Winnie - Our 1970 Bay

@Ben72Bay Yes, I jumped on the LateBay group buy, in fact I think it was my first post on there.

The individual cost on the group buy ended up as £23.67 plus £3.29 postage. Which I thought was a great deal.

You even get the lower spline adapter, but I just used the coupler.

I’m sure there would be plenty on here for a potential group buy

Nice sunny day here so me and Frankie decided to take Winnie for a spin down the beach.

Repaired the lower front valance and bumper after my slight altercation with a high kerb coming back from Welshpool in March. Not quite got the lower under curve right on the bumper centre section, but it will do for now, I’ll keep my eye out for a decent centre piece or whip it off again in winter and shape it a bit better … think I’m over thinking it though just drive the blooming van.







First proper run with new front bush, and it’s brilliant, gear selection so very precise now

Van is looking very clean

Had to do an unexpected trip up north so the pets had to come too.

Frankie rode shotgun



Dini the cockatiel was in the rear gunner position singing all the way



Weather was torrential on the way up, but Winnie got us there safely.

Really pleased with the recent changes done (Lares 209 coupler and Derlin front bush).
I also tweaked the 123 curve a bit more to be “mechanically all in” later in the rev range, van didn’t go above 100deg C on the 90 mile jaunt up and same return journey and there’s some good climbs in and out of Wales. No oil light flicker after the long runs too



Pitch was huge but ideal for getting the car on there too as we used that to go visit Gill’s mum in hospital.

Decided I needed something else to worry about and had my eye on the Aircooled Acessories Oil pressure gauge to make a matching set with the Oil Temp and Tacho.

That’s the trouble when you run a multicore from front to back and only use a couple of cores , the spare ones are nagging to be used.

The gauges aren’t cheap, but I think they do match the original grey dials very well, plus the Oil Pressure gauge and sender came in at £95 delivered when using code WELCOME10 on their website, which I thought was good value.

I went for the single sender unit supplied with the gauge (0-70 PSI) as I wanted to keep a separate pressure switch so bought the T piece from Demon Tweeks with the correct thread for the case. Also shored things up with a couple few dowty washers after reading the some horror stories of folk cracking cases through over tightening.

Fired up all good, lamp on temp gauge wasn’t working (I’d changed it to led) so had to whip out the gauge to sort it, in doing so scratched the frickin pod it’s only painted so I’ll redo it at some point.

I fitted an 18ohm inline resistor on the temp gauge as it’s been reading over by 18deg so it’ll be interesting to see how it now compares to the Bluetooth 123 temp sensor.

All good on start up, sort of pressure to be expected on a cold’ish start





Look at all those spare cores coiled up, just itching to be used


Not a lot of room because of the tinware, so mounted it this way.

Black permanent marker does wonders for the dash.

J & P

gas1man said:

Black permanent marker does wonders for the dash.

J & P

Click to expand...

I touched it up today with a fine brush and it looks a lot better now ..: from about 10yds