Great amusement attended the discovery that our holiday cottage at Goginan, near Aberystwyth was within earshot of the Vale of Rheidol Railway and subjected thereby to a regular progress report as the trains passed by the many foot and road crossings! Even so, it was a surprise to find NG60 at the head of our train on the Tuesday and the matter of introducing young Brân (our new recruit) to train travel got off to a special start. Tegid had to make do with a Quarry Hunslet in his day!

As promised, the first job once we were back home and on an even keel again was to investigate the feed of oil to the rear springs, which had appeared to lack the regular shots of oil from the RP lubricator. A messy hour was spent opening the most distant unions which could be used to attach my improvised oil-gun to the lubricating points, three for each spring. It took a surprising amount of pumping for a seep of oil to appear, but thereafter it dripped copiously for an embarassingly long time. I was put in mind of the identical technology on NG60 last week! What was proved, of course, was that no local blockage was present, and neither were the pins seized and unable to transmit oil along their grooves. I also took the liberty of observing the No. 2 hole in the distributor plate where I had removed the union while driving the distributor round under pressure and counting. Sure enough, 24 pulses per dribble were counted, so things looked much as they should. Once I am in possession of the correct adaptor, I shall try forcing oil the entire length of line 2 and see what emerges before trying other lines in turn. In the meantime, checking that oil was delivered through the new pipes to the offside swivel was accomplished. The new pipes were then trimmed to the proper length so they fanned-out to the unions on the bracket, and some new olives were used to complete the compression fittings before checking delivery to a couple of the four lubrication points. Despite all that activity, there was still no sign of oil feeding through to the rear end. For a diversion, I fitted the batteries and set about bleeding the fuel lift and injection pumps before climbing into the (comfortable height) driving seat to press the START button. No success! I soon discovered why - the stop lever on the injection pump had been left pulled out, and to make things worse the accelerator pedal wasn't actually advancing the throttle control lever. That indicated that I had not done an adequate job of adjusting the length of the morse cable, but it is easily attended to having performed the same task at the cab end. I found enough adjustment to ensure that the throttle lever moved, and tried again. The trusty 505 started up and I was able to get about 30% of full revs with the pedal right down. With the engine ticking over, I went round the injector pipe unions to bleed any air, and noticed that No. 1 injector was leaking significantly. Maybe that is why the engine is lumpy at low speed? I also realised that odd sound effects were probably exacerbated by a serious exhaust leak before the silencer, which was actually a relief! I also measured the battery voltage, and on finding over 27V I was happy that the alternator seemed to be delivering current. After filling the garage with fumes, I shut the engine off and went outside for a cup of tea while the air cleared. Not a bad outcome for a day for which I had no real plan......

Brân (right) meets his first railway locomotive. Photo © J.Wilkins

Trial fitting of the new exhaust pipe. Photo © J.Wilkins

The next session followed a day spent rodding drains on the Ffestiniog Railway under threat of torrential rain and strong winds which never really appeared, so we made great progress and finished earlier than expected. In the garage the noise of rain hammering on the roof was almost incessant and the River Conwy at Llanrwst rose from an urgent torrent to an angry flood spilling out across the park in a few hours. Under the bus the flood of dirty hydraulic oil triggered by recent running of the engine was unwelcome. Where it comes from amazes me since the system has been 'drained' for decades. After mopping-up the first job was to pop the two rivets in the luggage pen trim. This had been delayed thanks to a useless supplier online who sent plain rivets without looking at the order and when challenged discovered a "stock-holding error" and refunded the price. Then I fitted the nearside front wheel and improved the look a great deal. After coffee I looked again at the injector union for no. 1 fuel line, but could not improve the leakage, and going inside to see if I could detect the cause of lumpy running discovered that the (translucent) fuel lines were full of air bubbles. Yes, the gallon fuel can was empty after less than twenty minutes of running the engine. I have to address the leak-off issue, though it must be said that I ran half a pint through while priming the fuel pump. At least it is all finding its way to the main tank. By this time, patience was running thin, so I took out my frustration on the exhaust pipe, which was leaking badly and had to come off at some point for replacement. Typically the nuts attaching the down-pipe to the manifold were tight, rusty and/or inaccessible. Curiously, the bolts which I had to deal with had larger nuts than their heads, and one of them was 15mm! Maybe that is something to do with the access issue? Anyway, one had to be cut and the last must be dealt with another way. The flexible pipe would not budge, so it was cut through on a diagonal with a hacksaw and peeled-back one strip at a time until it disengaged. More hacksawing of U-bolts ensued and after an hour the silencer stood disconnected from the engine. The replacement pipe which I have had in stock for a long, long time did not look sufficiently similar to inspire confidence. "So it goes", as Kurt would say. I felt better for definitive action, however!

