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.