What a fortnight it has been.

So we bought the new van home and put it in for a service and Cam Belt change ... £2000 odd pounds later we have: a new Cam Belt, Oils, filters, Brake pads and disks (front), front wheel bearings, brake shoes and cylinders (rear), water pump, water pump pulley, crank shaft seal, x4 Injector seals and the offside indicator lamp cluster (front). So that was expensive. But it doesn’t stop there, there is a bracket for the glide-rite air suspension that has rusted through (possibly). I’m hoping that it isn’t too serious, or that it’s a false positive (our mechanics couldn’t be 100% sure having no explicit expertise in this particular arena). We are prepared for another bigish bill and possibly an overnight stay near to the installers workshop.

Are we regretting buying the unit already? Yes and no. The body work is spotless from the Cills up. Our mechanics say the engine is sound given the mileage, and that the service items mean that absolutely all major consumables have been looked after and are good for several thousand miles (oil needs changing every five thousand) at least.

I started tinkering with the internal space and trim and decided in a very short amount of time that the best way forward was to rip it out completely and start again. Now this may seem like a bizarre thing to do, seeing as one of the buying points was that it had been fitted out already. However, in ripping it out one has revealed pristine internal metalwork (except around the windows mentioned in the previous posts, and way down where the Cills join the main panel work). At this juncture there is rust, and frankly you have to wonder at Vauxhall’s manufacturing process and quality control, that this rust is effectively designed in.

At the points where the external bump trim fixing bolts penetrate the outer shell, they have not provided adequate rust protection, either by the physical fixing, or by additional coatings. On the old Talbot, which was seven years older than this Vauxhall, you could still see the hard glaze lacquer that formed a rim around every single body penetrating fixing, consequently there wasn’t a spot of rust on it. The visible rust doesn’t penetrate to the supporting uprights, but will require some grinding out and then either a  plate or some Isopon P40 fibreglass mat and a skim of Isopon P38 to finish. Fortunately the entire area of rust is under the bump trims that line the side ... not that that’s an excuse for doing a bodge job, it just takes the pressure off when t comes to painting and flatting.

If there is a big disappointment, then it’s the fact that the middle offside window rim is rusted right through and has been patched in a way that quite frankly makes me very cross: One because I’m going to have to fix it, and subtly underneath that, the fact that the unit was an NHS ambulance and we already paid for it to be looked after via the treasury ... and some lazy fucking turd somewhere just gobbed it up with some silicone, then layered on paint  with a trowel... and probably billed you and I for what probably looked like a proper job for a few months.

On from this I’ve made some grand discoveries: The heater is a Mikuni diesel unit, fully plumbed into the main fuel tank. There is a top of the line split charge relay unit and a deep cycle marine battery already installed. The battery provides the juice to the Glide-rite system and to all the secondary systems. There is an electrical distribution panel just behind the drivers seat that provides service to the blue lights, most of it is redundant in terms of terminations, but the board itself and its fuse carriers are re-usable (not that these are expensive items, it’s just good that they are not on a future shopping list). And finally for the electricals everything is run in flexible conduit.

I have now reached a stopping point with regards to what I can do, I need the air suspension to be serviced this is booked in for the 12^th of April. I then have to sort out the bodywork, before I can think about re-insulating and lining the unit with new ply. I can augment the under bonnet insulation and clean in the engine bay ... but to be entirely fair, these are nothing more than “keeping your hand in” jobs. So that’s March 2013 gone, on square forty hoping for a six next throw and no more snakes.

March Marches Past ... again.

We are coming up to the target date for leaving on our grand tour; 21^st March 2013 ... which by my calculations was supposed to be today. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that. It’s over a year since our first post and nearly a year we’ve had this date in mind. Who could have known what slog it would have been ... and some may say “all to nought”. My analogy is Snakes and Ladders, we got to No 98 and had to drop all the way back to the mid thirties. I say mid thirties, not zero or one, because you have to include all of the process that got you to the point where you were ready to “go a travelling”. If it was as simple as getting in your vehicle and driving off into the sunset, we would have been celebrating the anniversary of setting off, and our first year on the roads about now. There are two things barring our way forward at the moment ... albeit ... substantial hurdles on their own: The house hasn’t sold (but we got to enjoy all our labours all winter long), and the big one: we haven’t got a working motor home right now ... but we have that in hand.

Below are some more pictures of Mk2. I’ve already binned the seats from the rear. I was going to try them on Ebay, but then I decided to check Ebay to see how well they sold given their provenance ... it’s a spade is a spade moment ... to whit the seats are possibly piss smelling, bacteria ridden arse breakers that go on Ebay for .99p and then sit there without even a watch for the next ten days. I have no sense of smell so I couldn’t tell about the Pee smell, however I did do the release mechanisms to get the seats out, and after loosening the first one, I retreated to the bathroom for a hand wash and nitrile gloves. Cleary they’ve been cleaned as have the floors, after all it’s an ambulance, but once you’re in the grooves on the floor that the seats lock into, and scales that were small, become perceptively bigger, those clumps of hair and gritty crud in the dark crevices at the very bases of the seats become phage ridden bacteria swarms looking for a new kind of host to infect ... and that’s how Zombie apocalypses start. So the seats went to the dump where all the other phages live and die in a microscopic war of attrition that doesn’t usually result in Zombieapocalypsitis.

