Catching up with the blog

As you can probably tell from the two posts below, especially the one about my uncle's death, we have been busy this summer with foreseen and unforeseen events.

The first, and planned, event, was our family trip to the United Kingdom. My sister Carol was getting married, to the inestimable Mr. Wayne, and required the presence of her niece to help officiate, and this happy event further required a considerable work of logistics and child psychology to get said niece, all of two and two thirds years old, across the Atlantic. We used Icelandair for this, and recommend the airline, but the airport at Keflavik is sadly overcrowded and below par.

Here's the little flower girl on duty, wearing the new dress that mommy made especially for the wedding:

And here she is again with Aunt Carol and Uncle Wayne.

Unfortunately, while we were preparing to leave, another British relative, my cousin Barrie Lockwood, AKA "Uncle Barrie," suddenly died. Barrie was getting on and not well, having been living in a care home for nearly two years, so while the death was sudden, it wasn't unexpected, but it meant my sister and I had a funeral to arrange almost immediately after the wedding.

We stayed in the UK for about ten days and did a lot of tourist things when we were not busy with weddings and funerals. We stayed in vacation cottages in the Peak District National Park, one in Castleton, the other in Tideswell. Both were nice, and recommended.

Tideswell, which we only booked because we had to stay in the area for the funeral, was having its annual festival of Wakes Week and Well Dressings, also recommended. Our kid particularly liked the bumper cars and the tea-cups, below.

 

Once home, we had a marathon of work to do, and of course had used up much of the cooler early summer weather in which to do it. The garden was thick with weeds, we had a large number of vehicle problems to fix, and the hay to secure. We managed most of this, at some cost in skin and sweat.

Now it's hot and humid, and we're into our midsummer routine of trying only to do physical work when it's cooler. There are still a lot of projects to complete, but we're picking our battles. Stay tuned for more details on the garden and the Land Rover project when we get a chance.

Eulogy for Barrie

Delivered by his cousin Michael at Hutcliff Wood Chapel, Sheffield, June 23rd, 2017.

Good afternoon, and thank you for coming to this short service of remembrance for my cousin Barrie Lockwood. It falls to me as one of his few surviving relatives to say a few words for Barrie, and I hope to be worthy of that honour and to do justice to him.

As I said at my mother’s a few years ago, funerals are for the living, not the dead. They are for us to celebrate the life of the people we liked and loved. This one is for my sister, who was his primary family contact in these last few years and who visited him and gave him news and tried to keep him in the land of the living. It’s for the care home staff, who looked after him very well, and it’s for Aunty Eileen and Hazel and all the rest of us that knew him in happier times.

Barrie Lockwood was born to Harold, a Sheffield steelmaker, and Millicent, a homemaker and the daughter of a master gardener to the Leigh family whose head was at one time the master cutler. 

He was a Sheffield lad and proud of it to the day he died, and loved the industrial history and even the rough, coal-blackened and Victorian splendor of this industrial town. He loved trams and trains and British cars, he liked gritstone architecture, brown ale and brown trousers, and traditional Sheffield food. He lived a life based on Sheffield values of family and hard work and a little fun now and then.

Barry was a bright boy, won a scholarship to King Edwards when it was a grammar school, passed the civil service exam, and began a long career in government, which culminated in his job as Clerk of Sheffield Crown Court, a position that put him mentally and physically at the center of the city and the region and at the center of regional events, specially criminal ones. It was a fine career. Barrie was committed to British government and making it work, especially to old-fashioned British government based on values of reason and decency and plain common sense. Sometimes I think we could use a few more like him today, and a few less of what we have. He took civil service posts here after his father died to look after his mother, and retired early to do more of that, and so lived with Millie, looking after each other at High Storrs Close, until first she died and then he grew ill. Essentially, he lived seventy years of an eighty-year life or more in the same house.

I loved Barrie as my mother’s cousin and as one of the extended Watson clan, now dwindling, that once were much more common in the Mayfield valley. I also liked him. He was fun to be around, both when I was a small boy, and later when I would come home to visit him and Millie at High Storrs. He was also a shoulder to rely on, especially at two particular times, the first during the 1980s when he paid for my initial emigration to America and so gave me the push that would eventually lead to university and an academic career, to my wife Aimee and my daughter Edana whom some of you are meeting for the first time today, assuming she will sit still. The second time Barrie helped me greatly was when my parents had both begun to show signs of dementia, and I was racked with pain and upset at losing them, or at least losing them as I knew them, and Barrie helped me put it in perspective. I still can’t quite put into words what a relief it was to sit and talk to an elderly relative that still, almost to the end, had most of his marbles, when my Mum and Dad were so clearly off their rocker and going beyond my reach. I know Carol feels much the same way. Barrie was a kind and decent and helpful man.

Some particular memories of Barrie include he and my dad Gordon teaching me to play three-card Brag at family parties. I would get a little pocket money from dad, or earn money working for him in the chocolate shop, and Barrie and dad would then relieve me of that money in fairly short order, while I learned the intricacies of the game. It’s going to be hard to explain to the younger generation just how much good clean family fun can be had with just a pack of cards and a small stack of change and two close male relatives intent on relieving you of your cash and teaching you not to be a fool.

I’m not sure they succeeded, but we had fun trying.

Barrie and I were both in the RAF, as was Eileen’s husband Ron. Ron was a Mosquito navigator in World War Two, Barrie was national service in the fifties, and I was a regular in the late seventies and early eighties, so we had that in common. I served at some of the same Vale of York airfields that Barrie had seen twenty years earlier, and played three card brag in some of the same crew rooms.

