Side Project 4: Nudge Bar Refresh

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, it was just a small niggle but I carried on with the disassembly and preparation work, but by the time I finished up the sanding and priming towards the end of the day, it had become a massively debilitating pain and I could hardly walk. There is a lesson here that I should have learnt some forty years ago about lifting from the knees, and after having to take a few days off work and visit the doctor & physiotherapist, it just goes to show that it is never too late to learn.

Anyway, this put that project on hold for about 3 weeks while I recovered, but when I was fit enough I spent a day putting 2 coats of paint on the assembly and managed to put the nudge bars back on the front of the van without hurting myself again. To finish off the work I used the old heat gun trick I learnt from a YouTube video, (here), to bring back the fading black plastic trim that sits over the front of the nudge bars, to an almost new condition. It worked out a treat.

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Captain’s Chair Mod

I have spent about 9 months looking through various Delica forums and websites to find some information and guidance on how to move one of my middle-row Captain’s Chairs forward to the front passenger side location in Digby. This is a pretty popular mod for your Delica if you can have a Captain’s Chair or can buy one cheap, and I have found a good resource for this mod, ( here ), that show how the mod can be done with a degree of involvement and complexity. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much research you do in advance, something you didn’t expect comes along to throw you off…… When I removed the front passenger seat and lifted the carpet it became apparent pretty quickly that my simple idea of just lining up the rails and drilling some holes was not going to be as simple as I had hoped. Firstly, the bolt holes for the rear mounting on the front passenger seat were significantly wider than either the seat holes at the front of the passenger’s seat or the width of the Captain’s Chair

New Glow Plugs

Like many Delica owners, morning start-ups on cold days could be a nervous experience that came with a number of attempts and huge clouds of grey smoke, so it was time to investigate. After reading the forums the general advice was to take a look at the glow plus as a first step, and if that didn’t work, there might be a more serious issue. So I got hold of some Bosch 5.0mm glow plus (Bosch part: F005X12917) which took no more than 10 minutes to install, including giving the Bus Bar a good clean, and the Delica fired up immediately and with much less smoke. I can report that the glow plugs have been in Digby for a while and it still starts up first time every time. I strongly recommend that any Delica owner that is struggling with cold starts change the glow plugs immediately…. Note: I have had the new Glow Plugs installed for over a year now and the Delica is still starting strongly on the first attempt, and almost no smoke at all.

“Second Fix” and finishing the Interior

It’s been a while since my last blog post so I thought I would update you on where we are up to in terms of the fit-out of our beloved Delica; Digby I’m calling this phase the “Second Fix” not because it’s the next step in the build process, but a lot of what I have been doing recently is redoing stuff a second time…! After building the rear wardrobe unit I realised that I had positioned the bottom openings far too low to allow for the 15cm mattress we were planning on, and that the openings were a bit larger than we needed so I re-designed and re-built the front of the wardrobe to fit the new plan I had also built the carcass of the right-hand side unit as part of the “First-Fix” but again realised that it was both too long and would be difficult to access, so I completely re-designed the unit with an integrated wine rack, (yeah, I did that..!), some open storage space, and closed-in storage on top with a lockable side opening for access. Whilst this was a much better use of space, or

Digby's Aimless Adventure

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