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.

Trims And Wobbles

It’s been an odd couple of weeks. I couldn’t, without thinking long and hard remember what it is that we’ve been doing. And then it all came in a rush ... we fitted the new cab carpet in the motorhome, started tinkering with the motorhome door panels and door furniture and looked at the practicalities of fitting the felt in the engine bay and inside the doors ... had a day off and went to visit some friends over night.

The cab carpet was a big job requiring the removal of the entire seat pods from the cab floor, temporary removal of the hand brake mechanism and the removal of numerous bits of tread trim and under dash trim. It was a slog; I’d looked at it dozens of times in the last few months to get my head around the order of events, but it doesn’t matter how much mental breakdown you do; there will always be bugs on the day. Not too many bugs and nothing that deserves a special mention aside from the following line. Just the usuals’: nuts set solid by twenty years (not rusted just comfortably stuck fast), seized screws that required constant and gentle force until they were overcome by leverage (some minor rust but nothing WD40 won’t keep at bay for another twenty years), awkward wrist twists in tiny places, not having enough arms or hands between us ... daylight running out.

The results are acceptable, but I’m no car trimmer and the overall footprint of the cab is what’s made the carpet look good not my ministrations. What we have gotten out of the job is cab noise being deadened, and I imagine a certain amount of thermal insulation, though it must be said I preferred the easy clean surface left by removing the previous carpet. A carpet I now know was not designed or intended for vehicular use ... learnt a bit about carpets and their applications I have. I’ve also learnt that broken Scaphoid bones like reminding you of your previous carelessness every time you use a socket wrench in perpetuity. I think the job is finished, but there’s a little niggle in the back of my mind saying “now it’s all fitted take it out and have it whipped”, but we’ll see.

The door panels are different set of problems, for a start I can’t work out how to get them off. I know it has something to do with the pull handle that opens the door from the inside, and I will phone the Talbot expert Mike Chubb from No1 Gear and ask for some tips next week.  What I have discovered is that it’s easy to get the panels off up to the point that I need to turn them around the centre and pull them off completely. If I get this bit wrong, the door opening levers will be “fucked” (that’s a technical term widely used in many industries). I think on balance the panels will be a doddle to remake as complete units using new, hardboard and basic upholstery techniques, however there is an argument for thin ply which is easier to cut, round off the edges, and re-mount speakers to (the current hardboard requires additional plastic widgets for the speakers to screw into because hardboard isn’t very good with being screwed to ... hardboard also warps and shrinks ... which it has). The trick is to use the originals as templates and to buy new panel clips from here http://www.bresco.com/index.html ... you can I swear, find anything on t’tinternet if you look hard enough. I then have to create new covers using the material we had our new cushions covered in, and re-use the vinyl sections from the existing covers and some nice new foam backing. As mentioned above I’m not a vehicle trimmer, but I reckon this job should go fairly well, because I’m actually not to bad with a needle and thread and the pattern is ready made, all tha’ts required is patience and a steady hand and few Youtube videos. I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but if you need to see a job being done, regardless of obscurity you will find some American person from some obscure backwater of the states that has felt compelled to share their knowledge with you. I shouldn’t mock, but some of the attempts at instruction are hilarious, but persevere and you will find knowledge, and you will be able to compare techniques which is also very useful. I have put my toe in this particular water already and discovered that my right angle outside corner technique would have buggered me up from the “get go” according to some fella from the American deep south who fixes classic fords.

Aside from door panels and carpets, there are a few more jobs to get underway, and in no particular order are:

·         New Brake disks and pads (front), they were nearly due at the last service, and we’ll get them done at the garage, I have noticed a tiny amount of judder on recent drives, indicating wear or warp (which by the way I diagnosed after watching a Youtube video).

·         New brake shoes (rear), same as the fronts.

·         Over cab storage solution (this is still in its infancy and cargo net may not be the logical choice having looked at what were are proposing to store up there)

·         Replace the stereo and the speakers (one of which is dead anyway)

·         Replace the scroll fan under the dash

·         Titivate the electrics under the bonnet (that’s clean and protect in laymen using contact cleaner, and in extremes re-making the contacts with new)

·         Re-seal the headlamps and clean them inside, the offside lens can with moderate force be removed by hand. I discovered this by accident when dealing with the front grill. I have a superb industrial sealant to remake the seals on both sides, and I get to brush out the 20 years worth of algefied crud that’s collected inside due to normal condensation penetration over the lifetime of the units.

