We leave on the 17th - under 2 weeks to go - so we need to start getting properly organised or we're bound to forget something. Sue's been going through the pace notes from last year to make sure we don't forget any hard-learned lessons and, in fact, this has led to her writing them up into a readable form, so maybe there's an e-book in the making.
The list of stuff yet to do seems to be getting longer. Maybe it's just imagination, but the less time we have the more work there seems to be. Daphne got her "blood transfusion" yesterday even though the engine oil still had plenty of life in it. I reckoned it would be better to suffer the cost and do the oil change earlier rather than later. I did a check of the diffs and gearbox oils as well which was a bit easier since I invested in a rather natty oil pump. The previous method relied on the plastic tube that the oil bottles come fitted with to get the juice into the right place. This inevitably meant another anointing with viscous, carcinogenic gloop as you only know the boxes are full when they overflow, generally quickly, down your arm or into your face. Given that I have to lie underneath with the fill holes just inches away, I generally ended up with an unplanned facial. With my newly-grown face fur, that'd definitely be a Bad Thing.
The demented mouse that had apparently taken up residence under the bonnet has been tracked down. The manic squeaking that we noticed a week or so ago was coming from the spring-loaded wheel that keeps the "fanbelt" from flying off.
We experienced the result of this part failing a while ago. The bearing - the squeaky bit- stopped doing it's job halfway up a mountain road in France. First we knew of the problem was the smoke filling the cab from the fanbelt as it destroyed itself. We had a spare fanbelt, but the bearing was a problem. The whole country was shut down for the best part of a week because of the Bastille "Day" celebrations and we couldn't get the bit we needed in time to get home for work. After a bit of an argument with the insurance company Sue and I flew home and Daphne followed 2 weeks later in an ambulance. The bearing cost £3 to replace. Our insurer (Axa) initially refused to honour the Get-You-and-Your-Vehicle-Home part of the deal and instead offered us the princely sum of £600 to write Daphne off....We had a loud and acrimonious re-negotiation of the position and they miraculously changed their minds. Grrr!
The weather was dry enough this week to get the mattress into the roof tent, unfold it and check that everything still worked...
This type of tent comes in basically two standards - luxury/heavy or cheap/light. We chose the latter option which will be no surprise to those of you who know of my skip-diving habit. However...we have applied some thought to the process which went a bit beyond the financial. The "best" rooftents come in at over £2600 for basically the same thing that we have for well under half that price. What you don't see in the picture is the skirt or vallance that zips to the underside of the sleeping platform to provide another room on the ground floor, so to speak. We hardly needed it last year but we'll take it folded away, just in case of long stops in crap weather. So, ours cost quite a bit less than the best and the difference in quality is, to be fair, quite noticeable. But...we only use it for a couple of months a year, so it's good enough. It's also about 25kg lighter than the expensive models, which was the main reason - not cost - we bought this one. The dearer tents put about 75kg on the roof which is a serious consideration when Daphne's got 30 degrees of bank on and no roll cage. Ours came from a company in Derbyshire who have been a bit difficult to deal with when we had zips break, groundsheets that didn't fit etc but they honoured their commercial obligations. Eventually.
One annoying problem we have is condensation inside the tent when its cold outside. The air we breathe out creates a film of moisture on the inside of the tent roof which then runs down to the metal supports - arranged a bit like an old fashioned pram hood - and then drips on us,or rather, the bedding. This happens despite having the windows fully open, which isn't always ideal if it's snowing or blowing a hooligan...
The manufacturers of these tents make a bit of a "big deal" about being able to fold the whole thing up with the bedding inside and hence save a lot of time and faffing about when you set up or decamp. Well, try that in our climate and you'll have pretty soggy duvets damn quickly as they do a great job of blotting up the water inside the tent when it's all folded up. We reckon we've solved that problem by making a removeable inner roof from a bedsheet that will catch the drips and can be quickly dried out in the morning, having been used to mop the inside dry - quicker than a damp duvet, anyway. Yet to be troop-trialled, but we have great hopes!
I've been told that this "isn't a problem" if you buy a more expensive tent with better fabric, ie heavy canvas, not our lightweight alternative. Well, we also have an OzTent. These are seriously heavyweight/expensive but the best "ground tent" I reckon you can buy. It's great in almost every way...and it suffers from exactly the same condensation problem as our cheapie rooftent.
Lastly, we've refitted the Washing Machine. Despite what my mum thinks, camping has moved on a bit since her memories of Girl Guides, bell tents and latrine pits, and it isn't necessary to smell like a polecat in a farm drain all the time. OK, some of the time... Rather than taking the smalls down to the river and bashing them on a rock, we came up with this:
A combination of old bits of drainpipe and some bits of aluminium salvaged from the junk pile at work and we have a washing machine. The water doesn't even have to be hot as the black pipe sucks enough heat out of the sun to get everything steaming.
This time next week and everything should be packed in, lashed down and ready to go. Insh'allah!
The story of our travels in (and conversions of) Landrover Defender 110s - "The Mechanical Camels" - from the Scottish Highlands to the Sahara desert...
Sunday, 6 March 2016
Sunday, 21 February 2016
Ketchup from the Chef (it's taken a while).
Well, as Mike has said my time is now free of calculating the post mortem interval between someone's death and the discovery of their body by using the life cycle of blowflies, and of analysing blood splatter patterns at crime scenes for my forensic course - apart of course from his on the roof tent cover.
The kitchen has been sluiced out and I have been planning meals and working out what essentials we need to take, that we cannot get in the supermarkets in Morocco....