Having taken the old seats to the dump, I went in with the big gun ... that’s right total war scorched Earth Armageddon on dirt ... sounds exciting, in laymen’s terms ... hot Domestos on a traditional mop head. Never mind all that thixotropic sticks to the rim even after you’ve flushed shit shit ... what you need to weaponize bleach is hot water and a raggedy mop, followed by some deft footwork and plenty of foam. Needless to say, the water came out black, and my only regret was not wearing a facemask when I was down in the pube knotted micro world of sick or injured people’s faecal matter and bacteria ... possibly.

So today 21^st of March 2013, instead of driving off into the sunset, I’m instead going to go back in, to remove: plastic plates that tell you how to release the seats, a laerdal suction unit mount, clips and tubes that used to pass oxygen from one end to the other, and hopefully the wheelchair access mount (I say hopefully because it’s a big lump of metal held on with many bolts that have been worn so that the bolts may be difficult to hold with a spanner). I’m also going to remove one main ply panel to see what state the insulation is in. Once the insulation is inspected I’ll make a decision about replacing it, augmenting it or just leaving it alone.

On Monday I’m driving it to our usual mechanics, Benchsound in Stanford Le Hope, Essex (www.benchsound.co.uk) for a full service and a Cam Belt change (the first painful bill). I said in the last post that the unit had been well serviced and that it had a lot of service history which I read more thoroughly on Monday, Timing and Cam Belts have been changed previously as have brake pads, wiper blades, oils, coolant etc. However in amongst the lines of service history I did find one thing that concerned me a little, that I didn’t spot on the first run through; at around 200k miles it had a new cylinder head. There are two ways of looking at that; it’s had a new cylinder head that is 100k miles younger than the rest of the vehicle (this is a good thing), or it’s had a new cylinder head how are the pistons and rings? (That may not be such a good thing). However one has to look at the positives. Were the unit to require a full recon, the head should be pretty sound, with new belts and the frosty eye of the guys at Benchsound we should know by Monday Evening if we’ve “bought a pup” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke for those interested in the origins of that particular idiom ... clearly I was J ).

More later.

Down But Not Out

Yet again we have been quiet for a week or two, but in the background things have been happening. I didn’t have to complain to the highest level of Direct Line, in fact once they pulled their finger out they actually move very quickly. That isn’t to say that it’s good news, the motor home has been written off, as we suspected it would. There were a number of deciding factors: the age of the vehicle, the fact that the chassis is ladder format means that any twisting would require the entire body to be removed, and it couldn’t be assured of being jigged back to form (of course this in itself  would be massively expensive). The damage to the front near side suspension turret was a good indicator that the chassis had moved from square to a parallelogram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelogram (for those that may not know that shape). The ding in the front of the chassis only compounded the issue of the chassis being true, as the front damage is on the opposite corner of the motorhome.

The deal we’ve struck is a compromise, as things always are. We’ve been paid out £500 less than the insured value. We have to buy back the carcass to extract our brand new equipment. Had we removed it prior to the assessment as everyone said we should do, to protect our investment and to re-use it we would have lost all the value, but it does sting that we have to buy back that which we paid over £2000 pounds for less than a year ago. Insurance companies don’t like paying out.
What do we do now? Well I started scheming the very next day after the accident. I was up at our local petrol station, and happened to espy a 13 year old Vauxhall Movano 3500 PTS Ambulance (Passenger Transport Service) in a small commercial van sellers yard. It’s long, very long, It’s white, it’s got 300000 miles on the clock ... that’s a lot of miles, a really huge amount of miles. However research says that a new engine complete would cost £1500 and about the same to fit it. The clutch, Alternator, Starter Motor, Disks and Pads are all under £200, as are the piston rings, shell bearings etc, so a re-build while a big job, isn’t in itself hugely expensive ... he says while remembering he’s skint from last year and all the work on the previous motorhome ... and he wants to start from scratch again ... you’d have thought he’d learned his lesson?

So there’s this ambulance, it’s 50cm longer than the Elddis, though not as wide. It is panelled and insulated, it has a blown air central heating system (they cost between £500 and £1300), It has tinted windows down both sides. It’s a semi high top with double rear doors and side access.
I’m under no illusion that it is a project. However I have already reserved the services of Blackdown conversions for the end of May. Paul was as sick as a parrot on our behalf for the loss of the Elddis, but on the Brightside he says the Movano is a great base to convert from. Our usual mechanic has said don’t touch it with a barge pole because of the mileage. My mate Rob he knows a thing or two about vans took it for a test drive a few hours after I had driven it myself, and said it felt very good for its age and mileage; I to was very pleasantly surprised when I drove it (after speaking to the guy who reconditioned the Elddis, I was ready to give up on the Movano).

The advantage to the Movano is that it has a service history as long as your arm, every A or B service, tyre change, replaced light bulb, brake pad and even the loss of an offside mirror have been recorded. Though this pales into insignificance against the critical service parts “Timing Belt and Cam Belt”, both are recorded as changed ... don’t care ... still going to get them replaced again. Did you see the hint there? The decision has been made, this Friday I’ll haggle over the asking price after taking one last look over the potential new wagon, I want to check the roof rails for rust and I want another drive from cold; that means turning up unannounced which only new car dealers are happy about. I’ll post again when I know more.