New shoes for Daphne.

With about 2 months until departure, it's time to begin getting Daphne - that's Sue's name for The Truck - properly blinged up with all the expedition toys. I made a start yesterday, mainly because it'd stopped raining for a while, the sun was out and the prospect of getting my hands dirty was easier to bear if it wasn't wet and cold and windy.
The tyres we used last year were OK, but a little thin on tread, we thought. Although 8mm should be perfectly adequate, we had 2 punctures, one of which was caused by a thorn. This created a slow leak which, when combine with reduced pressures anyway, had the tyre running almost flat after an hour or so. That's probably why we picked up the second, much more severe, hole. This was big enough to get 3 fingers in and was almost certainly caused by a sharp rock. This was repaired locally but since I didn't know about the first smaller puncture, it went flat fairly quickly. This gave me the chance to try out the puncture repair kit which worked well enough and gave us a serviceable, if not completely leakproof, spare. When we got home I bought some tyre levers and taught myself the fine art of roadside tyre removal and repair, a skill I wouldn't ordinarily have attempted to learn but is now part of the "armoury". Every cloud....

 Working on a gravel surface is a right pain in more ways than one. The jack won't slide, my knees and back get shredded etc etc, and woe betide you if you drop anything small 'cos it'll disappear until you've found/bought a new one, then magically resurface.
I checked the bearings, swivels, seals and brake pads "while I'm down there".

...and the Appliance of Science, well, basic levers anyway, to lift the new tyre and wheel back onto the hub. Nice shiny new wheel nuts added and these were painted with engine assembly lube to keep them that way, at least for a while. So now we have five shiny new wheels and five tyres that look capable of taking Daphne up Everest.
Landrover Spotters will note the HD drive flange. I was in two minds about these as they could transfer a point of failure from an easy-to-fix place to somewhere more serious, but having lost drive to the rear axle a while ago due to a standard one failing, I decided to take the risk. I reasoned that I wouldn't want a flange stripping its teeth while doing something like this:

...this is me launching Daphne out of a river bed. The front wheels are off the ground and the sudden shock when they landed probably didn't do the drivetrain any good at all.

The next job is to replace the rear brake pads which I saw are about half worn, and to get the rear spare wheel carrier fitted. I reaaly should do all these jobs in the "summer" but it was so dank this year I kept putting it off. It's supposed to snow this week.....