I was going to take a piccy of Earl Grey Teabags but I've packed them and thrown away the box!
The mechanic has already included a photograph of the galley. The two metal containers on the left of the picture which previously held in flight plastic meals for Jersey Airlines, have proved to be incredibly useful.
Over the years they have gone through several different incarnations as we have trooped-trialled them to achieve the best format. Last year's push to the desert proved that just one shelf in the left hand box separating two 'Really Useful Boxes' worked the best. These contain all the basic cooking requirements - salt, pepper, spices, oxo cubes, tomato paste, chopping board, bottle opener and corkscrew and so on. Priorities.... I was a girl guide you know.
Last year I found cooking in Morocco far more challenging than cooking in say France or Italy, or for that matter when the 'kids' come home (27 and 22) and want to relive their youth by having Mum cook sausages in buns in the van in the car park at the sea side.... generally accompanied by battering winds and curious children passing by who stare blankly in amazement at this yellow beast, from which Tony Blackburn is blasting at great levels from the 'wireless' (update on 25 Feb...no longer, apparently. This Hardy Annual of the Radio has been sacked.) and which is full of 4 adults scrunched together inside trying to keep warm.
I might add here that we get no build up of condensation from all this cooking and all these bodies because my darling husband has provided an extractor fan.
Hmmm. Back to the Moroccan supermarkets which are usually only to be found close to large cities in the north. Once south of the Atlas mountains they are few and far between. Bread, fruit, vegetables and meat are readily available in all souks but great care is needed to ensure that the meat you ask for is in fact meat and not all mostly bone and gristle slipped in when you've been distracted. The first meat I bought last year using my schoolgirl French was 'fillet'. OK I thought, thinking of Mr Tesco's Extra Special cuts, that'll be fine. What I got was a different matter. I am convinced that it was in fact the shopkeeper's old flipflops which he was taking the opportunity to recycle.
Chicken is a far better and easier option. Well, with one proviso. It comes with two legs (good) but it is still running around on them (not so good). At least, we don't have to 'do the deed' and it is FRESH. They even take the feathers off! My mother always said though, never to put warm food into the fridge......sorry!
So, and this is my justification for what I have already got packed....it is NECESSARY to take as many things as possible that (1) do not take up too much space and (2) are in plastic containers [I have been listening] so that you can 'do' something cordon bleu with the poor quality meat and vege available. I must remember to take that beef jerky sauce in the jar out....
I've mentioned OXO cubes. I took about 3 last time and regretted it...you can get something similar 'out there' but it don't pack a punch. This time, I have take lightweight ingredients such as Spice Doctor curry mixes. I found these in Tesco and they consist of 3 sachets. One with dried spices for frying, then a base sauce of additional oomphy stuff and then the main sauce. In the middle of all this you add 250g of something else....meat, mushrooms, eggs, fish....I also take rice and pasta already bagged into portions for two.
I mentioned the fruit and vegetables. Oranges are sold everywhere at the road side and are wonderful. I wouldn't say that we bought any other fruit though. When you buy vege, you take one of the rather decrepit washing up bowls that are laying on top of the huge piles of tomatoes etc. into which you put everything you want. It is all weighed together and paid for in one go -minus the bowl. The quality is varied and you have to pick carefully through unripe, over -ripe and furry items all in the same pile. My suggestion would be to pick from the top of the pile to avoid those at the bottom that have been investigated by cats or peed on by the huge number of feral dogs that abound.
Bread is available in all of the tiny shops which actually look like cigarette kiosks...it is in no way your Mother's Pride sliced in a resealable packet - but round, about the size of a bread plate (?!), tasty but does not keep well. Occasionally, when we were out in the 'boonies' it became difficult to get. So I have also packaged up 'kits' so that I can make chapattis and drop scones. We did the latter last year using dried milk powder and dried egg. Just add 5 fluid ounces of water. Excellent but, time consuming if we wanted to get away quickly in the morning. We are intending to have some stop overs this time...
What's in the right hand flight box? Well that is also separated by a shelf which sits about 4 inches from the top and takes the heavy duty wet wipes for the mechanic, the doggy poo bags which are a great item to have around ( no not for that... for rubbish bags. You need small ones as big ones when full niff very quickly). Pegs, loo roll... Underneath, is the large container which holds the day to day water, and the washing up stuff.
Washing up is done at the sink, specially constructed to fold up neatly against the inside of the back door.

We have two means of cooking. The gas stove inside and the portable Cadac which also uses gas. Replacing cylinders in Morocco can be interesting. Most look as if they are 40 years old, covered in rust and come with different gauges at the business end.....so take the widget from the empty one with you to ensure you get a perfect fit.
The Cadac is brilliant and enables us to roast a complete chicken, bar b q, griddle and so on. We use it most of the time when we are in Europe and I tend to wrap everything in foil to cook to save on the washing up. We took it last year 'down south' and will do this time, but we did use it less there. There is usually a wind which in conjunction with the inevitable sand makes for cooking outside sometimes challenging. But it rings the changes and we have also got wind breaks.
What other 'white goods'? The fridge...runs off the lecky. Having tried ordinary freezer boxes and cheap electric ones, it paid to throw money at it, and it keeps the beer and the white wine cold, snuggled in with warm chook, milk and chocolate.
There is the wood burning stove which is lovely to sit next to in the evenings..
The pipe is also good for drying your socks on.....last year a pair of my daughter's purple socks which I was 'borrowing' ended up melting on the pipe - it still has the marks - when a certain someone forgot to check them while I was showering.
