First off for this evening, let's start with that fixture plate. A 33" long piece of 100x16mm should do nicely. Spend an hour and a half measuring, marking, re-measuring, re-marking, re-re-measuring, head-scratching, drinking coffee and thinking real hard, then measuring again just to make sure. It's recommended you do

Another coat of paint has definitely made a big difference to the side of the truck. It really does take a few coats to build up the opacity. And I got one tab welded onto the air pipe, and as expected that was the last dregs of the argon.

I have a big tin of yellow paint! And I've not touched it since it turned up because after a good couple of months of relatively decent health, joints-wise, I have come off the 4-day Easter weekend and faceplanted into the meatgrinder. I have managed to get a little tinkering done, however.

I've had a fairly productive week/long weekend so far, away from work (Which has been the land of gearbox/clutch hackery...) ## The 26th I got my new MIG torch in, so I celebrated by welding on my remaining two side-marker light brackets on the offside. Which, if my doctor's reading this, involved exactly 0 crawling or kneeling on the floor

I know I said I wasn't planning on painting the side of the truck 'til I was sure about bracketry and whatnot, but I had an oopsie and my brush slipped. First coat always looks pretty grim; seems like the opacity isn't really there when brushing this stuff. I had enough in the tin to give a second coat to that centre panel, and that looks significantly

Still taking short bursts at it; I've started rebuilding the rear corner panel for the passenger side which is coming along quite nicely when my welder plays nice. There's something screwed up in the torch that even a new liner didn't fix, so I've got a new welding torch on the shopping list, and in the meantime I'm using the TIG. More metal-forming and welding to do yet before I get it to the stage I can hang it on the truck, but it's all progress.

Well, I did manage to get up to a little bodywork! ...despite my welder's best attempts. Managed to weld in the little reinforcement plate from crossmember to the outside of the cab frame, and started tacking in another piece of floor at the back of the passenger side of the cab. However, the liner in my welding torch appears to be screwed up beyond all belief, because it'll only feed wire if everything's held

Alrighty! So I did end up drilling the holes out in the wing, and installing rivnuts to hold the headlight bowl in; and I'll do the same with the other wing, when I bring it down from the back of the wagon where it's currently lurking. I also drilled out the wobbly remains of one of the original brass adjusters, welded the hole up, and replaced it with a new hole in a slightly more outboard location that I have fitted an M5 rivnut in. So that, along with cutting the original springs to half their length,