Barrie liked to talk of his RAF days. He always liked British technology and those were the heydays of British jet flight. Barrie was a clerk in the HQ of a Javelin squadron. Javelins were some of the first truly modern jet fighters and well ahead of their time, and the squadron was led by seasoned veterans of the war. The Soviets were the bad guys by then, and the squadron was needed, and it must have been exciting to be a eighteen-year old lad around all that. Later in life he developed a taste for fast cars, probably related to this experience, and always had some souped-up British car parked outside his house, which was exciting for me as a young lad.

He could talk. Boy, could that man talk, he said. Lapsing into Americanisms. Conversations with Barrie were two, three, four hour affairs. He never seemed to tire of it. But it was always entertaining, and always witty, and always he’d kept up with the news and he knew what was going on and had an interesting opinion and point of view on it all.

I could go on, but this is the new Britain and this chapel and crematorium are run on what my American relatives call a tight schedule, which Barrie never was, and so we had better move on, or we’ll keep the staff from their Friday night relaxation. Barrie would most certainly NOT have wanted to do that.

Barrie Lockwood is gone from us physically, but I will always remember him as the bright and able and witty Sheffield lad he was, fun to be around and good to talk to. I hope you will too.

How to replace a series Land Rover rear cross member

After the fairly long-term success of my post on repairing outriggers (5,700 page views over four years and quite a few comments), here's another on the rear crossmember replacement job.

First, the preparatory work: This is a 1971 Series 2a 88 inch, LHD with the wheels removed. It's now on jackstands (placed forward of the rear springs). The floor, seats, seat box, and tub have all been removed. the rear spring shackles have been undone or cut off, and the differential gearbox and spring assembly rests on the floor jack (AKA "trolley jack" in the UK) or on blocks. The frame has been pressure-washed and brushed lightly with a wire wheel on a hand grinder to remove the worst of the dirt and any loose old finish.

Here we are measuring to record the distance between the front and rear outer tub brackets. We'll keep this measurement the same when we put on the new crossmember. Lots of people advise using the tub as a jig to set this measurement, but to my mind that runs the risk of shortening or lengthening the distance between the front spring mount and the rear upper shackle anchor, which helps set the rear wheel alignment. The tub is flexible, and could be squeezed into a different shape, throwing these measurements off.

As it stands, the passenger side is actually 1/4 inch longer than the other due to a slight driver-side fender-bender. We'll fix this when we fit the new crossmember. The final target measurement to square up the truck is is 48 and 3/8 inches.

We also measured the difference in height between the cross member and the flat top of the frame using a level as a straight edge. We'll keep this measurement the same too, at 1 and 3/8 of an inch.

Then it's time to cut your Rover up! Not for the faint of heart. I started with my 7 inch grinder. My new crossmember has 16 inch frame extensions with four inch welding tabs, so I cut the frame just shy of 12 inches from the old crossmember.

The heavy duty grinder proved too clumsy and in fact broke a cutting disc off, so we finished with the 4.5 inch hand grinder.

Once through about three quarters of the way, we position jack stands under the old crossmember to catch the weight. Leave these about a notch lower than the crossmember. After a while the old crossmember will bend down, or can be pushed down, to rest safely on the jack stands. This allows you to finish the cut with a hacksaw from the top, which is easier and safer than using a hand grinder from below.

Once  the old junky cross member is removed, it's easier to burn out any old shackle bushings. Use a gas torch to burn out the old rubber, and the inner bushing can then be pushed or pried out.

You then cut through the outer bushing metal with a hacksaw, being careful not to cut into the spring itself. The new crossmember comes with shackle bushings installed, so unless you plan to remove and/or service the spring or diff too, you only need to buy two new ones, but you may need some new bolts and nuts too, and perhaps new shackle irons. (Remember, only the inner shackle iron is threaded.)

You now have a once-in-a-Landy-lifetime opportunity to rust-proof the inside of the frame easily. Here I'm using Fluid Film, popular here in New England where we use a lot of winter salt on the roads, a proprietary Fluid Film air-powered product dispenser, and a long piece of hose which reaches forward all the way past the dumb irons, but you could use Waxoyl or similar.

First, test where you can see to make sure product is coming out in a suitable spray pattern. Start spraying with the hose fully inserted, then withdraw the hose an inch or two at a time. Repeat to be sure of getting enough product in there.

Now turn your attention to the new cross member. Bend the welding tabs out gently with a mallet and test fit it to the old frame. Using trial and error, get the best fit. Reproduce the old measurements above and clamp it in place, then tack weld it.

This is the bit where the old-timers say to fit the tub, and use the tub as the final jig to get the measurements right, but that ignores my objection above, and it requires that you put the tub on and take it off again to weld the top of the new frame extension. This is too much trouble for me, and indeed, my tub isn't square anyway.
  

Instead I relied on careful measurement. I then welded all around each side, and up and down the tab slots. You can easily tighten any gaps between the tabs and the old frame with a hammer once you start welding and get everything nice and hot.

Now, if you're brave, measure again! Mine was within a sixteenth of my target 48 and 3/8 inches, so I was pretty happy with that.

Having reconnected the shackles, my plan now is to spray everything I see except the transmission with POR 15 rust proof paint, and Fluid Film on top of that.

That should last a while. Enjoy.