Finally, there is the washing machine. Daphne is actually the prototype for the BBC's Tardis. The only difference being that they did not think yellow would be a good colour. There is a large tube with ends on it. Half fill with water and a smidge of washing up liquid, add dirty smalls, seal and attach firmly to the vehicle before a day's off road driving. Ready and clean for rinsing and drying at the end of the day having been well agitated for several hours.
The kitchen has been sluiced out and I have been planning meals and working out what essentials we need to take, that we cannot get in the supermarkets in Morocco....
I was going to take a piccy of Earl Grey Teabags but I've packed them and thrown away the box!
The mechanic has already included a photograph of the galley. The two metal containers on the left of the picture which previously held in flight plastic meals for Jersey Airlines, have proved to be incredibly useful.
Over the years they have gone through several different incarnations as we have trooped-trialled them to achieve the best format. Last year's push to the desert proved that just one shelf in the left hand box separating two 'Really Useful Boxes' worked the best. These contain all the basic cooking requirements - salt, pepper, spices, oxo cubes, tomato paste, chopping board, bottle opener and corkscrew and so on. Priorities.... I was a girl guide you know.
Last year I found cooking in Morocco far more challenging than cooking in say France or Italy, or for that matter when the 'kids' come home (27 and 22) and want to relive their youth by having Mum cook sausages in buns in the van in the car park at the sea side.... generally accompanied by battering winds and curious children passing by who stare blankly in amazement at this yellow beast, from which Tony Blackburn is blasting at great levels from the 'wireless' (update on 25 Feb...no longer, apparently. This Hardy Annual of the Radio has been sacked.) and which is full of 4 adults scrunched together inside trying to keep warm.
I might add here that we get no build up of condensation from all this cooking and all these bodies because my darling husband has provided an extractor fan.
Hmmm. Back to the Moroccan supermarkets which are usually only to be found close to large cities in the north. Once south of the Atlas mountains they are few and far between. Bread, fruit, vegetables and meat are readily available in all souks but great care is needed to ensure that the meat you ask for is in fact meat and not all mostly bone and gristle slipped in when you've been distracted. The first meat I bought last year using my schoolgirl French was 'fillet'. OK I thought, thinking of Mr Tesco's Extra Special cuts, that'll be fine. What I got was a different matter. I am convinced that it was in fact the shopkeeper's old flipflops which he was taking the opportunity to recycle.
Chicken is a far better and easier option. Well, with one proviso. It comes with two legs (good) but it is still running around on them (not so good). At least, we don't have to 'do the deed' and it is FRESH. They even take the feathers off! My mother always said though, never to put warm food into the fridge......sorry!
So, and this is my justification for what I have already got packed....it is NECESSARY to take as many things as possible that (1) do not take up too much space and (2) are in plastic containers [I have been listening] so that you can 'do' something cordon bleu with the poor quality meat and vege available. I must remember to take that beef jerky sauce in the jar out....
I've mentioned OXO cubes. I took about 3 last time and regretted it...you can get something similar 'out there' but it don't pack a punch. This time, I have take lightweight ingredients such as Spice Doctor curry mixes. I found these in Tesco and they consist of 3 sachets. One with dried spices for frying, then a base sauce of additional oomphy stuff and then the main sauce. In the middle of all this you add 250g of something else....meat, mushrooms, eggs, fish....I also take rice and pasta already bagged into portions for two.
I mentioned the fruit and vegetables. Oranges are sold everywhere at the road side and are wonderful. I wouldn't say that we bought any other fruit though. When you buy vege, you take one of the rather decrepit washing up bowls that are laying on top of the huge piles of tomatoes etc. into which you put everything you want. It is all weighed together and paid for in one go -minus the bowl. The quality is varied and you have to pick carefully through unripe, over -ripe and furry items all in the same pile. My suggestion would be to pick from the top of the pile to avoid those at the bottom that have been investigated by cats or peed on by the huge number of feral dogs that abound.
Bread is available in all of the tiny shops which actually look like cigarette kiosks...it is in no way your Mother's Pride sliced in a resealable packet - but round, about the size of a bread plate (?!), tasty but does not keep well. Occasionally, when we were out in the 'boonies' it became difficult to get. So I have also packaged up 'kits' so that I can make chapattis and drop scones. We did the latter last year using dried milk powder and dried egg. Just add 5 fluid ounces of water. Excellent but, time consuming if we wanted to get away quickly in the morning. We are intending to have some stop overs this time...
What's in the right hand flight box? Well that is also separated by a shelf which sits about 4 inches from the top and takes the heavy duty wet wipes for the mechanic, the doggy poo bags which are a great item to have around ( no not for that... for rubbish bags. You need small ones as big ones when full niff very quickly). Pegs, loo roll... Underneath, is the large container which holds the day to day water, and the washing up stuff.
Washing up is done at the sink, specially constructed to fold up neatly against the inside of the back door.

We have two means of cooking. The gas stove inside and the portable Cadac which also uses gas. Replacing cylinders in Morocco can be interesting. Most look as if they are 40 years old, covered in rust and come with different gauges at the business end.....so take the widget from the empty one with you to ensure you get a perfect fit.
The Cadac is brilliant and enables us to roast a complete chicken, bar b q, griddle and so on. We use it most of the time when we are in Europe and I tend to wrap everything in foil to cook to save on the washing up. We took it last year 'down south' and will do this time, but we did use it less there. There is usually a wind which in conjunction with the inevitable sand makes for cooking outside sometimes challenging. But it rings the changes and we have also got wind breaks.
