Patching up unwanted holes

In common with most caravans and campers of the day the original Holdsworth Villa 3 conversion was fitted with a mains inlet for connection to a static supply when parked on caravan sites, and was also fitted with a fridge which worked on 240V, 12V and butane gas.

These days it's perfectly feasible to obtain mains electricty from a carefully designed inverter if you're careful about the earthing (more about this later) and we don't plan to have any gas in our new conversion.

Holes are therefore cut all over the van for various sockets, and three openings for the fridge (gas flue, ventilator and an inlet beneath the sink to allow gas vapour to escape and air to enter for combustion.

The edges of these holes appear to have been painted with some green gunk but it hasn't prevented them from rusting, sometimes badly.  Despite having a foam gasket it's very difficult to prevent the holes for the self-tapping screws from rusting, and the screws themselves.  Once that starts to happen the entire surrounding area corrodes.

We don't need these, so we're going to block them all up!

Firstly the inside of the panel is cleaned (good old wire wheel and angle grinder) and then a panel is cut and tacked into place on the inside.  This area isn't structural and these holes have always been there so there's no need to risk warping everything by trying to weld all the way around it.





We're applying underseal to the inside of all the panels as part of the refurbishment.  It's a good way of preventing new rust and it keeps down the road noise.  You can buy NVH material to stick on, but underseal works, especially when you don't expect to want it off again, and is much more cost-effective.

This entire panel will be covered when the interior is rebuilt, so black is fine.

The outside surface of this panel is slightly curved, so we'll have to keep filling it and sanding it until we restore the original shape.

The hole for the electric inlet was repaired in exactly the same way.

Instrument Panel and Fascia

In the twenty three years I've had this van I've never had to take out the entire front fascia, but this is how we did it.

Whatever you do, don't follow the instructions in the Haynes manual, they'll have you drilling out the weak-bolts that hold the steering column bracket and eventually having to replace them with new ones.  There's no need, you can get the fascia out with the steering column still atached to it, and then remove the column from the bracket.

Basically the whole thing is bolted to the front of the van at each side, and along the bottom of the windscreen where the condensation gathers and rusts it all - see previous blog.

It's necessary of course to remove the instrument panel, and disconnect the speedo cable.

There are dozens of wire bundles to undo but they are all on connectors, and every connector is either different or is keyed in some way, so there's no possibility of not knowing how they go back.

Look for the brown wire from the steering wheel to the horn, we missed that.

There are two metal support arms which bolt from the steering column bracket to the front of the van, either side of the brake and clutch fluid reservoir. They're hard to get at and you'll need to be careful not to damage the plastic reservoir. You just need to undo those arms and disconnect the bottom of the steering wheel shaft from the rubber mount near the brake pedal and you can take the entire assembly out.

You'll also need to pull the knobs off the heater controls, take the front off it, and remove the screws so that the heater control assembly stays behind.  Apart from the screws at the front there is one round the corner on the steering wheeel side - that took us a while to discover.  Much grovelling about trying to find out what was holding it all in, while trying not to break whatever it was.

It's a two person job to get it out, it's heavy.


Now there's a hex-headed clamp bolt you can undo to take the steering column off the bracket.

We could have done that before we took the assembly out, it would have made it lighter, but we didn't know.
If you ever just wanted the steering column out you could disconnect it at the bottom and then undo the hex-headed clamp bolt to remove the column leaving the bracket still attached to the fascia.

It will go back together!

There are a few things to do now that we have got this off.

For many years only two of the three heater controls have worked as the cable inner kept pulling out of the control lever because the associated cable and flap was old and stiff, and eventually the knob got lost.

We must take the heater to bits while we can and free all this up, and source a new knob.

The last time this heater control assembly went wrong was a hot summer day when the temperature knob came off and I had to drive back from Falkirk to Keith with the heater on full.  Even with the windows open by the time I got home I was almost down to my underpants.  You didn't really want to know that.

Body Repairs 4 - Windscreen wiper hole

Many years ago the area around the driver's side wiper arm started to rust, and water eventually started to get into the cab in rainy weather.  I had no idea why this corrosion might have started in this particular place, as the centre wiper arm was unaffected.

I made a temporary repair using a bit of fibreglass, and it worked for a while but without being able to get at the complete area properly to remove all the rust it was short-lived.