At the next visit, I decided that the campaign should continue without pause. First, the final flange-bolt on the exhaust downpipe was undone, surprisingly easily once I had attached a metric spanner. Yes, really! The replacement exhaust was purchased about 18 years ago because I did not expect that the pattern would be stocked much longer! It is too long, and may simply be for the longer wheelbase e.g. 2MB type. Cutting it therefore looked an obvious way forward, with a view to re-joining the flexible section to a shortened downpipe. The flexible length was attached under a welded collar, so first it was all cut off with a hacksaw, and then the flexible pipe was cut through by the collar. All good, clean fun! That left a flexible pipe attached to the silencer bend at one end, and a nice fit to the downpipe which will cut to length in due course. Considering the rubbish which has been passed through the injectors in recent times, and the fact that their performance looked pretty poor, I talked to a company recommended by the Hooton team behind BL88 and RT2629. A set of 6 injectors from SM106 (and a 'spare' from SMS637 in case of problems) has been collected by company transport and taken to Wrexham for servicing. I found that two injectors from the spare engine could not be budged, though the other four yielded after a good fight. I have started to pay more attention to the spare, now that its true value is becoming obvious, and I was dismayed to find that I cannot turn it over with a bar. As always the big question is "Did it ever turn since I owned it?" I thought it did, but certainly not recently. Eddie Knorn reckons it was capable of being coaxed into life in his orchard before SMS637 was dismantled. The other job was to cut through enough rusty bolts to free the heatshield on the silencer and take it out. In just a few days I had a call to say that the injectors were done, and that I should definitely not re-fit them with a copper washer. In fact, the AEC manual says exactly that, but both my engines were fitted with them and I have no idea why! The advice was that the spray pattern would be impaired, and smoke would result. Well, there was plenty of that, so we shall see!

The rusted and leaky remains of the old exhaust system. Photo © J.Wilkins

First stage cleanup of the chassis crossmember. Photo © J.Wilkins

In further progress, one more injector has been liberated from the spare engine, and the complete set of refurbished injectors has been inserted back into SM106 for safe keeping, but not yet connected up. The morse cable for the accelerator has now been adjusted for length at its rear end, by first trimming back the sleeve and cutting an additional 1¼" of screw thread on the rod. Then the unibal was screwed on as far as it would go and the visible thread marked so that the minimum sensible length could be cut off. After cleaning up any burrs, the cable was inserted once more into the accelerator bell-crank cradle and the nuts done up. In the absence of any exhaust down-pipe, the bell-crank was very easy of access from under the bus, which meant that no straining through the floor-trap was necessary! The plastic sealing caps on the sleeve and rod were replaced after greasing and the unibal was screwed down to about the right position by eye and popped over the fixing bolt on the bell-crank. It all looked fine, so my neighbour was asked to play at bus driver so that I could check the cable travel - which did not quite reach the point of compressing the spring-link. It will do for now, and will need repeating when the cable is routed properly once more, by which time more objective testing will have occurred. After lunch, it was back to the exhaust and removal of the silencer, which was in terrible condition. No surprise that the casing was rusted through under the securing straps. The hacksaw was the only useful weapon again, so it was quite hard work and a great source of satisfaction when it dropped to the floor. There is a surprising amount of room without it! Thereafter, the nearside support bracket was next. One bolt was supremely easy to undo, the other needed the hacksaw. With that out of the way, cleaning-up the chassis cross-member commenced with undoing the clamps on the pipes and sleeved cables so that the inches-deep drifts of greasy soil could be dug away prior to proper preparation for cleaning and painting.