What other 'white goods'? The fridge...runs off the lecky. Having tried ordinary freezer boxes and cheap electric ones, it paid to throw money at it, and it keeps the beer and the white wine cold, snuggled in with warm chook, milk and chocolate.
There is the wood burning stove which is lovely to sit next to in the evenings..
The pipe is also good for drying your socks on.....last year a pair of my daughter's purple socks which I was 'borrowing' ended up melting on the pipe - it still has the marks - when a certain someone forgot to check them while I was showering.
Finally, there is the washing machine. Daphne is actually the prototype for the BBC's Tardis. The only difference being that they did not think yellow would be a good colour. There is a large tube with ends on it. Half fill with water and a smidge of washing up liquid, add dirty smalls, seal and attach firmly to the vehicle before a day's off road driving. Ready and clean for rinsing and drying at the end of the day having been well agitated for several hours.
This is a boring blog!
No, nobody's complained, that's just my opinion and as I'm writing this blog, I can confidently claim the majority view. Let's face it, a travel blog with no travel is about as good a sedative as a hot afternoon at a village cricket match. About as exciting as a wet Wednesday afternoon in Wigan. Not that I've got anything particular against mid-week activity undertaken in inclement weather. It's Wigan that's the problem. It wouldn't be a problem in, say, Barbados or Hawaii but Wigan, by comparison, has got a long way - uphill - to go before it comes close to being on anyone's list of Places to Visit on Early Closing Day. Star Trek probably wouldn't have gained the cult following it has if Cap'n Kirk had started too many episodes with "This is the log of the Starship Enterprise, laid up for yet another week in the dry dock on Alpha Centauri."
Let's review the content so far. I do this for new readers who've just dropped by, as my reader in the USA flogs through this drivel every week with loyalty verging on Unnatural Interest - only joking, Yank! The occasional visitor from Poland is also appreciated -Witaj mój przyjacielu! - but the sole "hit" from Romania happened to co-incide with our daughter being in Bucharest for the weekend, so I don't think I can count that on the scorecard of International Interest.
So, some droning on about how I managed to get 55kgs of tent from the storeroom to the roofrack without dropping it and, unbelievably, a photo of Daphne's back end cluttered up with plastic boxes...wot? I mean, FFS! Is this all there is? When we wrote the blog last year, we read somewhere that we should include all the things that go wrong, all the bad bits as well as the good stuff and the pretty pictures as readers "like" to hear how It's All Gone to Hell in a Handcart. So, I must apologise for not dropping the tent off the lash-up of a ramp. I'd like to say "It nearly happened", but actually ended up being a completely uneventful event other than for the doing up of the fixing bolts. We live alongside a country lane frequented by almost no-one except dog walkers and Sunday strollers. The latter group tend to be more refined persons - well, the gentlemen wear hats not hoods, which is almost an indication of aristocracy around here. And it was a small group of the latter that were treated to my loudly voiced opinion on the state of the universe, God and the weather when I skinned my freezing knuckles and sent a vital nut spinning into the middle distance to land in the previously-mentioned gravel, where flying metalwork goes to disappear forever. They might have been outraged but, then again, they might be representatives of our new but rapidly expanding Polish community and were just entertained. If they come back equipped with folding chairs and picnics, I'll try to be less profane since they seemed to have quite an interest in what was going on. Perhaps it was the metal detector that did it. I wasn't even aware that they were there and listening to my cursing, having earphones on an' all. Didn't find the nut, either.
Regarding the point of all this, there's not much to report this week. Again. I sorted out the paperwork to import Daphne via Tangier which is made a lot easier by visiting Tim Cullis' excellent guide. Find it here: http://www.morocco-knowledgebase.net
There's always something that can be improved, and in an attempt to improve the view of the navigation display I made this little gadget from some scrap aluminium:
OK, so what? Well, we found OSM mapping quite useful, unlike the rear view mirror which is largely redundant except for seeing how big our dust cloud is. Rather than remove the mirror, which is easy to do as Sue proved to my annoyance last year, we decided to make it comply with our "everything must be dual purpose" philosophy:
So here's our new Head-Up Display satnav. This lets us both see what's going on, or Sue can use the Garmin while I keep an eye on OSM. Any chance of disagreements over the navigation now removed...yeah, right.
Anyway, despite my original misgivings, it doesn't block the view forwards as much as I'd thought and I don't need glasses to read it.
I'm getting interested in a New Noise that only happens when Daphne is running on smooth roads and the transmission is cold. It might be a wheel bearing or one of the diffs, but it's difficult to isolate from the driving seat. This isn't helped by the fact that I'm hightone deaf in my right ear, the result of a combination of firing guns without ear defenders and a career in and around aeroplanes and noisy jet engines. My time associated with Chinook helicopters probably either trashed my eardrums or was a natural defence mechanism since six years in the lefthand front seat were accompanied by a loud whining noise from the other side of the aircraft. I initially thought this was the front rotor gearbox but since it was often there before the engines were started.....This whining, which became more high-pitched when we began recruiting female aircrew has left me with a permanent disability and an aversion to pilots with t*ts. ;-)
An oil change has to be done before we leave, even though the present fill has got 3000 miles left in it. There, that's something for you to look forward to next week. Bet you can't wait. Still, less than 4 weeks to go before we head South.
Sue did manage to lighten the load a bit - see previous regarding rearrangements in the kitchen department - by transferring all the foodie stuff that was in glass jars into plastic pots, but I still reckon we're taking too much. I tried to point out that folk in Morocco didn't seem undernourished and that we could probably replenish the larder fairly regularly and didn't need to fill all available space - that I need, obviously, for More Important (Man) Stuff - with comestibles which will probably be available en route. After some negotiation we have reached a fair compromise. Sue will organise the feeding arrangements and I will shut up. Anyone seen my coat?
