Why you should always listen to your own advice...

It's been a while since a spent any time using Jim, or doing any work on him but with two trips planned I decided to tick a couple of items off of the list of repairs and modifications I'd accumulated whilst travelling around America and Mexico. Almost all of the items on the list are either permanent fixes to small field repairs, or modifications which would make things work better, but one of the items needed proper attention before it caused further damage.

I mentioned in this blog whilst converting Jim into a motorhome, that I was trying as far as possible to avoid using fixtures and fittings from caravan and motorhome suppliers, partly because they tend to be fugly (technical term), and partly because they have the resilience of a chocolate tea pot. In general I managed to stick to this ambition, and I largely used parts from marine and industrial suppliers. In the bathroom however, I broke my pledge, and bought a series of matching plastic pieces that combine to make a reasonably attractive moulded bathroom suite. To replicate the appearance and functionality of these items in something tougher like fibreglass would have taken me a significant chunk of time, and so I took the lazy option. Below is a photo taken whilst I was installing the items in May 2012.

As soon as I picked up the shower tray component of this suite, I knew the decision would bite me on the arse, but I thought that a hefty amount of plywood and sikaflex reinforcement would be enough to prevent it from falling apart. I bonded a sheet of plywood across the bottom of the tray, and supported all four edges with a plywood upstand. In hindsight I completely underestimated the utter uselessness of the original product. I hate calling anyone out without giving them a chance to defend themselves but in this case the shower tray that I bought from CAK Tanks to match the C400 type Thetford cassette toilet was so appallingly low quality that I feel compelled to advise others to either not waste their time, or to simply use it as a mould to make a better version out of fibreglass.

Even supported completely by a sheet of plywood, the base of the shower tray developed a series of cracks all over within a few months of use. It’s difficult to comprehend how this is even possible but I suppose that the tiny amount of flexibility in the adhesive used to bond the plywood to the shower tray was enough to allow the tray to flex and crack. The cracks started off as ugly, but not intrinsically problematic, but after a year of full-time living in the truck, I could see beads of dirty water squeezing out of the cracks as I stepped on the tray. In addition, the radiused corners of the tray, which I had presumed would be safe as one doesn’t stand on them, also started to crack. Without intervention, I would have had water ending up in places where it shouldn’t, potentially rusting the floor, rotting the plywood furniture and causing corrosion in wiring.

I must acknowledge the awesome abilities of the CT1 adhesive that I used as a temporary repair to the tray whilst we were travelling. It is described as a hybrid polymer adhesive sealant, and it worked remarkably well to seal all of the damage and prevent water leaking into the area under the tray. When I first used it, I expected it peel off, as the cracks flexed. But it stuck the tray far better than the Sikaflex I used to bond the reinforcement pieces, and remained flexible enough to absorb the significant movement in the cracks around the edge of the tray. Unfortunately as well as it worked to prevent leaks, it made the shower tray look shabby, and ultimately I couldn’t live with the shame of such a visible bodge.

The way in which I constructed the bathroom in Jim would make it a massive ball ache to remove and replace the shower tray, and whilst I acknowledge that this may be in my future, I decided to first try and repair/rebuild the shower tray in-situ. The easiest way that I could think to repair the damage, was to fibreglass over the existing shower, effectively building a new tray inside the old one. The only snag in this plan was finding a way to get the new tray to bond effectively to the old one. Having a fair amount of epoxy resin left in the shed, I decided to use this for the fibrglassing, but I knew from experience that there are many plastics that epoxy does not effectively adhere to. My first step was to try to find out which plastic the tray was made from.

Blog Update!

I've recently been busy uploading some photos.

You can find a load of photos I took when converting Jim in the 'Converting Jim' tab...

And you can find an even larger load of photo's of our recent trip in the 'North and Central America' tab.