The lack of recent updates is not an indication that progress is not being made! It has more to do with a half-term holiday on the Cumbria coast with my family, and the increasingly flaky flash unit on my camera. A number of unrecorded initiatives have been progressed, particularly the cleaning and preparation of the chassis cross-member and ancillaries before the inevitable descent into cold, damp and gloom. In truth, early November proved to be warmer than expected, so oxide primer and two coats of aluminium primer were applied and look well. Now that all the experiments with the RP lubricator have completed, the pipes to the offside front swivel were put into a protective sleeve (garden hose) and terminated properly. Replacement for the flexible brake hose on that side has also been secured and attached. That meant that the wheel could be mounted, so now I have a bus that can be set back onto the ground when ready. New bolts were sourced for the silencer supports, one of which required its fixing holes to be opened out because smaller metric bolts had been fitted within the space occupied by the half-inch holes in the cross member. That was accomplished with a rat-tailed file because a big drill-bit would simply catch-up, probably break and finish in the wrong place to fit afterwards. What a caper. The heat-shield, in two parts, was still attached to the silencer, so spanners and hacksaw were applied as required and all the straps which fit to the silencer were measured-up for replacement. Really, they are in a bad way through corrosion, but should not be difficult, technically. The silencer has holes beneath the strap locations where moisture has lingered, and it will be a good job when complete. As the month of November progressed we saw the first snow appear on the mountains, and the regular imposition of 6°C temperatures. The air pipes to the gearbox have always been a mess, because one pipe has been replaced by using a different pipe from another bus, which would not fit the spacing bracket that clamps the pipes. All that has now been undone, and new pipe sourced to replace the incorrect one. That should solve any tendency to vibrate and chafe by elimination of crossing-points.

Removing the silencer heat-shield. Photo © J.Wilkins

Prepared and painted crossmember and silencer supports. Photo © J.Wilkins

Now that the nearside of the chassis is painted on the inside as far as the gearbox crossmember, the brake pipe and accelerator bowden cable can be put back into position. It is really encouraging when the job is reassembly of clean parts! This is all important progress towards the reinstatement of the rear brake chambers, of course, which will be a huge milestone.

Pipe clamps doing their job! Note the unprototypical oil-pressure pipe. Photo © J.Wilkins

The offside swivel with its replacement flexible pipes. Photo © J.Wilkins

The next session coincided with the ridiculous reversal of the cold snap that we were 'enjoying'. Condensation was severe, and drips pooled on the floor beneath the differential and similar heavy metal parts, so I decided to continue with the reinstatement of the exit doors. A while back I engineered some plastic angle strips which slip into the nosing aperture and cause it to grip more tightly. I have not had negative feedback regarding the COH Baines replacement part, but the neck is simultaneously too slim and too long to grip neatly. Peter used it on MB90 and a Bristol VR, apparently satisfactorily, and they will all be standard Peters door profiles. A mystery, but not one to waste any more time over! The first job was to make a little aluminium plate to fit the top slot so that the rubber could be drilled for a self-tapping screw and prevent it sliding down the slot under gravity. That took a while, though clones will be quicker. And then came the rusty fly in the ointment. Difficulty offering-up the door to its actuator pole showed that one of the clamping screws was still in place, but it had no head! An expletive moment for our friend Kurt. Over lunch I weighed-up the options, and ruled out an attempt at freeing the captive nut by disassembling the door. Mixed-metal assemblies like that will NOT come apart after more than 50 years. Wielding my angle grinder with great care, enough metal was removed from the lower corner of the door to free the captive nut & bolt assembly without damage to the decorative finish, or any part which will be visible when assembled on the bus. I have no spare captive nuts, so that one had to be sorted and door leaves are too valuable for such a sacrifice.The angle grinder was used again to make flats on the headless bolt, which was then gripped in the bench vise, and the nut turned with a spanner. It did not want to go, but a tiny movement was converted (after some lubrication and a great deal of spanner-waggling) into rotation, and the job was done. Anyone who has played with these 'captive' nuts in the wild will know that there is no simple way to attach the door leaves, and these gave me a proper runaround. It was well dark by the time I had tightened enough bolts to hold the first half of the first door securely enough to leave the problem for another day. Luckily, back at the coast the steamy drizzle had dried up enough for a pleasant, if dark, dog-walk before dinner.

The rearmost of the exit doors is installed at last...... Photo © J.Wilkins

.....and the foremost, almost. Photo © J.Wilkins

It took a couple more sessions to complete the operation, the first of which demonstrated that a deal of slop in the fixings was sufficient to install the closing-leaf of the rear pair WITHOUT removing its guide roller. What a result! The rest of the day was spent in making the little keeper-plate and installing the nosing rubber in the forward pair of doors, and then digging-out the parts required for installing the handrails. In the next session, the forward leaves were installed, but I could not prevail without removing the guide-roller bracket. No worries, I am honing my door-fitting skills with all this practice, and it didn't take long to make the doors hunky-dory - apart from the lack of a longer bolt for the top arm on the support pole. The longer bolt is required to go through the actuator arm as well as the support bracket, and I hope that finding a replacement will not be too difficult. The question remains, what happened to the original? All the others are there.