The problem is that the wiper arm assembly is behind the dash and the inside fascia panel, and these are difficult to remove.  The rusted area also extended up into the windscreen rubber.  The area was therefore virtually impossible to repair without removing the windscreen and the entire dashboard.

Now is the time.

Having removed the old windscreen and the entire dashboard and fascia it is now apparent why the area has rusted away.   This is the passenger side are of the front.  The lip is where the windscreen sits, so the top half of the photograph is outside and the lower half is inside the van.

The dashboard / fascia bolts to the area that is showing surface rust.  This is where condensation that has run down the inside of the windscreen collects, and it runs to either end of the opening, where it is supposed to drain through that large hole and drip onto the floor.

It has corroded this side of the windscreen opening.  On this side it is only surface rust and will clean up, but part of the lip is rusted and will have to be rebuilt.

At the driver's side this water has accumulated around the windscreen wiper pivot and bracket, and caused major corrosion.  The rusted area was cut away but the lip which reatins the windscreen, and the inner plate onto which the dashboard is bolted has completely disappeared.


Two replacement sections had to be made to patch up the area, one for the outer surface, and the other for the inner surface.  These are tacked into place and plug-welded along the top to rebuld the lip.  This is how the original lip is formed where the front panel and the inner plate are spot-welded.

Body Work 3 Rear Panel

The rear section of the T25 is mostly taken up by the tailgate.  It's the section beneath this containing the lights and number plate which tends to corrode.

The number plate is fixed to a drop-down flap which gives access to the dipstick, oil filler and the coolant system expansion tank.

The flap is sprung closed on a pair of hinges. A bit of effort is needed to remove the screws but the complete assembly does come off.  I found it was too difficult to get at the screws holding the hinge brackets to the rear panel, and the solution was to knock out the hinge pins so that the two parts of the hinges sprang apart, and then it was easier to get a drive onto the screws.

This shows one hinge removed.  The two holes above the removed hinge are for the screws which retain the collant expansion tank.  I really need the whole area clear to get all the rust off and respray it.



Beneath this opening is the dropped lip that covers the exhaust muffler.  All the little square holes in this are also corroded.  The whole area soon cleans up with the wire wheel on the angle grinder.

The areas that appear black are actually shiny, it's just the way the light catches them.













Once cleaned up it is apparent that there are several perforations along the lower lip, which will clean up on the back and then repair with a fibreglass patch from the reverse side.

Once repaired, rubbed down and primed the section looks quite good.  There are some uneven edges around the little square holes where the old paint has not feathered properly. We might fix this before the final respray, but all this section is behind and below the rear bumper, so not subject to close scrutiny.

Body Repairs 2

The side door slides on a runner concealed behind a removable panel held by a couple of screws, and along a bottom rail which is part of the sill.

It's a real bugger to get the side door off, the workshop manual is not much help, but with two brains we managed to work out how to do it.

We didn't really care whether we scratched the paintwork getting it off, we'll have to be very careful putting it back on again when the job is finished.

There looked to be a lot of rust behind the side panel, but it was all just flaking paint and nothing that had corroded through.  Some work with the powerfile and a few coats of primer soon sorted that out.

We were more concerned about the bottom runner, which was badly rusted and at first it looked like it was an integral part of the sill.  The main problem was the channel holding the door rubber.

Not so, the u-shaped channel is spot-welded onto the sill and can be removed and replaced.  Simply drill out the spot welds, clean them all flat with an angle grinder, drill holes in the replacement runner and plug weld it in the right place. We used the rubber surround that was taken off the opening to locate the exact height for the replacement.

That wasn't very painful at all.  Unfortunately, while doing this we noticed that the bottom corner of the 'C' pillar was rusty, and that was a real fiddle to repair.

After cleaning it up we had to make a shaped repair profile to weld in place. The shape of this pillar is complex as it has both a u-channel to hold the door rubber and a channel that forms a drain, and that is not a profile that we could make out of one piece of metal.

This shows the repair section in place ready to be welded.  It is in two pieces, the shaped part shown in the previous picture, plus a flat plate (with the blue 'o' on it) which completes the u-channel that retains the door rubber down the side of the pillar.  There's no way to clamp it all in place until it's welded, so it's clamped up by the self-tapping screw.  Once it's all hammered to a close fit and welded up the screw could be removed, but it's doing no harm, so we might as well leave it in.










