Thanks everyone for following this story, I look forward to following the threads that we have inspired when you all come back from your adventures - NaFe while your project has ground to a stop, stick your trip up, my picks make me smile and I have only been back two weeks!
Have just been tinkering with the van and have some pictures relating to the story:
Firstly, my collection of alternator pulleys. From left to right, the first is the one that came on the engine (I have every reason to believe it is OG), the inner pulley (top half in picture) shattered between the spindle and the outer edge of the pulley and if you zoom in on the picture you can see where it was welded together, then the 'square' hole in the outer pulley (bottom half in the picture) began to round off as you can see. The second set is the repro I received from JK and the spindle attached to the innner pulley was only spot welded in 4 places so came undone straight away, three days later it split as show in the picture and ate the alternator casing as shown in the picture below. The third pulley is one of my 3 spares, this particular one is from Heritage and a much more solidly put together pulley.
the damage to the alternator casing:
The insulation we applied to the van to keep us warm, firstly we fitted sun screens (the type that fit in the windscreen when parked up) to the three rear windows, then fitted some 5mm polystyrene covered with a thin sheet of aluminium (the kind of stuff that goes behind radiators in a house to reflect the heat back into the room):
This stopped the large windows stealing our body heat at night, then below, we bought some larger sun screens (to fit vans) and blocked off the pop top, as the fibre glass roof offered no insulation. As the roof gathered a lot of moisture the screens wouldn't stick up with tape so I had to create some support bars to hold it up:
Although we looked a little like a spaceship inside, we had gone far beyond being image conscious at this point!!
