2: The Grindening

...Continued from previous page

This gives an idea of the culture shock I was experiencing, going from enthusiastic amateur tinkering to a group of people who actually knew what they were doing, how to do stuff properly, and perhaps worst of all knew that you can't cut corners.

I was sent out to buy myself a couple of angle grinders and a load of wire wheels, and then told to set to and strip the chassis back to bare shiny metal. For context, the chassis was 30 years old ex-military so had pretty much been dipped in bitumen at the factory and then allowed to accumulate 30 years of grot over the top, with occasional re-coatings of god-knows-what by bored squaddies in the intervening years.

It was thick and it was stuck on there - you couldn't scrape it off with a scraper, and unless you got serious with the wire wheel you just kinda smeared it around.

I honestly can't remember how many days I spent just grinding away at it, but by the time-stamps on the photos, two weeks later it was back to shiny metal:

I think I burned about 4 grinders and probably 10+ wire wheels on this, and I was finding bristles from the wire wheels in my clothes, my shoes, my hair, and stuck into my skin all the time. I was wearing a coating of powdered bitumen after each session, when I showered the water ran black. It was not super fun.

Now it was time to move onto the axles, which were also covered in Swedish military paint and dirt, not to mention plenty of brackets and things that we weren't using;

So this meant, yes, even more grinding - as well as cleaning all the paint off, the axles had to be taken back to a bare housing - all the brackets cut off, ground down, back to zero:

Yes, that was a hell of a graft too.

Forwards to some engines!