Dometic HB2500 Air Conditioner

When I converted Jim I installed a floor mounted air conditioner in the form of a Dometic HB2500. The air conditioner runs from a 240 volt AC mains supply, and so we did not get a huge number of opportunities to run it on our trip around North and Central America last year, despite temperatures getting up to 44 degrees centigrade. I originally thought that I could run the air conditioner from a 120v mains supply, by powering the air conditioner from the batteries through our 24v to 240v inverter, and putting the charge back into the batteries from our universal input battery charger. The reason that we ended up not running the air conditioner in this way often, was that the combined heat output from running the inverter and battery charger, pretty much negated any cooling effect from the small 8,500 BTU air conditioner. Both the battery charger and inverter are located inside the living accommodation; in hindsight this was a mistake and it would have been more sensible to locate them in a locker thermally isolated form the inside of the truck body.

The only occasions that we ran the air conditioner, were either when we were desperate enough to use the generator, or when we had a 50a power supply available. A lot of small commercial electrical installs in North America have single split-phase 240v supply, with 120v from either live to the neutral, but 240v between the lives. The big 50a sockets are the only commonly found supplies that offer both lives, and these allowed us to plug the truck into a 240v 60hz supply through a cable which swapped one of the live legs to the neutral leg of the 32a ceeform input socket on Jim. The air conditioner ran fine from these supplies and on a handful of occasions we had a chance to escape the heat in this way.

This sporadic and scant use of the air conditioner changed when we returned to the UK. The HB2500 has the capacity to generate a hot air supply by reversing the refrigerant cycle, and so we used the electrical supply we ran from the house to save some diesel and give the Eberspacher air heater a rest. The noise from the blower is too obtrusive to run all night, but we have found the unit useful for keeping us warm during the day. It is not a particularly effective heater, partly because the air outlets are all mounted at ceiling level, but it is powerful enough to keep the truck comfortably warm when the temperatures outside are around freezing. Being mounted at floor level, and now being run for around 14 hours a day, the air inlet regularly sucks in enough dog hair and dust to block the filter, and so every 2 weeks or so I have to take the filter out and clean it.

Unfortunately over the recent cold snap the unit has started cutting out periodically. The display shows a flashing orange light, and the unit will stop blowing for a few minutes before restarting again. To see if I could diagnose the problem, I decided to take the unit apart. Access to the air conditioner is fairly simple, I just had to remove the bottom drawer and undo the 10 screws holding the cover panels on, and on taking the polystyrene cover off I could immediately see the problem. The condensating coil was frozen solid. This happens occasionally on air conditioners working hard in extremely humid conditions, but it has never been an issue on our HB2500 before.

Unfortunately I can see now why air conditioners do not make effective heaters. Any ice generated during in operation in hot conditions is likely to thaw and melt off fairly quickly, but when operating as a heater in below freezing conditions, the incoming air blown over the evaporating and condensating coils is too cold to allow the ice to melt. Being mounted inside the truck, I can turn the unit off and allow it to slowly thaw out, but a roof mounted air conditioner sitting in the cold air would never have the chance to thaw until the outside temperature rises. A heater that stops working in below freezing conditions is a bit of a liability, and so I would not recommend that anyone relies on the HB2500 for heating their vehicle.

One good thing to come out of taking the unit apart, was the chance to remove two spider nests before they hatched millions of arachnids into our home. I sincerely hope that the spiders were harmless domestic critters, but there is every likelihood that they hitched a lift from Mexico or America and may have been less friendly than the spiders that I'm used to.

A Short Trip Down to Dorset

Since arriving back in the UK, both Naomi and me are back at work and so the travelling has all but finished for now. Thankfully over the Christmas break we had the chance to briefly get back on the road again, and we headed down to beautiful Dorset to spend some time with my family.

We spent three days parked at the top of the East Cliff along the Bournemouth seafront, ignoring the no trucks rule and avoiding getting a parking ticket. We enjoyed several sunrise and sunset walks on the beach, and spent a glorious day walking around Hengistbury Head.

