is fine, if my mum lets me take it, it’s also fire. Fire in a tent is generally classed as ‘not good’. And while I used to be much more…slack about such things…

I also discovered that bloody Lidl have an offer on Fire Extinguishers which starts 2 days before we go on holiday; just after I bought one from bloody Halfords for 6 times as much. Bloody.

Anyhow, the sun’s out and it’s time for me to go and throw another coat of paint on the door. Hopefully if I put enough paint on, when I flat it back it’ll look okay!

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.