Total Pageviews

April 9th - The cars have arrived in the States

After a year of planning this trip, we have the final piece of the jigsaw in place: the cars are safely parked up in Malibu, California.

I say ready, but that's not quite true as there is a lot of work that needs doing to my Landcruiser to get it properly prepared for the 4,000 miles of driving up to the Arctic Ocean. The most urgent repairs to be done are on the front brakes, which have warped discs, causing quite severe brake judder. This has been a recurring problem on the Landcruiser. After heavy braking on mountain passes the brakes get very hot and the discs can then warp This has happened before in China and South Africa. The current discs have been skimmed once and it is now time to fit new ones, which I will do in May.

Returning to the events of yesterday. When my son Edward went to collect the cars from the shipping agent, just south of Los Angeles, things did not go as I had planned!

When we drove the car on its final leg of the SE Asia tour, from Behai to Macau, we ran the car very low of diesel. We did this because it is a requirement when shipping a car in a container that it has very little fuel in the tank. Well, I didn't realise just how little fuel there was in the tank, when I left the car with the agent in Macau, because as Ed drove the car out of the Los Angeles container depot it ran out of diesel! Now, starting a diesel after it has run out of fuel can be a problem, as was the case yesterday. He had the car towed to a garage, filled it up with diesel, but try as he might the car wouldn't start. He called me in London and I phoned Chris, who has prepared the car for all the events we have done, to find out what we could do to start the car. The solution to the problem was that, unknown to me, there is a priming pump that allows you to prime the system with diesel and expel any air. Once I had phoned Ed back with the solution he managed to get the car started.

Bob's Landcruiser was loaded on to a tow truck and Edward led the truck across Los Angeles and up the coast to the house in Malibu, where the cars will be stored until we start the event in July. I'll post a photo of the cars in my next posting.

With the cars in the States, we are getting very excited about the trip. We have always wanted to drive up to Alaska and now that will become a reaility, in just a few months time.

1 comment:

  1. Timothy
    A scary thought that you did not know about priming a Toyota diesel after all the miles you have done!
    Glad that it got sorted.Looking forward ti readin about the trip.
    Peter

    ReplyDelete

The web links to previous adventure drives, as well as our next drive across Canada in April/May 2010 and this blog's archives, are at the bottom of this page.
YOU CAN DOUBLE CLICK ON ANY PHOTO TO INCREASE ITS SIZE, THEN CLICK ON YOUR SERVER RETURN ICON TO RETURN TO THE BLOG.

Blog Archive