Reinstating the handrails has highlighted a fact that I had forgotten! During the removal of the handrails for proper preparation of the paintwork, 5 out of 8 barrel-nuts proved to be impossible to release due to corrosion. The solution was to drill away the screw that clamps the assembly into the door. A couple I tried to drill from the inside, which was a bad idea because of the deep penetration into the barrel-nut. I realised that the countersunk head was an easier option. I therefore had a collection of irreplaceable barrel-nuts with either a nasty hole or a protruding, headless screw. Holding the remains of the screw in the vise and turning the barrel-nut with my largest screwdriver held in an adjustable spanner proved too much for the corrosion and the screw came out quite meekly. One sheared off, but may be recoverable with careful drilling. The last can probably be cleaned up with no more than the careful application of a size 0 BA tap (which all of them will receive, anyway). One handrail was installed with the three sets of perfect parts that were removed intact, and looked the part with its newly-polished escutcheon plates. No, they were not painted originally! All that endeavour took over an hour and a half, by the way, though it does not sound much.

The gearbox air pipes and spacer block. Photo © J.Wilkins

New screws and refurbished barrel-nuts. Photo © J.Wilkins

After lunch I set about replacing the air-pipe which runs from the EP unit to the first-gear cylinder. Some while back I realised that the pipes had been bodged, and the spacer block (which is intended to prevent chafing of the pipes) had three pipes and an inch-long remnant of a fourth whose replacement was re-routed randomly. Not only random routing, but severe chafing had resulted (sound familiar?) from the fact that it was too short and could not run parallel to its comrades. No good! Steel pipe is too hard to work with, so ¼" cunifer brake pipe was obtained and straightened by rolling between two planks. Yes, expensive gizmos may be quicker but un-necessary for a medium length. Steady work using the redundant exhaust pipe collar or a scaffold pole as a former produced a close copy of the original steel pipe, and trimmed to length. The old pipe was cut to release its nuts which were threaded onto the new pipe with new compression olives. After tightening, the new pipe was eased into its groove in the spacer block and clamped securely. Too late for a pressure test that afternoon, with gathering darkness and dogs to walk, but it looked just fine (I thought). The most exciting things to arrive in our Christmas post were two different sizes of setscrews for doors application: Long ones 5/16" UNC for the actuator fixings and No.0 BA CSK for the handrail attachments. With the latter in stock I spent a cold hour in the cellar workshop repairing the threads of the barrel-nuts which had been damaged during the disassembly. Four were recovered with no more than a careful tapping operation, and tha last also required a drill. The art of tapping holes is all about feeling the tap cutting metal, and stopping when it baulks, lest the brittle tool snaps. I suspect that a ring of intact metal from the old screw was still in place, so it was drilled one size bigger than the largest bit that would pass through. That gave sufficient clearance for the tap to resume progress, and the job was complete. I ran indoors to warm my frozen feet!

The ceiling vent covers hang to dry. Photo © J.Wilkins

Absolutely the last task performed in 2025 was the painting of various bits of magnolia-ware from the ceiling and front header areas. The decorative covers to the ventilation ducts (well, slots in the ceiling) were removed before my time in order that an uninterrupted surface could be prepared for re-painting. They are pressed, thin-gauge steel and were a bit rusted because paint preparation had been minimal during the original build i.e. unpainted on their interior surfaces. That could not persist, and you may recall that selected examples were sent off for soda-blasting and primer coating, to great effect. I was nervous that, without further attention their condition would deteriorate. The flaps from the front header were removed completely during the autumn for painting, so the whole kit & caboodle was brought home where conditions are nominally better. That meant the kitchen, unfortunately. The flaps were treated and undercoated lying on a sheet of thick, scrap plywood (protection for the worktop) and hung up to dry in the shed, which looked like a kipper smokery. The vent covers were hung on an improvised 'washing line' over the stove. I was probably informed by working in view of the paint-spray area of the ICL 1/3 factory in Letchworth back in the late 1970s, but Hot Tango they were not. Apart from complaints about fumes, the arrangement worked well and without mishap. It was good to do something productive at a time when the bus garage was uninhabitable. We wish SM106 and all our readers (two or three at the last count) a Happy New Year!