·         Rub down an repaint the towbar, this is purely cosmetic

·         Finish the shower hose boxing in and wardrobe shelves

·         Miscellaneous other bits and pieces I find along the way

The problem I have now is time; suddenly I find myself working almost every weekend through November. I’m also working every morning from 6am (4am out of bed ... finish time is the usual) for at least the next six weeks. And evenings are dark now, I did wash the motorhome in the dark this week, but that’s about the limit for working in the dark. There’s forty four hours minimum overtime in those next four weeks, then add in the weekends and my arse isn’t going to touch the floor. It’s not like we don’t need the extra cash right now, I haven’t been this skint since 1999 (I know it’s this year exactly, because it’s the year I got divorced). I do have four days leave to take before the end of January that will scrape me back some time to do some jobs, however one has to bear in mind, inclement weather that can affect things like adhesives, ability to actually hold tools etc.

One has to ask: Where did the time go? Where did the year go?

We are allegedly off in March of next year, but there’s only two and a bit months of this year left, the house still isn’t sold, and I have the list above to complete. I’m trying to identify where we’ve wasted time, but just thinking about things now as I scribble I’m finding it hard to think of a time since April where we haven’t been killing ourselves doing something to progress the adventure or progress the saleability of the house either internally or externally.

The question then is: Have we been too ambitious with our targets? And I guess the answer to that is no ... At no point when the plan was first proposed did we anticipate spending the best part of six months and several thousand pounds re-vamping the dinning room extension to the extent that we had to. That’s where six months went, that’s where the budget went. We are on the back foot and four months looks like no time at all ... all of a sudden. It’s wobble time, we’ve wobbled a few times since we started, to not concede wobbles would be arrogant and rose tinted. At times like this you need wise words from someone long dead ... on a whim I’m going with:

“only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go” T. S. Elliot.

Fatigue, worry, doubt and not having a pot to piss in for at least four weeks, this is the low, I hope there is no lower. It ain’t that we can’t get back up, fuck it, I’ve been lower than this, as has Amanda, it’s just that you get to a certain age and climbing back up just feels like life is being vindictive.

Onwards and upwards.

Deep Breath Relax (for a while anyway)

Since I last posted the list of achievements is extensive and the working hours obscene, however as I’m sure I’ve said elsewhere “nearly there”. I won’t list house DIY details other than to say I need to apply some touch up paints here and there in the kitchen diner, where we've dumped into things putting the room back together (ironically). However we are not touching up until I've moved the first wave of excess stuff into storage). I’ve gotten as far as removing most of the pointing from the patio prior to repointing (it’sthe final job before the estate agents are called in on Monday next week) ... we were going to get them in today to start valuations etc, but instead we decided we’d enjoy it as our home for one week and hope that we have a bit of a late summer early Autumn Indian Summer and a buyer steps up asap. 

In the motorhome I sorted and tested the water supplies with mixed results. The cold worked fine, but the hot had dismal pressure. With a little research I found some of the answers and hoped it wouldn’t get too expensive: 

The hot water system is a 9 litre Carver Cascade 2 system, and from the information I gathered; there is a non return valve at the end of the cold feed pipe that gets scaled and jammed. I removed the drain plug (which I broke) and a large amount of solids fell out along with some lime scale slurry. The parts with free delivery come in at a few pennies over £16.00 from http://www.leisureshopdirect.com/caravan who are proving to be an essential port of call for just about everything motor home related.

I made a good intuitive call on making all the T pieces Y pieces as this eases pressure drops and is recommended. I then retested the pump pressure, and flow through the heater cylinder, once it was all seen to be fabulous, and water could be squirted direct from the drain plug eight feet across the verge, I re-assembled the whole kit and caboodle, switched on the gas and tested the heat ... it’s all good.

So that’s it then ... we’re all done in doors, we found a brilliant storage place after much legwork £100 PCM for 160 sqr ft ... as opposed to the last ridiculous quote I got for the same ammount of space at £269 PCM with the first month only costing £0.01p. Now we can start clearing down prior to moving out. And we’ve sorted out our temporary accommodation, for whatever period of time we need to be, between temporary accommodation and setting off on the journey.

There is still a lot to do in terms of planning and finance, but now those tasks will replace the constant DIY, and hopefully I can put together the scraps of knowledge that I’ve picked up about our routes, our mileage, what we want to see, where we want to stay and for how long, and how long we actually plan to stay on the road ... because it’s only sitting here right now that I realise how many snippets I have; as fag packet notes or un-viewed favourites, or our collection of mails to self that we’ve put together and now need collating into real Matter. Deep breath and relax.

