I arrived back in Johannesburg on May 1st 2020, two years and two months since racing back to Australia at the start of Covid. I had 58kg of luggage. That included one change of clothes, the rest was car parts etc for fixing Clancy.
Clancy had been sitting out in the weather for those two years and had taken a bit of a beating. The good things when I arrived. The cranking battery was good having spent two years attached to a solar panel. The deep cycle batteries were good, having been totally disconnected, but still had a voltage of over 13V. I hired a car for the first 3 days and drove around Joberg getting things like epoxy resin, car parts and tools.
I spent five weeks fixing things. The list:
*Replacing the hinge of the door. I had left the door siliconed up, because the hinge broke the day before I left. This included fibreglassing the aluminum edge back on the door.
*making a new lid for the roof box. The roof box was something I made at the last minute before I drove to Sydney to load into the shipping container. The lid was badly designed and leaked when it rained, so I had to extend the lid so it fitted over the top of the roof box.
- Repaint Clancy all over. The paint had faded over two years. Partly because it was painted so badly. I was still painting it the night before I left to drive to Sydney to put it in the shipping container.
- Derust, I used rust converter on many parts that has rusted in the weather.
- Replace the radiator. The radiator was leaking, and I had brought a replacement radiator just before Covid, but had never installed it.
- Replace the tie rod ends. This caused a lot of problems. I sucessfully replaced the tie rod ends, but then it needed wheel aligning. Over two days and four different wheel aligners I found no-one could do it. Either Clancy was too heavy, or too high, or the rear wheels were too covered stopping the alignment targets being attached. Eventually the last guy I spoke too told me how to do it myself. I did and it drives quite well.
DIY wheel alignment
- Numerous fibreglass fixes. I had many little pieces of fibreglass that needed fixing, or improving.
- Replacing flap hinge. I needed to replace the hinge on both side flaps. I did one side, left the other side until later.
- Replace the water pump and many valves. I am not sure what went wrong, but many of the 10mm ball valves got corroded, and the water pump died. I possibly think that because I pumped a bleach solution into the tanks before I left, and it probably sat in the lines and the pump, and corroded everything. I should have drained the water lines.
- Installed the UV filter in line with the existing filter. However I did not tighten it down enough, water got into the UV light and the ballast shorted, so it doesn’t work.
- New inverter. Cabled but when I connected it up it blew all the fuses in the inverter. I pulled it apart and replaced all the fuses, reconnected it but something else blew. I have disconnected it pending further investigation.