Let's review the content so far. I do this for new readers who've just dropped by, as my reader in the USA flogs through this drivel every week with loyalty verging on Unnatural Interest - only joking, Yank! The occasional visitor from Poland is also appreciated -Witaj mój przyjacielu! - but the sole "hit" from Romania happened to co-incide with our daughter being in Bucharest for the weekend, so I don't think I can count that on the scorecard of International Interest.
So, some droning on about how I managed to get 55kgs of tent from the storeroom to the roofrack without dropping it and, unbelievably, a photo of Daphne's back end cluttered up with plastic boxes...wot? I mean, FFS! Is this all there is? When we wrote the blog last year, we read somewhere that we should include all the things that go wrong, all the bad bits as well as the good stuff and the pretty pictures as readers "like" to hear how It's All Gone to Hell in a Handcart. So, I must apologise for not dropping the tent off the lash-up of a ramp. I'd like to say "It nearly happened", but actually ended up being a completely uneventful event other than for the doing up of the fixing bolts. We live alongside a country lane frequented by almost no-one except dog walkers and Sunday strollers. The latter group tend to be more refined persons - well, the gentlemen wear hats not hoods, which is almost an indication of aristocracy around here. And it was a small group of the latter that were treated to my loudly voiced opinion on the state of the universe, God and the weather when I skinned my freezing knuckles and sent a vital nut spinning into the middle distance to land in the previously-mentioned gravel, where flying metalwork goes to disappear forever. They might have been outraged but, then again, they might be representatives of our new but rapidly expanding Polish community and were just entertained. If they come back equipped with folding chairs and picnics, I'll try to be less profane since they seemed to have quite an interest in what was going on. Perhaps it was the metal detector that did it. I wasn't even aware that they were there and listening to my cursing, having earphones on an' all. Didn't find the nut, either.
Regarding the point of all this, there's not much to report this week. Again. I sorted out the paperwork to import Daphne via Tangier which is made a lot easier by visiting Tim Cullis' excellent guide. Find it here: http://www.morocco-knowledgebase.net
There's always something that can be improved, and in an attempt to improve the view of the navigation display I made this little gadget from some scrap aluminium:
OK, so what? Well, we found OSM mapping quite useful, unlike the rear view mirror which is largely redundant except for seeing how big our dust cloud is. Rather than remove the mirror, which is easy to do as Sue proved to my annoyance last year, we decided to make it comply with our "everything must be dual purpose" philosophy:
So here's our new Head-Up Display satnav. This lets us both see what's going on, or Sue can use the Garmin while I keep an eye on OSM. Any chance of disagreements over the navigation now removed...yeah, right.
Anyway, despite my original misgivings, it doesn't block the view forwards as much as I'd thought and I don't need glasses to read it.
I'm getting interested in a New Noise that only happens when Daphne is running on smooth roads and the transmission is cold. It might be a wheel bearing or one of the diffs, but it's difficult to isolate from the driving seat. This isn't helped by the fact that I'm hightone deaf in my right ear, the result of a combination of firing guns without ear defenders and a career in and around aeroplanes and noisy jet engines. My time associated with Chinook helicopters probably either trashed my eardrums or was a natural defence mechanism since six years in the lefthand front seat were accompanied by a loud whining noise from the other side of the aircraft. I initially thought this was the front rotor gearbox but since it was often there before the engines were started.....This whining, which became more high-pitched when we began recruiting female aircrew has left me with a permanent disability and an aversion to pilots with t*ts. ;-)
An oil change has to be done before we leave, even though the present fill has got 3000 miles left in it. There, that's something for you to look forward to next week. Bet you can't wait. Still, less than 4 weeks to go before we head South.
Sue did manage to lighten the load a bit - see previous regarding rearrangements in the kitchen department - by transferring all the foodie stuff that was in glass jars into plastic pots, but I still reckon we're taking too much. I tried to point out that folk in Morocco didn't seem undernourished and that we could probably replenish the larder fairly regularly and didn't need to fill all available space - that I need, obviously, for More Important (Man) Stuff - with comestibles which will probably be available en route. After some negotiation we have reached a fair compromise. Sue will organise the feeding arrangements and I will shut up. Anyone seen my coat?
Monday, 15 February 2016
Let's play tents....
...while it's not raining. Having extracted the rooftent from under a pile of garden toolery, we remembered that there were some small jobs that needed to be done before we could put it back "up top". The two main ones were a repair to the side skirt and some means of fastening the waterproof transit cover since the completely useless zip broke within minutes of first use.
The skirt repair was fairly simple but the cover needed some thought. The zip fastener, even if it hadn't broken, was far too difficult to use. Given the two corners the zip had to pass around, that it's 2 metres off the ground and couldn't be done without lying horizontal across the (wet/dusty) roofrack for at least one side made it completely impractical. We'd held it on with bungee straps but we needed a better system. A search of the scrap box turned up some webbing, buckles and straps from an old tent. These we stitched to the cover at points around the edge...
The sail stitcher did a good job, but the material plus webbing was pretty tough to push through and I managed to break a needle and stab myself several times. OK, so the bloodstains are a bit overdone, but it really was a bugger of a job. Despite bringing the cover indoors for several hours to warm it up and hopefully make it a bit more supple, handling it was still much like trying to gift wrap a football with a sheet of hardboard.
