Power to the Landy...

Decisions, decisions, decisions....
What should I do about our battery situation? At the mo we have just the one big battery in the battery box. I think its a tractor battery or something like that, but i'ts a big puppy! But having drained it a couple of times using the winch I think it would be a wise idea to replace it before we go. I also want to set up a dual battery configuration so that the starting battery never gets flattened by accessories.

Currently my line of thinking is to have a standard sized 069 or 072 battery for starting, then a hoochy muma Intimidator battery for accessories and winching. The Intimidator battery's seem to be fairly new in the UK, not heard much about them up until recently, but they sound good. They use something called absorbed Glass Matting technology instead of the normal lead acid stuff. They also have good deep cycling ability meaning that they can be charged and discharged many times without affecting their overall charge holding ability, again unlike normal lead acid batteries. Plug it all together with a split charge and a twin battery monitor and we should be away!
However, if I want to do this then I will have to re-wire things like the winch as they are wired up to the starting battery under normal circumstances.
I have already "aquired" a Voltage sensitive relay from a club member. He works in the marine industry and seems to know his stuff, so I think I may ask his advise again... look out Matt, loads questions coming your way!

Shipping... yeah, whatever!

Ok... prepare yourself for a long and boring read. I've been looking into shipping for quite a while now, and now after several glasses of wine, thought it was time to put pinkies to keyboard.

The shipping industry seems to me to be amazingly relaxed. Jen has been nagging me to find out when Charlie will arrive in Baltimore. The trouble is I can't give her an exact date. Every shipping company I have phoned have pretty much said "ahhh yeah man, dounnnnt worrrrry about a thang... just gis a caaaall 3 daaaays before ya want to go". Now, to me this seems just a tad on the relaxed side.

Being based in Southampton it seemed logical to us to try to find shipping from here, but every company quoted from Felixstowe. This seems to be the best and cheapest place to send a container from. So I asked on the ever faithful LR4x4 forum for peoples experiences with shipping companies... sure enough the responses supported my experiences. But as with all forum posts, some good suggestions were also made. I was pointed in the direction of Kingstown Shipping who are based in Hull. They specialise in the transportation of cars between the USA and Blighty. I spoke to a chap called Steve who was very helpful and full of re-assuring assurances along the lines of "Dounnnnnt worrrry... about a thang". But I have to admit, even after the posts from people doing similar things, that I am still nervous about this whole shipping milarky. Steve has assured me that he will contact me in plenty of time to arrange our shipping, and I don't doubt him, but in the shipping world, plenty of time is like a week before, and this is doing our nuts in!! I'm sure if we were more experienced in the international travel and shipping game that this wouldn't be a problem, but as it's our virgin trip...

Anyway, after a few phone calls to Steve at Kingstown I found out that it takes between 8 and 14 days for a container to ship from Felixstowe to Baltimore and that they sail on a Monday. So now we have a rough guestimate about when Charlie will arrive in the USA.

Through my chats with Steve I also worked out that Charlie will not fit in a 20ft container! The opening is 2.27m. Charlie Camel is 2.34m tall. This presented us with a bit of a problem. We have 7cm to loose in height. Varoius options were discussed like taking the rear springs out, letting the tyres down, using a ratchet straps around the chassis and axle. In the end we just opted to go for a 40ft high cube container which is 2.58m tall. It's a couple of hundred quid extra, but there are no worries about Charlie fitting, and the potential for damage is a lot less.

Time to go make sandwiches for work tomorrow.... more will follow!

Money, money, money..

Another advantage of the rainy bank holiday weekend was a chance to get the more 'fiddly' parts of the trip sorted. My house sale had recently completed so we had good reason to sort the finances out. Another reason for doing this is most credit cards and maestro cards charge for use abroad, obviously 4 1/2 months of charges for us both was likley to be considerable. A quick bit of reasearch on moneysavingexpert.com provided the answers we needed and a recommendation for a credit card without crossboarder charges and a bank account that won't charge you for withdrawing cash from machines abroad: the Post Office credit card and a joint Nationwide current account. With a bit of clever planning (and a direct debit to pay the credit card off automatically each month), we should never be charged by our accounts for using the facilities abroad and be able to use the protection offered when buying on a credit card. We also opted for the card protection insurance giving us both cover for a year £18 this gave us extra insurance and means we only have to ring one number to cancel all our cards should the worst happen.

Oh - and the exciting bit! We finally booked flights and our first hotel! We fly to Baltimore on the 15th July (return on the 1st December) with BA the day before the Camel could potentially arrive and with any luck will pick it up soon after and get on the road... or alternatively we may be waiting around for 5 days for it to turn up, apparently it all depends on the weather in the Atlantic. Still, we've got some bits for the trip to buy, so that will give me plenty of oportunity for American shopping! Lucky Dan...

It rained and rained! Last few jobs on the Landy

Well, it was a typical bank holiday weekend, a bit of a washout really... Saturday was simply cloudy so we took advantage of the lack of rain but sorting out the odd 'rusty' bits on the Camel. We had a rusty bit of capping on the rear of the vehicle which I rubbed down, primed and painted whilst Dan worked on the small patches of galvanic corrosion on the roof where the steel of the roofrack had reacted with the aluminium. We've now just got to wait a while for the paint to harden before t-cutting, paint restoring and making the Camel look shiny before putting the roofrack back on.