Travel News

In between rain showers and coats of paint, we’ve had a little time available to do minor jobs in the motorhome. A minor but key job (in the grand scheme of things) was tracing out the remains of the old water system so I can connect the kitchen sink and shower. The kitchen sink will be dual purpose as the face wash and toothbrush sink and the all important washing up sink (when site facilities aren’t available)... I think I mentioned this elsewhere; but to re-cap; by only having the one sink in the kitchen, we save space to manoeuvre in the wetroom, where once there was stupid old style corner sink and cupboard, plus shower, plus toilet... moving swiftly on. The shower connection speaks for itself... we need a shower.

The tracing of pipes isn’t hard, though a little cramped and dark (that’s what head torches are for), and if you’ve ever done plumbing at home, believe me plumbing in a motor home is a joy ... no solder, no flux, no gas burners, no PTFE tape and measuring to millimetre tolerances.. no risk of fire or death when you accidently heat a gas pipe adjacent to a water pipe, and for a second or so everything is very bright and clear...and then very dark for the longest time. No in a motorhome, hot water is in the red flexible plastic pipe and cold water is in the blue flexible plastic pipe (unless you are total nob or a masochist and use clear pipe for everything. Pipes push together on T, Y or straight connectors and are held fast with Jubilee clips, as do the end terminations; being taps or showers. forward of your water heater you have a grit filter, and some main and branch isolating valves.... erm that’s about it for real pipe gotchas, though I’m sure that there are more if I look in the book of words, but the only issue I ever had was air in a pipe, and that’s no great shakes to sort out as long as the water tank is full and you get the priming order right (sounds like a biggy that, but it ain’t).

The bonus from this little tracing job was that I found that the new shower hose’s have their straight connectors bonded on already so I don’t need to purchase any, and as the wetroom previously had two feed pairs (hot and cold) and the kitchen sink only one feed pair, that with a little gentle pulling pressure and then twenty four hours in Milton fluid that I don’t need to buy anymore connectors (unless ours let by...see previous post about the goods available in GoOutdoors). Had I had the time this week I would have already made the connections and done a test fill and flush of the entire system (what with the long hours of light and all); and subsequently declared the Moho ready for business as long as leaks weren’t found. However I am now saving myself for this weekend because of the works in the house.

I’m anticipating having several hours free on Saturday for this momentous piece of work... and connecting the plumbing and dealing with the shower for me is the DIY equivalent of eating a good meal and saving your favourite bit until last, because of the overall simplicity of the system...I was going to make a legover or wanking analogy regards saving this treat for myself, but maybe not everyone would get it, in any event Saturday is a big day.

Motorhome Home and Aching Wrists

On the weekend of the 18^th May I caught the train down to Devon to pick up the motorhome, now Blackdown have completed the repair and refurbishment works; more on that in a line or two, first the travel news.

I left home to catch my usual commute train to Fenchurch Street Station and then pootled my way across town to Waterloo to catch the 09.30 train to Exeter. In terms of travel things couldn’t have been easier, in part because I like to give myself wide margins of time for travel on train and tube (in case of hiccups). I tend to build in enough time to walk between connections; this is a legacy of being a walking engineer in London some ten years ago. People never believe when I say most places in the city are a walk away, until they walk with me.  

In any event my caution paid the dividend I’d hope for, to whit: an easy coffee and Croissant from a booth on Waterloo’s insane rush hour concourse and an easy stroll to the front three cars of the train that are the only part that goes as far as Exeter (the rest breaks of at Andover, and unless I miss heard splits off towards Bath).

The only incident to report relates to my clothes. There I was fumbling in my wallet to separate my train tickets from the receipts so I could pass through the barriers. During said fumble I dropped my wallet. I crouched down to pick it up as I can’t bend because my spine is fused pretty much from neck to waist, and heard rrrrriiiiiip… it was the crotch of my jeans. It was one of those little epiphany moments. From almost the time I’d gotten on the train at Tilbury I’d been getting odd looks. The reason being that the jeans I was wearing already had a minor rip by the seam at the base of the zip. I’d forgotten about the rip, and clearly I’d forgotten to do the repair, but the jeans had been cleaned and pressed and put back in my wardrobe. I’d then put them on totally oblivious to the fact that my nuts were already half hanging out… hence the odd looks earlier; and having now crouched to pick up my wallet I might as well have been walking around in just my boxers.

