Waxolyling

This is going to be a long story. First of all you gather the tools and set off into the adventure with a great deal of optimism - I mean how hard can it be to wax a Land Rover ?

According to all the instructions available you warm up the Waxolyl in water before using it and if necessary thin it with white spirit (which is also good for cleaning things as you will see later)

Whilst that is warming up I popped around the front and tried reversing Katy up onto some ramps I'd borrowed - unfortunately I gunned it a little hard, shot backwards and with no-one to tell me how far to go I misjudged it and ended up going over the back or the ramps and jammed them under the chassis (oops!)

No problem I thought I've got a good jack so I'll just lift her up a little, free them off, and take them out.

However the jack wasn't tall enough so I got a log from the log shed, which worked perfectly as you can see below.

Well actually what you can't see is this is after I've removed the first of the 2 ramps and discovered that the combination of log + jack at minimum height is taller than the gap up to the chassis when not held up by a ramp. This combination is therefore well and truly stuck !
  

So this is where Log & Jack number 2 comes in useful - I had to get an old scissor jack out of the garage and use that to lift the chassis up just a little so I could get the bottle jack out. I( have to say that this was a good lesson in the different capabilities of the 2 jacks because the bottle jack lifted her easily and the scissor jack was hard work

Having learned from the first side I put the scissor jack in whilst the bottle jack was still under and then released that one first and just lowered down on the less capable scissor jack.

On with the job then and the first discovery is that all this warming the stuff up was a waste of time it's still like goo and sprays awfully. So I go indoors and do some more reading and people talk about thinning it down so I take a dollop out of the can, replace with white spirit and shake madly - this time the stuff sprays OK so I start on with it

Apart from the nozzle on the sprayer blocking quite a few times I managed to get the job pretty well done, well at least I thought I had until I took these pictures. You see it's really black under there now and I didn't want to take a torch under as I was a bit messy by then, as you can see later. So I'll need to go back and touch up some bits

All in all however I have about 12 litres of Waxoyl applied and I'm letting that coat go off before I try any more as it's too sticky under there just now

Also at this point Rhian had come home and I needed to spend about an hour cleaning myself  as you can tell by this picture that she took. The 2 kids cycling past the end of the drive just at this time almost fell of their bikes laughing at the state of me.



However even though I do have some more to do I am congratulating myself on another job of improvement well done and no worries about going out in the snow and rain this winter


Update... I had this message from a friend (John Perriment who is a superb photographer http://www.johnperrimentphotography.com/)

 Waxoyl? Didn't know you could still get that, what a blast from the past. I'm afraid I laughed at your predicament in overshooting the ramps and getting the jack stuck! Still, it's a job well done. At least Katy shouldn't rust anymore during the winter - and neither should you, judging by the state of that photo!

Thanks John!