Thought I should get the last update of the year in as its been months since I posted any progress.
Back in July/Aug we went on a 2 week trip to Cornwall, just as the weather turned to s***. On the A30 a large bird of some sort flew right out of the hedgerow as I was passing at about 50mph and bounced off the passenger side just above the headlamp, it made quite a bang and when I pulled over to inspect I was gutted to find cracked paint and a couple of very small dents just near the A post, great start to the holiday!
As we pulled into the campsite she was running a bit rough but this just turned out to be a loose nut on the exhaust as I had stupidly used nylocs on the exhaust which meant the nylon separated from the nut when hot, D'oh!
We spent a week in Falmouth along with some family and were pretty lucky with weather, it wasn't great but we avoided most of the rain. We then drove all the way up the atlantic highway to Croyde in the hammering rain and that was the rest of our time camping, gale force winds and pi**ing rain! Thankfully the old girl did us proud and didn't miss a beat other than a blown fuse on the split charge relay which I now know is because I hadn't wired it up correctly and have now ditched it in favour of a voltage sensing relay, much neater.
So, quick pic in the rain on the road to Croyde overlooking Saunton sands:
When I laid the flooring I wasn't really happy, I copied the standard Danbury method as I wasn't sure if anything else would cause me problems with the buddy seats and bed lining up but it didn't matter in the end. I chucked down some cheap vinyl but I don't like the cold floor and wanted a rug to cover it up. We know someone that makes rugs and stuff from recycled clothing, we gave her a huge bag of old clothes we didn't want and she cuts these into strips and weaves them into a rug, the exact shape of the bus floor to go around the buddy seats.
I love the rug, the colours are a bit of an assualt on the eyes, especially with our old interior back in at the moment but hopefully in 2016 I will change at least the fabric on the seats and curtains.
Rug on the floor in our house and then how it fits in the bus.
I bought one of Butty's brilliant throttle kits to replace the knackered mechanism on the bus, now that Butty has a plate that bolts onto the area that wears the most this has made an amazing transformation of the throttle effort and action, its so much smoother and gets full range without problems.
Before: You can just see the amount of wear to the left of the shaft
More obvious here:
Lining up the new plate with bearing for drilling:
Drilled and bolted up:
With the rest of the kit in place:
I highly recommend this kit to anyone, well worth the money.
Lastly I swapped the old Red9 bevel box to the new style one they provide now, needed a little fettle of the chassis to get properly fitted well without any binding of the column but it has sorted the slop I had in the steering and it steers lovely now.
As I mentioned earlier, turns out I hadn't wired up the split charge relay correctly, I read that voltage sensing relays are preferred these days and neater to fit so ditched the old s/c relay and fitted one of these instead, much neater:
That's me done for this year, Happy New Year to you all, hope you have a great 2016!