On the day that we left to return to London, we avoided a short section of the A31, and instead drove up a beautiful but unnamed road that runs past Lin Wood in the new forest. We took the time to go for a walk through the beautiful scrub and wooded landscape, spotting some magnificent stags on the way.

How Much 316 Days of Travel Cost us, and Why we Should all Travel Through Nebraska More.

With me, Naomi, Boris and Jim safely back in the country, life has returned to some kind of normality and routine for us, albeit not exactly the same kind we left behind twelve months ago. Despite having only finished working on the truck about a week before we put it on the boat bound for America, and having only done a half day of shakedown testing, most elements of the conversion worked out well. In fact life in Jim has been comfortable enough for us that we decided to continue living in him whilst back in London. It gives us the chance to continue to rent our house out, and save a little of the money that we overspent on the trip.

Despite this decision, there are plenty of things on Jim which broke on the trip, did not work out as we intended, or could be improved through modification. None of the issues require urgent attention, but attending to some of them gradually after we have moved back into the house, will help to keep me busy and poor over the next few years. I’ll update this blog whenever I do any work on the truck, but certainly the posts will be less frequent than they have been over the last couple of years.

When we were preparing for the trip around America and Mexico, I found a huge wealth of information on the internet to help in planning. For visa and border issues, there is almost nothing that can't be found with a search through the Horizons Unlimited HUBB forum. For information on converting a vehicle into a motorhome, almost everything worth knowing is hidden in the Self Build Motor Caravan Club (SBMCC) forum. For anything more specific to extended autonomous travel, I looked at the Yachting and Boating World forums, and for anything related to travel off tarmac I used the Expedition Portal forum. I am sure if you look hard enough on the internet, it is possible to find anything you want, but in the time I had dedicated to planning, I found very little regarding the costs associated with extended overland travel. 

On many of the blogs I read, I came across useful information, but rarely was it conglomerated onto a single page or post. Below is a summary of the main costs related to our trip; clearly the cost of relocating a vehicle, two people and a dog across the Atlantic comprised a huge proportion of our expenditure. The costs of living on the road was far lower than I expected, and in hindsight we would have got better value out of the relocation costs if we'd spent longer on the road. Unfortunately with the route we took, this was impossible due to the 12 month limit on keeping a temporarily imported vehicle in the US.

I apologize for the lack of exciting photos in this blog post.

Trip Summary

The duration was 316 days, from December 15th 2013 to October 28th 2014

The total distance driven was a little short of 17,000 miles, of which approximately 10,700 miles was in America, 6,000 miles was in Mexico, and 300 miles was in Canada.

The route driven was pretty much as shown below.

Cost Summary
The total spend during our trip was approximately £31,200, broken down approximately as shown below.

• Flights - £5,870
• Shipping - £6,540
• Truck insurance - £2,110
• Truck repairs - £2,740
• Diesel - £4,860
• Living costs - £9,080

Below are  further details on some of the larger costs.

Jim's Brothers Spotted

For anyone interested in what Jim (formerly known as J118) looked like in his previous life with Brinks, I found his brothers J119 and J120, photographed by the google streetview cameras parked on a road in central London. Jim was in an older Brinks livery, but was otherwise indentical.

The location adds some additional mystery to what Jim's role was for brinks; the two trucks are parked in an area better know for bank headquarters than actual banks. I had presumed he was used for typical cash transfer jobs between banks and secure depots, but Brinks never had enough of these type of vehicles for this type of job so it is likely that his role was more specialised.

The End of the Road

During our last week in America, we made and fitted three shipping boards to the truck, cleaned the truck inside and out, emptied the fresh, grey, black and hot water tanks, emptied and defrosted the fridge and freezer, charged the batteries and disconnected all non essential circuits, bought and packed two suitcases, and donated our Florida bought bicycles to charity. Thankfully we were not trying to arrange, the shipping and flight preparation from the side of the road, and had the generous hospitality of Fred and Denise in Arlington, and then Bill and Mary in Reston to make life easier for us.

