A J Van Hero

Earlier this week my work sent me 3000 odd kilometres to the other side of the country for a couple of days. Normally I don't look forward to these trips, typically they are hard work, stressful and I get even less sleep than usual. Well all of that happened this time, but I also had the opportunity of meeting Kim, another mad keen Morris enthusiast. Kim kindly took the afternoon off work to take me to his home in the outskirts of Perth, where he keeps his collection. He has several acres, with plenty of room to keep the nice ones under cover and the less good ones outdoors. Kim has several Morris Minors, including a lovely project

I wouldn't mind if my backyard looked like this
 - I doubt I could persuade my wife though.

tourer, a van and a nicely restored saloon he drives on his 100km round trip commute to work. He also has a big 4WD Bedford truck.

Even more interesting to me are his five J and JB vans. Not all of them are saveable, but he reckons he should be able to build two good ones from the best parts of the five.

At present he is building up the chassis of his first, a JB chassis, which has a 1662cc B series motor and gearbox from a Morris Major, and the diff internals from a Wolseley. It will be fitted under the body of an earlier J Type. Pictures of Kim's progress are on his restoration blog.

A newly made spring shackle pin on the front suspension

Kim has a very pragmatic restoration philosophy. He wants to build a van that he can use on a regular basis. Hence the bigger engine and more practical diff ratio. His next step is a larger fuel tank, which will triple the fuel capacity. By using parts from within the BMC family, he can keep many of the improvements invisible. His ultimate aim is to fit the van out with period camping fittings so that he can travel in comfort and style.

Wheels look really good

Maybe its his background in helicopter safety, but Kim is extremely particular about doing things properly. It looks to me like every bush, pin or wearing part is being brought back to perfect original standard. He has done things like having leaf springs made, kingpins re-bushed and spring carrier wedges cast and machined, rather than re-using worn parts. He showed me a handbrake quadrant that he'd built up with weld and then filed all the teeth by hand back to the original profile. As a result, all of the details look terrific. I hope I can do mine to a similar standard.

This one looks a bit sad now, but this will be the second one saved

After spending the afternoon looking over Kim's collection and lots of Morris talk, I met Kim's partner Bronwyn and son Rob and was treated to a great dinner. Then to top it all off, I was farewelled with an early Christmas present. Kim very generously donated a large number of the parts I am missing. I am extremely grateful for his generosity. Kim has officially earned the title of "J van Hero".

That crate once held helicopter parts, but now it contains something much more important!

Little J Type

1:43 scale Morris J Type

Barry, my Father-In-Law is a big fan of Hornby O gauge model trains and often frequents swap meets and sales in the hope of picking up something new for his collection. This afternoon he dropped by with a very nice boxed set containing a Morris J Type along with a Bedford O type box van in early British Rail livery.

Morris J Type van and Bedford O type box van. The Bedford is quite a bit bigger than the Morris

The model looks to be pretty accurate and is nicely made. Its well outside my area of expertise, but apparently the set is a Corgi D46/1.

Looking back through my previous posts I realise that there hasn't been much progress with my 1:1 scale van. However I'm off to Perth, Western Australia tomorrow, and I hope to have something interesting to report in a few days.

Glass Half Full?

Members of the Morris Commercial J Type Van forum and followers of Bugly's Blog have know for some time that Lou sold his van "Bugly" to be used in an advertising campaign. Although Bugly's new owners were a secret, various hints regarding chocolate and the colour purple let us all guess that Bugly's new life would be promoting Cadbury's chocolate. For some time Cadburys have been running their "Joyville" promotion where they use a range of different quirky vehicles, all painted in trademark purple, so a J Type seems a good choice.

The new advertising campaign went to air in Australia last night, but as a viewer of ABC television I had to learn about it from the internet. Here's the youtube video. The promotion is called Joyville Special Delivery. It seems that there is a competition where they will deliver the winners a chocolate sculpture of something that gives them joy, personally they can keep the choccy and just leave the delivery van.

There are already a number of mentions of the van (or is that vans?) on the internet. Cadbury's are calling it "The Joymobile". The work was done by Jade Auto Repair in Sydney.  I have had my spies  out today to have a stickybeak through the doorway of their workshop. Sure enough there's the Joymobile.

Joymobile at Jade Auto Repair. Photo courtesy Ryan Paterson

The big question is, how many Joymobiles are there? Cadburys is a multinational with a major presence in Australia, New Zealand and the UK
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Apparently the ad was filmed in NZ and the promotion seems to be running there too. But did they ship Bugly across and back just to film it, or is there another in NZ? Could there be more than one here? I found a mention on the internet that Jade Auto Repair did up "the vans", so there may be more. Are they doing the same promotion in the UK?

Anyway, aside from the rather lurid colour scheme, its nice to see Bugly back on the road and even working, and the ad is going to bring more attention to the J type so that has to be a good thing.

