Digby's Aimless Adventure

When we purchased Digby, we accepted that the front nudge bars would need some work. Not only did they show signs of discolouration and rust, but inexplicably, Mitsubishi decided that the nudge bars of this model of Delica should be white, and odd choice as the rest of the vehicle was predominately black over grey. I had previously seen a few similar models to Digby with the nudge bars painted black, which matched to the bodywork and which I thought looked bad arsed… I could have decided to spray paint the nudge bars in place, but I thought that I would do it properly and remove them from the front of Digby, sand down the rust spots and flaky white paint, add a coat of rust-inhibiting primer, then respray the nudge bars matt black to key into the majority of the paintwork, and put them back on the van. As it turns out, the nudge bar assembly is quite heavy and as I was removing it from the front of Digby, I lifted it incorrectly and managed to pull something in my back… Dam…!! At first

The next project on the list was to spruce up the dash-mounted binnacle that houses an inclinometer, a temperature gauge and a battery voltage meter, which had been damaged by a previous owner and no longer bolted into place on top of the dash. I also wanted to take a closer look at the inclinometer, which if believed, indicated that Digby was upside down on its roof..! As the white plastic lugs through which the bolts were was mounted had been snapped off, leaving the whole unit ‘free-floating’, the binnacle was easy to remove by just unplugging the electrics. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that some of the missing parts of the broken white plastic were still held in place under the bolts that screwed into the metal brace at the top of the dashboard, which I carefully removed as there was just enough plastic that I might be able to superglue the parts back to the main body of the binnacle. I carefully disassembled the binnacle housing, firstly removing the clip-off rear surround an

The next side project I decided to tackle was to upgrade all the interior cabin lights and instrument panel bulbs to LED’s, so I started to purchase the various size and types of bulbs required, mainly from Alibaba.com. As I have said before, I am not particularly mechanically-minded and this lack of skill also extends to being somewhat limited in the electrical department, but  I was throwing myself into this project as a learning experience as much as for any other reason, so I started to fumble my way through it. Firstly I replaced the existing dim interior cabin lights to super-bright LED’s, with only managing to blow a few fuses in the process. I purchased a couple of LED kits from Mark Redfern’s excellent Rabbitz2k shop on eBay ( here ) which duly arrived in the post, and with a minimum of fuss installed them into Digby. Taking out the instrument panel and replacing the various warning light bulbs is not to be underestimated, it’s quite a complex job and I referred to the Mitsubi

Fiona & I had a little project of our own to make some sort of window covering for the back of Digby that would block out the light when camping. Some of the more up-market Delica’s came with curtains & curtain tracks, but we were not so lucky. We watched a few YouTube clips and tossed around a few ideas and finally settled on making some snug-fitting inserts that would act as blinds that could be positioned right up against the back windows and held in place by the internal window surrounds.  For this to work, the blinds would need to be cut very close to the window shape, be quite stiff to hold their shape across the window, be able to act as a moisture barrier and include some sort of insulation material to stop any thermal transfer from the glass.     To achieve this we first purchased some stiff corrugated plastic (corflute), maybe 5mm thick, some reflective insulation underlay normally used under carpet, and some patterned material cloth that we thought would look nice on

When buying a 23-year-old vehicle the one thing you know you going to have to do is spend some time and money repairing & replacing some of the worn-out and tired parts, and I had allowed a generous budget to have some initial work done on Digby. As I am not particularly mechanically minded, I did some research to see if I could find a mechanic in the local area that would have at least have a passing familiarity with a Mitsubishi Delica, a vehicle that was only imported into New Zealand in very small numbers or brought in as a personal import. Imagine my joy when I found a mobile mechanic named Harry working in Christchurch that was not only familiar with a Delica but actually used one as his door-to-door mobile garage.    I dug out Harry's number and gave him a call and set up a time for him to pop round to my house and give Digby the once-over, and he duly turned up in his green short wheelbase series 1 Delica and proceeded to give the old boy a good going over, and after a