In general shipping the truck back to the UK followed the same process as the outbound journey. Once again I booked the truck onto a K-line ship as they are the only line operating a transatlantic crossing via Southampton. NYK line operates a route via Liverpool, which whilst more convenient than the more commonly used European ports of Zeebrugge, Bremerhaven, Hamburg and Antwerp, is not as close to London as Southampton, and inevitably necessitates a trip to Liverpool. Once again I employed the services of NMT as shipping agent, partly because they did a good job on the way out, and partly as they remain one of the few agents with a presence on the east coast of America and at Southampton with experience in roro shipping.

A month before the proposed sailing date I contacted NMT and using the schedule that they sent me, gave them preliminary notice of my intention to put Jim on a specific sailing. With the exception of organizing shipping insurance, I then did nothing regarding shipping until five days prior to the scheduled sailing date, when I drove to Baltimore to drop the truck off at the docks. Learning from my experience at Brunswick last December, I did some research regarding port security prior to leaving Washington, and discovered that once again I would need a TWIC (Transport Worker Identification Credential) card to enter the docks alone. Therefore instead of driving straight to the docks, I first drove to A1 Escorts (not the kind of place you'd expect from the name) where I got all of the necessary photocopying done (five copies of the trucks registration papers, and a few copies of the delivery note prepared by NMT), and picked up a friendly escort who would escort me through the export procedure (and nothing else!).

Regardless of the requirement for an escort for security purposes, the process of just getting the truck to where it needs to be would be near impossible for a novice like me without assistance. The process at Southampton could easily be undertaken by a terrorist with severe learning difficulties, but at Baltimore this was far from true, and I was glad to have someone with me to show me the ropes. After about an hour spent at the docks, and with the security, export and shipping processes completed, I left Jim in his designated spot, with the key in the ignition, and the cab door unlocked. If it was sad on the way out, it was doubly sad this time around, and I had a hard time walking away from Jim after I had spent every night of the last 320 days sleeping, cooking and resting in him.

As on the outbound journey, the fact that the truck was not completely empty caused no problems (although it remains to be seen whether UK customs and Excise will be satisfied), but unlike the outbound journey I was not permitted to ship the truck with a tank of propane on board. I suspect that if I'd declared the propane tank at Southampton, I would have been told to remove it, but at Baltimore I was not given the opportunity to send it across the pond. Consequently I donated an almost full bottle of propane to the escort company.

After waving goodbye to Jim, I cheered myself up with a huge crab po-boy from Jimmy's Famous Seafood near Dundalk docks, hired a minivan to take Naomi, Boris, me, two suitcases and a giant air crate to the airport with, and drove back to Washington.

The flight home followed much the same protocol as the shipping in that it was very similar to the outbound journey, just more complicated. Flying two humans and two suitcases from America to England is of course extremely simple, but when you add a dog into the equation it becomes a little more complicated and a lot more expensive. We were aware that up to ten days in advance of the flight we needed to get a certificate of health stamped by a vet, but until we spoke to a local vet we were not aware of the requirement to get the vet's stamp ratified by the United States Department of Agriculture in the relevant state's capital. If we had had the foresight to visit a vet in the Maryland portion of the Washington DC metropolis, we could have visited the USDA office in DC, but we made the mistake of visiting a vet in the part of the city in Virginia, necessitating a 330 mile round trip to Richmond. In addition we also had to get Boris dewormed at the vet, and get the appropriate page in his passport stamped accordingly. On top of the visits to the vets, the process of getting Virgin Cargo to clear him for flying involved a huge quantity of paperwork, partly to ensure that they would not be responsible if our dog was returned to America by the UK customs officers whilst we waited patiently for him at Heathrow Airport.

Naomi, Boris and me are now safely back in the UK, homeless, jobless and largely destitute, but enjoying the company of our friends and family. When I've had the chance to gather my thoughts I'll write some posts detailing what worked and what didn't with Jim, and summarizing the major costs, complications and considerations for anyone else planning a similar trip.