A Royal Visit

I was blessed with a visit from Peter Bateman yesterday. Peter is kind of J Type royalty in Australia, he's based in Sydney where he is owned by a shiny blue J Type known as "Mr Cholmondley". Peter is somewhat obsessed by J types, which I think is admirable. Peter was visiting Tasmania under the pretext of a birthday present for his wife, but somehow managed to fit in several visits with Tasmanian J type owners. Peter came by for a couple of hours and gave me the benefit of his many years of J Type experience. Unfortunately we really ran out of time, not helped by my two bored youngsters who spent the whole time interrupting and demanding snacks!

She's not pretty is she? I find  t helps to squint a bit and use my imagination.

I particularly liked Peters suggestion of replacing all of the timber sub-structure with steel. Its something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to. The problem with the J type body is that its really just the  top and two sides of a narrow box. The big opening for the rear doors doesn't have a strong stiffening frame around it so the body can literally flop from side to side, like a collapsing box. Its very common for them to go out of square and fatigue cracks in the corners of the roof are endemic. Adding a steel subframe under the floor would enable closing the 4th side of the box in steel, as well as providing a solid foundation for a proper stiffening structure around the rear door opening and at the front. I'm wondering whether I might be able to use it to add  mounts for front seatbelts. I'm a bit paranoid about seatbelts, following a head-on in a Moke several years ago.

Luckily Peter gave me three weeks warning that he was coming. The J type has been pushed into the corner of the shed and buried in household stuff since I brought it home. The rest of the shed was filthy and filled with junk. So I've spent the last three weeks having a massive clean-up and I rolled the van out so that Peter could have a proper look. This meant that I could take some pictures of the whole vehicle, rather than just bits of it. I also took the opportunity to try to get a panoramic photo of the fleet. These are my wheeled projects, there are any number of other unfinished jobs and unstarted projects still waiting. Since the big clean-up. it has been an absolute pleasure to get out into the clean and spacious workshop, but I do have to admit that the Mini has been the one getting the attention.

1951 Morris J Type, 1977 Leyland Moke Californian, 1961 Morris Mini Traveller, 1969 Triumph Trophy 650, 1955 BSA C11G

J Type on Kids TV

Sarah, my 3 year old daughter, has a new favourite television show. I found her standing in front of the TV mesmerised by an animated emu driving an icecream van. A moment later I was beside her trying to get her to move out of the way. The program is called "The Koala Brothers" and one of the characters, an emu called 'Lolly', drives a slightly stylised J Type icecream van.

Lolly's van could do with some suspension work

The fact that its bright pink is what wins it favours with my 3 year old, when I pointed out that its the same as my van she came up with a number of suggestions about what colour schemes I should be using.

The rest of the cartoon isn't too bad either, there are several classic vehicles that make an appearance including a Piaggio Ape, a Vespa and a vintage caravan.

How the Engine Shroud Shouldn't Look,

 Charlie was after some pictures of a J van engine shroud, so I took some of mine to show what they aren't meant to look like. They aren't meant to have a vacuum brake booster rivetted to the rear face, or an automatic gear shifter welded to the side of them.

They shouldn't have a choke knob on the rearward face either, its meant to be standing up vertically in that hole in the far rear corner (and its called a bi-starter control in Solex lingo). Those aluminium pop-rivets aren't meant to be there either, neither is that cut and bend just in front of the choke knob, or that big gap next to the drivers's seat. In fact the whole rear section should be about 6 inches forward of here.

They aren't meant to be patched together and extended with scraps of aluminium sheet either, but thats how to do it if you want to fit a six cylinder where there's really only room for a four cylinder.

 It looks bad, but I think its mostly complete, so it shouldn't be too hard to piece it back together and weld up all the superfluous rivet holes.

Another Missing Part Located

Original wasn't a bad fit, despite being of unusal Pedigree.

When I first bought the van I quickly realised that the fuel cap that was fitted was unlikely to be the genuine part. The words "Pal Chicken in Marrowbone" printed on the side was the give away.

I wasn't really sure what the cap is meant to look like. On Charlie's Victoria J. Van Blog he shows a really nicely shaped polished brass fuel cap, but his J is a bit older than mine and has a number of other differences. Anyway I measured the thread on the filler pipe at 2" and 16TPI, which is actually a reasonably common fuel cap thread.

Not long after a cap was listed on Ebay in the UK, described as being for an unknown Morris Commercial, and measuring 2" with a 16TPI thread. I really only stumbled on it because the seller only listed it for sale to the UK not on ebay Australia. Luckily he didn't take much persuasion to agree to post it to Australia. I took a gamble and 'won' the auction. A week or so later it turned up.

Chrome is a bit pitted and needs re-doing

You can see the brass showing through inside

Anyway I hadn't made a mistake measuring the thread and it fitted quite well, although the finger grips bump against the panel that covers it on the inside when I try to screw it on. It will only need a small adjustment to make it fit. Mike from the MCJTV yahoo group tells me he's seen similar caps on other J types, so I reckon thats one more missing part found!  I'd be interested to know whether it really is a J Type cap though, or off another model, does anyone know?

Rough condition matches the rest of the vehicle.