Now it fits and the edges can be pulled tight enough to stop water getting under the cover and wetting the tent.
The next thing was to get it into place.
As my old Science teacher would say, a "suitable system of planes, pulleys and levers" was set up and the task of getting a 55kg dead weight from ground to roof was a one-man job.
We'll leave the mattress indoors for the moment, in case the weather takes a turn for....
...the worse. This was Sunday morning, so glad we got it done the day before. I waited until things got a bit warmer before fighting with the awning, but this went back on fairly easily once I'd got the brackets and bolts lined up.
This is a great bit of gear. It unfolds like a giant bat wing and shades the side and back, over the table and back door. The legs that support it also support our custom made windbreak, so we can seal ourselves in from the weather.
Other odd jobs done: cable for the CB re-routed and the ground plane fixed to the roof, kitchen storage cleaned out and the GPS refitted to the co-pilot's seat.
Next week I need to put a guard around the rear worklight switch, so the chef can't turn it on accidentally and not notice for 15 hours......good job it's an LED.
The skirt repair was fairly simple but the cover needed some thought. The zip fastener, even if it hadn't broken, was far too difficult to use. Given the two corners the zip had to pass around, that it's 2 metres off the ground and couldn't be done without lying horizontal across the (wet/dusty) roofrack for at least one side made it completely impractical. We'd held it on with bungee straps but we needed a better system. A search of the scrap box turned up some webbing, buckles and straps from an old tent. These we stitched to the cover at points around the edge...
The sail stitcher did a good job, but the material plus webbing was pretty tough to push through and I managed to break a needle and stab myself several times. OK, so the bloodstains are a bit overdone, but it really was a bugger of a job. Despite bringing the cover indoors for several hours to warm it up and hopefully make it a bit more supple, handling it was still much like trying to gift wrap a football with a sheet of hardboard.
Now it fits and the edges can be pulled tight enough to stop water getting under the cover and wetting the tent.
The next thing was to get it into place.
As my old Science teacher would say, a "suitable system of planes, pulleys and levers" was set up and the task of getting a 55kg dead weight from ground to roof was a one-man job.
We'll leave the mattress indoors for the moment, in case the weather takes a turn for....
...the worse. This was Sunday morning, so glad we got it done the day before. I waited until things got a bit warmer before fighting with the awning, but this went back on fairly easily once I'd got the brackets and bolts lined up.
This is a great bit of gear. It unfolds like a giant bat wing and shades the side and back, over the table and back door. The legs that support it also support our custom made windbreak, so we can seal ourselves in from the weather.
Other odd jobs done: cable for the CB re-routed and the ground plane fixed to the roof, kitchen storage cleaned out and the GPS refitted to the co-pilot's seat.
Next week I need to put a guard around the rear worklight switch, so the chef can't turn it on accidentally and not notice for 15 hours......good job it's an LED.
Tuesday, 9 February 2016
Some new toys, and improving old ones.
We got one of these! Given that we're going to be a little farther away from help this year we decided that a little extra "insurance" might be wise. I picked up on the idea from information on another forum, and the item you see is the slightly more useful upgrade to the original "SOS" basic unit. Actually, the basic unit does a little more than that - but not much - and anyway, isn't available anymore. So, we got this one from Amazon - (where else, they're taking over the world). Apart from having a Panic Button, it can lay a trail of breadcrumbs that can be followed online by anyone we include in our plans and allows a certain number of text messages via satphone so we can keep in touch without having the rely on Maroc Telecom, wonderful though it might be.
We also decided to commit to using the carrier of the solar panel as a table. The usual table is heavy duty - and I mean heavy - and the cover for the solar panel is a quarter of the weight, so it made sense to use it instead. I beefed up the panel - which is just a bit of ratty old 5mm plywood - with some 25mm square battens - and that has stiffened it enough to make a useable table and it doesn't interfere with folding the solar panel away:
It fixes to the rear ladder via a steel tube welded to the ladder and an old tent pole which luckily had a final diameter just the right size to fit into it:
The other end is held up with an adjustable leg that began life as the bottom half of a crutch. It fits like this:
The table isn't as solid as the usual one as it is, but if the solar panel isn't removed, it's pretty good. I reckon that since we only use the table for preparing food and eating in the evenings, the solar panel will be refitted anyway, then table becomes much more substantial and it'll be on the underside, out of the way. Two jobs for the price of one, and a saving of about 3kg as well.
Daphne had her annual inspection by the Government rep last week, and passed with only one comment. The headlamp I had to replace last year - the one that shook itself to bits on the washboard roads - was slightly out of alignment. Nothing else to note so the maintenance effort was worth it. That said, the annual MoT test doesn't really mean a thing as far as "expedition reliability" is concerned. She could blow up tomorrow and still be legal.
....and as for us, well, the Darija studies continue and my beard is now ten days old and just getting to the itchy stage. I shaved it off twice last year as I couldn't put up with it and drive all day as well. I've done all the route planning - although the sat nav won't accept the routes so it'll be point-to-point like last year, unless Wikiloc works - we'll see. The compass and the map will always work....depending on who's using them....Ouch!