This repair secion also butts up to the newly-replaced bottom channel, so that could all be welded together.




The result is not the prettiest repair but will clean up, and it's all hidden behind the door rubber anyway.






The remainder of the sill is fine and it cleaned up really well.  The upper channel is the door runner, the lower one is the replacement one for the rubber.  In fact, the door runner section doesn't get exposed to long-term road salt and dirt because it's on the 'inside' of the door rubber, which is probably why it's survived so well.

So, that's pretty much the back half of one side of the van repaired, at least in terms of the bodywork.

Body Repairs 1 - Updated

From the outside it has always seemed that the problems with the van were just 'a bit of rust'.  Once we started taking it to piece it became obvious that this was far from the full picture.

The bumpers on this T25 are resin-composite ones rather than the metal versions on earlier models.  The rear bumper is made up of three sections, a long one across the back, and two end-cheeks.  The rear section is bolted to a couple of long 'arms' which in turn push into the box sections forming the sides of the engine compartment.
The end cheeks bolt onto the ends of the rear bumper section and also bolt to the lower corner panels in two places.


The nearside rear bumper cheek had been drooping for a few years, so we expected that the bolt location holding it to the chassis would be corroded, and so we expected to need a new panel section for that, and also perhaps the wheel arch section too.

I believe this corner cheek got pushed into the side of the bodywork about seven years ago when someone borrowed the van and parked it at the top of a hill without putting the handbrake on properly and it rolled into a ditch, where it had to stay all night until they could get a farmer to come and pull it out.

We were right about needing both those panels

The big hole is where the bumper end-cheek bolts through the panel from the inside.  The bumper comes right up to the swage line, and wraps round to the back of the wheel arch, so none of this corrosion is visible until you remove it.

Replacement panels are easy to obtain, and need a bit of 're-shaping' (hitting with a big hammer) to fit properly

A bit of work with a hammer in the wheel arch also revealed that the whole area around the back corner was corroded as well. There is a box structure in the back corner rearwards of the wheel arch, and the horizontal and vertical joint lines visible in this photograph are not just joins between two panels, they are actually joins where three surfaces meet to form the front and bottom of the rear box.

A large section of this was also corroded

This photograph is looking up through the floor of the van into what is effectively the left-hand side of the engine compartment.  The metal panel at the top of the picture with the blue line drawn on it is the back of the wheel arch.

This corrosion is partly due to bad design. Above this section in the side of the van is a ventilator that allows heat from the engine compartment to escape.  It also allows rain to get in and collect on the floor of that box, which is actually formed of two overlapping metal sections that are not welded but only sealed together with compound.

Combined with road salt and dirt on the outside of the floor this is a recipe for disaster.

In effect the entire lower rear corner of the van needed rebuilding.  The blue line was part of the area which we drew to cut around, where the existing panels were sound enough to weld to.

Once that had been cut out it looked like this

The triangular section rising from the corroded floor forms part of a vertical box section rising all the way to the roof to strengthen the corner of the van and to help direct the air upwards to the ventilator in the side.

Some scraping that we did on the rear dropped lip showed that this seemed to be ok.  All this is covered in factory-applied rubbery sealer, which appears to work well until water gets underneath it.

To repair this corner we had to make an 'L' shaped metal panel to fit inside the box, matching up to the  flanges.  This would seam-weld to the cleaned inside of the box, and the replacement rear bumper panel and wheel arch sections would plug-weld 'through' the partly-corroded flanges, trapping them in between.

A smaller 'L' shaped bracket was constructed to weld the bottom end of the vertical riser to the new floor of the box.

When all welded up it looks like new.  Photos to follow.

The repaired panels.

Feech away!

Now that we have everything off the van we need to get rid of all the old and dirty (feechee) fabrics. Brown was obviously a popular colour on the 80's.

The worst stuff to remove was the brown furry fibre matting which seemed to be everywhere. The glue that it was stuck on certainly did the job. After some research we had a few things to try to get rid of the feech.

We tried steam and that was a failure, next a hair dryer again a failure. WD40 was the next suggestion again no movement.

Finally we tried petrol (don't try this at home) and success it came off.

It was a slow process but it was worth it to have it all off.  

The last stuff to remove was the backing cloth that was behind the wardrobe, that was not too difficult to remove, it pulled off.  

Now the inside of the van is all clean ready to start with the addition of the cupboards.