Other jobs this weekend pretty much just involved a 'service' of the rooftent. It's had quite a bit of use since we brought it 18months ago and the ladder and floor is in need of a bit of repair after suffering the rain of the English weather. Still, one of the reasons we brought the tent was because we knew these jobs would be easy to do and it's now sitting in the lounge waiting for the new floor...which I can't get because the roofracks not on the Camel - we really should have thought that through!

Only a few jobs remain: a metal frame to make the area behind the drivers seats level. This will ensure we can slide the table in along the floor under the water tank/our bags etc and provide a level platform for storing clothes bags and the filing box. Also, carrying out the 'anti-rattle' mod for our X-Eng handbrake. After that, should just be a service and ready to go!

Sitting pretty...

Some months ago, Jen treated Charlie Camel to some rather nice Exmoor Trim heated seat bases. Its amazing how much more comfy they are than the old collapsed seat bases!

The heat pads come as part of a kit, so we also had the bits to do the seat backs aswell. This weekend we finally fitted the seat back heat pads together with some luuuuurvly matching new seat vinyls. The kits came from Exmoor Trim again, but this time rather than being ready assembled, we had to fit the new covers and squabs.

This is the sort of job I hate, cos any damage can't be rectified with a welder, or some spanners! So it was with some trepidation that I started to unpeel the old seat coverings from the frame. It's actually a lot easier than I expected. With the seat covers removed, you simply pull off the old seat squab (foamy padded bit) and plonk the new one in place. Then its justa case of fitting the new seat trim. My only complaint is that the instructions were a bit pants and that one of the seat covers tore quite easily at the bottom corner, but as its right at the bottom, you can't see it when the seat is in place. We'll keep an eye on it, hopefully it won't get any worse.

It probably took less than an hour to do each seat... this gives some idea of how easy the job is.

So we now have a pair of completely refurbished front seats. All I have to do now is wire up the heaters... Thats a job for another day tho.

Bling brake pipes

Fitted the shiny new stainless braided flexi-brake pipes this weekend. The bizarre thing was that I didn't have any problems with copper pipes getting stuck in the pipe unions and twisting while being undone :shock, horror: So, a couple of hours, and a litre of brake fluid later, 3 new pipes were fitted, one to each front caliper, and one to the rear axle.

The braided pipes help to remove some of the squidgey feeling from the pedal as they don't expand anywhere near as much as standard rubber pipes when under pressure. So therefore the brakes should feel much more precise, especially when the brake fluid has been changed too.

Water purification system

After welding up the framework for the water tank and fitting it before the Gaydon Land Rover show, I actually managed to get around to wiring up the pump on Sunday. The gearbox change had gone swimmingly and so I had the sunday to do other things. Unfortunately the weather was pants so I didn't get a whole lot done.

All the kit wat providede by Boab who were extremely helpful and knowlegable. They supplied the tank, pump, purifier, shower head, and all the pipework. They also connected everything up and put little labels on all the pipes so we knew exactly what connected to what! So big up for Boab, cheers chaps!! :-)
The wiring for the switch to operate the pump needed to run from the batery box under the passengar seat to the back of the vehicle. I'd already run in a wire for the rear lighter sockets and so used that conduit to run the 2 new switch wires to the back of the vehicle. The switch activates the relay which switches on the pump.
At the moment the pump if mounted on the bulkhead. But I think this will need to be moved as I intend to fit the speakers in the rope boxes behing the rear seats. If this happend then the pump will be in the way. Fortunately I haven't made the wiring or the plumbing to the pump perminant yet, so things can still be moved around fairly easily.

We chucked some water in the tank, flicked the switch and voila! we have water!! :-)

Gearbox change

Friday night.... got home from work, got changed, and started to take the gearbox out of Charlie Camel. Earlier on in the year I had done an oil change oin the gearbox and half a baulk ring had come out of the drain hole. Although the box has continued to work satisfactorily, there has been a lingering thought in the back of my mind... When is it gonna go "BANG!!"? So I finally bit the bullet and bought a new box.

With the help of Mike, we managed to get the gearbox out of Charlie and lying down on the floor within a couple of hours... not bad going.

Saturday... Richard (another friend) can round to help. We started by separating the transfer box and bell housing from the main gearbox. Then took all the gearstick linkages off. While Richard treated the transfer box to some new gaskets, I changed the main oil seal on the back of the engine and then fitted the new clutch. It appeared that the clutch was probably done recently as ther ewas still loads of meat left on it.

Then we started to look at the gearbox. Not a huge amount of play in the mainshaft and all the splines were pretty good. I remember when we bought the Camel, the chap selling it said he thought it had had a replacemnt gearbox. This could well be the case, but it wasn't an Ashcroft one.

Anyway, having got the bellhousing off, we then started to clean it. This is when we noticed a huge crack in the thrust bearing carried... Nightmare! A quick call to Steve at Brookies confirmed that I had sold it one on Friday to a customer and that we didn't have any more on the shelf. Steve phoned Hunters who had one and put it by for us. Jen legged it over to Southampton to pick up the bits while me and Richard sat and ate donuts and drank tea :-)

By about 12, we had the gearbox back into Charlie. We had left the Transfer box off to make things more manageable, so with a rope round the box, jen lefting and me and Richard underneith we managed to guide the box into place quite easily.

Transfer box was refitted and the X-eng handbrake fitted in place of the drum handbrake which is rubbish. By mid afternoon everything was back in. By late afternoon, all the trim and floor panels were back in, and a successful test drive was made around the block.

Water tank

Finished off the framework for the water tank last night. It has welded lashing hoops, the top is covered in chequer plate and the fridge slide lock is fixed on top of that. This will all bolt down through the floor in between the rear seats.