We also decided to commit to using the carrier of the solar panel as a table. The usual table is heavy duty - and I mean heavy - and the cover for the solar panel is a quarter of the weight, so it made sense to use it instead. I beefed up the panel - which is just a bit of ratty old 5mm plywood - with some 25mm square battens - and that has stiffened it enough to make a useable table and it doesn't interfere with folding the solar panel away:
It fixes to the rear ladder via a steel tube welded to the ladder and an old tent pole which luckily had a final diameter just the right size to fit into it:
The other end is held up with an adjustable leg that began life as the bottom half of a crutch. It fits like this:
The table isn't as solid as the usual one as it is, but if the solar panel isn't removed, it's pretty good. I reckon that since we only use the table for preparing food and eating in the evenings, the solar panel will be refitted anyway, then table becomes much more substantial and it'll be on the underside, out of the way. Two jobs for the price of one, and a saving of about 3kg as well.
Daphne had her annual inspection by the Government rep last week, and passed with only one comment. The headlamp I had to replace last year - the one that shook itself to bits on the washboard roads - was slightly out of alignment. Nothing else to note so the maintenance effort was worth it. That said, the annual MoT test doesn't really mean a thing as far as "expedition reliability" is concerned. She could blow up tomorrow and still be legal.
....and as for us, well, the Darija studies continue and my beard is now ten days old and just getting to the itchy stage. I shaved it off twice last year as I couldn't put up with it and drive all day as well. I've done all the route planning - although the sat nav won't accept the routes so it'll be point-to-point like last year, unless Wikiloc works - we'll see. The compass and the map will always work....depending on who's using them....Ouch!
Sunday, 31 January 2016
Opening the toy cupboard.
Time to start arranging the off-road toys.
I put off playing with the tent this weekend, since it was blowing 55mph and snowing. Quite apart from the risk of it turning into an expensive kite, getting it wet would give me another job - trying to get it dry. So, we invoked Plan B - put the waffle boards on the roofrack and sort out the new solar panel.
I bought the boards from a local who'd retired from the offroad scene and had a lot of stuff to get rid of. Luckily I spotted his Gumtree ad before anyone else and got 2 sets of boards - lightweight and heavy - for half the cost of one, and they've not been used. Despite the extra weight, we'll carry the thicker versions to Morocco as they're strong enough to act as bridges as well as sand ladders. They fit perfectly on the rack and give me somewhere safe to stand while I'm leaping about like a gibbon up there. Not only that, and to satisfy our rule that "everything must have at least two uses", I can use one board to provide a stabiliser for the Hi-Lift jack:
The black paint on the upper board gives the locations for the Hi-Lift stabiliser kit:
The cover for the jack mechanism was made from an old inner tube, cut to shape and held together with press studs. I know it's not as good as a full cover, but it'll keep most of the crud off and it was free.
...and on with the Solar panel:
OK, so it looks like a bit of armour plate, but what you see has taken weeks of trial runs and wasted effort. The first effort was, in fact, more like a bit of side armour and way too heavy. The solar panel itself weighs next-to-nothing so I was determined to try to keep the whole set-up equally light. Eventually I made a cover from thin plywood, braced with battens around the edges. It won't last forever but is good enough for now. This is the panel in "transport" mode. It can be opened in situ....
and this is about the angle you'd want it to catch any energy just here at the moment. The sun does, despite rumours to the contrary, actually get above our horizon for an hour or two each day. Clearly, this wouldn't be an ideal angle for use anywhere south of the Arctic Circle (here - nearly) so it has to be a bit more flexible...
...Hmmm, dunno why this picture won't load "straight"...anyway, the whole lot comes off and can be moved around to follow the sun. The plywood cover acts as a stabiliser and we can put rocks on it to keep it in place against the wind. When the sun goes down we can fold it up and it's a table top.....
There's 5 metres of cable connecting it to the charge controller :
so we can pretty much put it anywhere - on the roof if necessary. Having the panel lets us keep the main (starter) and auxilliary batteries charged when we're parked up, so we are now completely free of the need to use campsites and external electricity. This was necessary last year. If we wanted to run the fridge and other things while wild camping, the battery would last just over a day and then need a charge from Daphne's alternator. This isn't a problem if we move every day but it's not the plan this year.
Sue has finally finished her work on her Forensics course, for now anyway, so is getting her head around the phrasebook. I'm concentrating on the social niceties and she's "doing the shopping", which means,among other things, learning how to argue over the price. If we learn a phrase a day, we should be pretty well sorted by the time we land at Tangier.
I put off playing with the tent this weekend, since it was blowing 55mph and snowing. Quite apart from the risk of it turning into an expensive kite, getting it wet would give me another job - trying to get it dry. So, we invoked Plan B - put the waffle boards on the roofrack and sort out the new solar panel.
I bought the boards from a local who'd retired from the offroad scene and had a lot of stuff to get rid of. Luckily I spotted his Gumtree ad before anyone else and got 2 sets of boards - lightweight and heavy - for half the cost of one, and they've not been used. Despite the extra weight, we'll carry the thicker versions to Morocco as they're strong enough to act as bridges as well as sand ladders. They fit perfectly on the rack and give me somewhere safe to stand while I'm leaping about like a gibbon up there. Not only that, and to satisfy our rule that "everything must have at least two uses", I can use one board to provide a stabiliser for the Hi-Lift jack:
The black paint on the upper board gives the locations for the Hi-Lift stabiliser kit:
which consists of 2 ratchet straps and 2 locking bars. The pin and clip are for securing the jack adapter.
The ratchet straps are used to brace the jack against the stiffness of the board and stop it from tipping left or right, which is a real hazard when using these things.
When we had our puncture last year, the bottle jack wouldn't work on the stony ground - too unstable - so we used the Hi-Lift and a wooden footboard similar to this, but it only did that job and was otherwise Dead Weight. This new arrangement is more useful and the boards can be used as seats if we have guests....which we anticipate might be pretty often!
