Bugger!!!!.... Measure twice cut once.

When will I learn?  Hitched up on Friday and to my utter dismay I discovered that there was not enough travel space in the inner arches to allow for rear axle movement.  I was sure that I had allowed sufficient distance but upon inspection I discovered that I had measured 110mm instead of 210mm.
Stupid mistake, which after much discussion about different solutions, I realised that the only way to truly fix it was to cut out the Inner arches and replace with new ones.  A quick call to Paul Burrows, my brother in law, who dropped everything to come out and measure up the required size of the radius for the rolled arch and by 10am Monday, the new arches were sitting next to the truck for fitting.
First thing Monday morning (6.30am) saw me out with the angle grinder cutting out the existing inners.  With the assistance of my other brother in law, Brian Cotgrove, we held up the new inners and scribed the new arc on the outer guards, from this line I was able to cut the outer guards to suit and then we could slide the inners in to meet the inner guards, scribe the arc there and then cut them out.  From there we held the inner arches in place and I tacked them in place.  This took till about 4pm ish to do both sides.  I had to have a shower (covered in grinding dust) and a change of clothes before continuing to fully weld the inner arches in. finished around 9pm.
Another early start on Tuesday saw me grinding the weld areas ready for smoothing up and primer.  Brian re-proofcoated the inner arches underneath and replaced the wheels and by 5pm that day we had replaced the hitch and hooked up to the van.... All was well even if we were then two days late for our departure.

Old Inner Arch

New Inner Arch

Thursday morning at around 11am, we went and said our 'good buy's' to all the crew at Carba-Tec and by 11.30am we were on the road for a plesant drive to our next destination... Scarbourough Holliday Village Caravan Park.

We set up camp with ease and sat down to relax for a bit, whereupon the previous weeks workloads caught up with me and I just had to sleep.

... So as the sun sets over the yard arms....

another chapter in Eileen and My lives is about to unfurl....