I did try to find a men’s clothes shop on Waterloos concourse, but unfortunately with the £10million pound refit that’s in progress, I all I could find was a Monsoon, an Accessorize or WHSmith which somewhat limited my choices…. In the end I decided that finding a seat with a table on the train would do. I then spent the next couple of hours sitting opposite Dr Gus Casely-Hayford and a team of women he was travelling with, followed shortly after his party left the train by a group of twenty chaps going well and truly “on the piss” in Torquay for the weekend.

I was happy to get off the train at Honiton, having been co-opted temporarily into the Piss up group, who seemed to be at pains to get me drinking beer, (always tempting but not when you have a long drive ahead).

And so we come to the Motorhome refurb; Paul has done a competent job. The leak repair and new ceiling are fantastic, and the colour match is as near as dammit perfect. The new wet-room is a clean white wipe-down affair, and the new cassette toilet looks great in the un-fussy easy clean wet-room. All that needs to be done is the fit and fix of a showerhead and taps gas and 12volt systems. The new roof lights are clean, aerodynamic and don’t have fly screens that rattle when the engine idles. The kitchen unit is resplendent with it’s new work top, hob/sink combination and spanking new cooker and Fridge. Paul’s wife has done a fabulous job with our re-designed cushions and the new extra large all over bed I designed is simply brilliant. The floor is now a hardwearing industrial lino in a pale blue terrazzo affect, and to finish Paul has fitted new blinds that are uncomplicated in operation and design (being blackout but plain white). All things being equal we are very happy.

Having spent several hours with Paul going over the fixture and fits, limitations of what he could do to seal the habitation unit, and a modification to the water tank that allows unparalleled ease of cleaning, it was time to hit the road for Somerset and the big clean. It was at this point that I realised I’d left the Satnav Power lead in the cars door pocket a hundred miles and more to the east and would now have to navigate to Somerset using a map drawn on the back of an envelope and the force. I had 54 miles to navigate, and was suddenly very aware of how reliant I’d become on the satnav, and equally aware that I need to put the old fashioned road atlas back in the cab and leave it there. I think I managed fairly well with only two definite wrong turns that required strategic three point turns.

I arrived at our friends house in Rooks Bridge Somerset around 4.30pm, and decamped. Amanda joined us later by train to Highbridge, and then after a quick whiz round Asda for supplies we had a splendid dinner and ales and a relatively early night.

Saturday morning I had a bit of a head on me from the ale, but nevertheless got the bucket and sponges and went out to clean the moho from top to bottom. There’s a little over 150 square feet of moho to clean, including roof sides and cab. It had sat mostly on a drive in Devon for two and a half months… it was filthy with rain residues and ale. To make things even harder on ourselves we also wanted the old Elddis Decals removed from the bodywork as they were faded and tatty after twenty years of pounding by both sun and rain. So armed with little more than finger nails and a small hair drier the stickers took the best part of three hours to remove, and my nail beds still hurt today.  It then took us four hours to wash the entire body shell and cab after that… but that’s not the punishing part. After washing it from stem to stern, it had to be T-Cut all over to get rid of the dark marks where rain drains from the roof down the sides, and to get the colour looking even where the stickers were removed. We finished at around 7.30pm, had another splendid dinner and some more beer, and I found myself making my excuses at 09.30pm and going to bed with a hot water bottle for my lumbar spine and a fervent desire for the magic pixies to come in the night and wash it again and wax it… and there in lies the problem with pixies, they are lazy feckless little bastards only interested in flitting round woodlands and looking good. So at 9am on Sunday morning we went back out with buckets and sponges and washed the moho from top to bottom again, this time to remove T-Cut residues in preparation for the waxing. Thankfully this entire process only took six hours, it must be said that the pain was worth it. I doubt the moho has shone so bright since it rolled off the production line in 1991.

The question now is; Will we actually get to use it this year? And the answer is likely to be “no”. We still have a huge amount of work to do at home to get it ready for sale, damp fix, and decoration being the least of it. I booked off the Jubilee week in hope that we would be going to Southwold in Suffolk to try everything out, but with damp works and decorating at home, I can see that nine days being eaten in one great big chunk. One must be philosophical; we intend to live in it full time from early next year for at least two years, so missing out on high summer for this year is on balance a worth it.