The cover for the jack mechanism was made from an old inner tube, cut to shape and held together with press studs. I know it's not as good as a full cover, but it'll keep most of the crud off and it was free.
...and on with the Solar panel:
OK, so it looks like a bit of armour plate, but what you see has taken weeks of trial runs and wasted effort. The first effort was, in fact, more like a bit of side armour and way too heavy. The solar panel itself weighs next-to-nothing so I was determined to try to keep the whole set-up equally light. Eventually I made a cover from thin plywood, braced with battens around the edges. It won't last forever but is good enough for now. This is the panel in "transport" mode. It can be opened in situ....
and this is about the angle you'd want it to catch any energy just here at the moment. The sun does, despite rumours to the contrary, actually get above our horizon for an hour or two each day. Clearly, this wouldn't be an ideal angle for use anywhere south of the Arctic Circle (here - nearly) so it has to be a bit more flexible...
...Hmmm, dunno why this picture won't load "straight"...anyway, the whole lot comes off and can be moved around to follow the sun. The plywood cover acts as a stabiliser and we can put rocks on it to keep it in place against the wind. When the sun goes down we can fold it up and it's a table top.....
There's 5 metres of cable connecting it to the charge controller :
so we can pretty much put it anywhere - on the roof if necessary. Having the panel lets us keep the main (starter) and auxilliary batteries charged when we're parked up, so we are now completely free of the need to use campsites and external electricity. This was necessary last year. If we wanted to run the fridge and other things while wild camping, the battery would last just over a day and then need a charge from Daphne's alternator. This isn't a problem if we move every day but it's not the plan this year.
Sue has finally finished her work on her Forensics course, for now anyway, so is getting her head around the phrasebook. I'm concentrating on the social niceties and she's "doing the shopping", which means,among other things, learning how to argue over the price. If we learn a phrase a day, we should be pretty well sorted by the time we land at Tangier.
Monday, 25 January 2016
Beginning to Bolt On the Bits.
...and there are a lot of bits to bolt.
The arrival of the new brake pads coincided with the warmer weather, so getting ouside again was quite pleasant. The temperature today is more like late Spring (for Moray, anyway) than mid-winter. Crazy times.
The brake pads didn't really need to be replaced having only been used for 9000 miles, but they're not exactly expensive so I swapped them anyway. While the back end was off the ground I greased the prop shaft joints, anointing myself in the process with several gobs of hi-speed grease. With a little air to bleed from the gun and struggling for room while on my back underneath, I opened the bleed screw and the air inside released with a crack, together with a jet of yellow gunk. It could've gone anywhere, but chose my right eye instead.... ho hum.
I remade the side panniers earlier, so these went back on.
These were made up from some scrap metal fencing, a couple of strap hinges and over-centre catches which can be locked. They're suspended from brackets that clamp around the roof gutters.The front one is slightly larger and holds a NATO plastic water can and the rear cage holds a jerrycan. To save our backs the diesel can be siphoned out so there's no need to ever take the can out of the rack.
The ratchet straps are there to stop them moving about and bashing the window grilles. Both the grilles and the panniers were a project to practice my emerging welding skills. The fencing panels were galvanised....and I learnt another lesson! At least they won't rust. The window grilles were made from a discarded bed base which just happened to be exactly the right size once cut in two. There are 4 skips at the back of my work place which get regular visits....
We need to get the tent back on the roof soon, but I need to work out a better way of securing the travel cover. The useless plastic zip broke the first time we used it last year and we made do with bungees to hold it on. It'll be a simple fix to make it prettier, but once it's out of storage it'll take up most of the garage, which I can't afford at the moment. Then there's the awning, the recovery kit, all the kitchen stuff - which Sue will no doubt want to rearrange AGAIN, spares box, oils....well, you get the picture.
The arrival of the new brake pads coincided with the warmer weather, so getting ouside again was quite pleasant. The temperature today is more like late Spring (for Moray, anyway) than mid-winter. Crazy times.
The brake pads didn't really need to be replaced having only been used for 9000 miles, but they're not exactly expensive so I swapped them anyway. While the back end was off the ground I greased the prop shaft joints, anointing myself in the process with several gobs of hi-speed grease. With a little air to bleed from the gun and struggling for room while on my back underneath, I opened the bleed screw and the air inside released with a crack, together with a jet of yellow gunk. It could've gone anywhere, but chose my right eye instead.... ho hum.
I remade the side panniers earlier, so these went back on.
These were made up from some scrap metal fencing, a couple of strap hinges and over-centre catches which can be locked. They're suspended from brackets that clamp around the roof gutters.The front one is slightly larger and holds a NATO plastic water can and the rear cage holds a jerrycan. To save our backs the diesel can be siphoned out so there's no need to ever take the can out of the rack.
The ratchet straps are there to stop them moving about and bashing the window grilles. Both the grilles and the panniers were a project to practice my emerging welding skills. The fencing panels were galvanised....and I learnt another lesson! At least they won't rust. The window grilles were made from a discarded bed base which just happened to be exactly the right size once cut in two. There are 4 skips at the back of my work place which get regular visits....
We need to get the tent back on the roof soon, but I need to work out a better way of securing the travel cover. The useless plastic zip broke the first time we used it last year and we made do with bungees to hold it on. It'll be a simple fix to make it prettier, but once it's out of storage it'll take up most of the garage, which I can't afford at the moment. Then there's the awning, the recovery kit, all the kitchen stuff - which Sue will no doubt want to rearrange AGAIN, spares box, oils....well, you get the picture.
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