Hi all, just a minor update.
Its been ages. I only get one day a weekend to work on the truck and it always seems to be raining, blowing a gale or someone else asks for help on that day.
I'm hoping to get a week off shortly so I can get the chassis rails finished and painted and maybe the new air lines fitted.
The days are getting shorter and colder and soon I won't be able to get the paint to cure.
While hammering away at the chassis rail, I heard a clunk sound and looked up to see the brake light switch had snapped off and was dangling on it's wires.
Its a fair old hunk of metal and the part that attaches to the tractor protection valve is cast aluminium. Looking at the break, I think the metal was cracked a while as the switch had water in it.
I asked around locally, as some of the guys in the Defence Transport Heritage Tasmania group have Inters, but nobody had a spare.
I looked up the part numbers and found that it was an old International part.
The number in the F1 RPS was 154054 H1 and the number in the MK4 RPS was 136460 R91.
The Iveco dealer looked them up and the F1 number isn't in the system, but the MK4 number was listed as being superseded by part number 873706 R91, which he even had in stock. $41.
Looks very different to the old one and is far lighter. It should last the life of the truck now.
As you can see in the first pic below, I had to cut the head off one of the mounting bolts for the tractor protection valve to get it off. The bolt had seized in the aluminium casting.
I tried soaking it with CRC and Penetrene but was worried that the aluminium might crack if I tried driving it out with a hammer and punch.
I couldn't twist it at all, so heated the broken bolt up with a little butane torch and let it cool. Then I put it in the press with the broken bolt in a hole I drilled in a press plate that was just a few sizes bigger than the bolt, to give the housing as much support as I could. The press went up to just over 5 tonne before the bolt started to move, but it came out smoothly and I was able to clean the hole out with a round file.
I put it in the sandblasting cabinet and gave it a clean up. It looks like the steel pipe has a copper wash. I can't pressure test it until I get it all refitted, but I will pull all the brass fittings off and use thread tape on them before repainting it all. It looks like they originally use red Stag pipe jointing paste, and it has done hard and crumbles off when poked.
Not sure if I will get a chance to do more to the truck this weekend as we are supposed to get more rain, but I'll post an update when I get more done.
Greg