Merry Christmas!

To ease the boredom of being stuck for another few days at an interstate intersection, we hired a car for a couple of days.

Yesterday was spent visiting Savannah, about 70 miles north of Brunswick up the I-95. We only spent the day there but it seems to have more to offer than you can see in a day. It's a grand colonial city that obviously generated a lot of income for the empire in the 18th century. The squares and parks are reminiscent of central London squares like Grosvenor and Russell square, and there is a large area which looks largely as it must have done 200 years ago. The city feels distinctly cosmopolitan compared to the other parts of Georgia that we've seen so far, it's difficult to imagine sushi restaurants and fixie bikes in Brunswick. There's a lot to see, but if all you do in Savannah is go to Leopold's Ice Cream, you won't be disappointed.

Christmas day was spent visiting St Simons Island and Blythe Island Regional Park, mostly walking on the beach and in the sub tropical forest prevalent here. Sadly the temperature has dropped from about 26C last week, to about 10C this week, still warm enough to spend time outside, but certainly not warm enough to be sunbathing on the beach.

I hope everyone else had a great Christmas, with any luck my next blog post will be from the comfort of Jim.

Still Waiting...

I was hoping that my next blog post would be about how we spent Christmas day parked on the beach, drinking wine on Jim's veranda. Sadly this isn't going to happen; the boat carrying Jim was delayed again and despite Jim now being in Brunswick, the port is now shut until the 26th and so the earliest we will be able collect him is Thursday.

To save some money we dropped off the hire car, and so for the last 5 days we've been limited to a walking distance radius from the interstate intersection that we're staying on. On the plus side, we have a multitude of fine establishments to experience within a half mile radius, including two burger chains, two sub/sandwich chains, a fried chicken chain, two BBQ chains, a seafood chain, a pancake chain, five gas stations minimarkets, and six motel/hotel chains.

To save more money we've downgraded from a $70/night hotel, to a $40/night motel. Merry bloody Christmas!

YeeHaw!

It's been a crazy few weeks, full of stress and excitement, and also some moments of unimaginable boredom.

The weeks running up towards putting Jim on a ship, involved putting lots of finishing touches to the interior, including blinds, cushions, curtains, , a mattress, hooks, a bin, a plastic bag holder, subwoofer grill bars, soap dispensers, shoe racks, a floor rug, a door matt, a toilet roll holder, a kitchen roll holder, and a washing line. In addition I installed the fresh water tank and two waste tanks, installed and calibrated the senders in each tank, and installed electric dump valves to each of the waste tanks. There were several items on my 'to-do list' which ultimately never got completed, but there was no mad rush to finish off critical systems at the last minute.

With such a multitude of changes having been installed since I last gave Jim any serious use, it was obviously important that we had a proper shakedown run to make sure that we could identify any problems and fix them before the big trip. With this in mind, we took the decision to spend one night in the truck on Bournemouth sea front before driving to the docks the next morning. Let it not be said that we aren't meticulous in planning and preparation!

Thankfully no major problems showed up; the beer was cold, the oven was hot, we were warm in bed, and we got to our destination without breaking down.

Spare Tyre Carrier

Heavy commercial vehicles in the UK rarely carry spare tyres these days, and if they do, they rarely have the tools to change them if the get a puncture. A mounted tyre on a 22.5 inch rim is upwards of 100Kg and so it is more cost effective for haulage operators to use the weight capacity for paying cargo, and accept an infrequent cost for roadside assistance from a mobile tyre fitter. It's possible to have a new tyre on your truck in less than an hour almost anywhere on the UK mainland and so it's not worth the cost of carrying the tyre around, and the risk to employees of having to change it by the side of the road. Consequently when Jim was passed into my care, he had no spare tyre.

Even in the UK, I prefer the idea of being self sufficient, but with plans to drive far into Central America, I do not like the prospect of having to wait for days by the side of the road for a suitably equipped tyre fitter to come past. It wads therefore fairly important that I got a spare tyre, and found somewhere to put it, before the truck gets dropped at Southampton docks next week.

The most common place to fit a spare tyre on a heavy rigid, is either under the chassis just in front of the back wheels, or mounted centrally behind the back wheels. Jim's wheelbase is fairly short, and so once I had fitted the generator and auxiliary fuel tank there was no space on the chassis rails for a spare. In addition the overhang at the back is very short, sand so there is no space behind the back wheels either.



This left me with a few options, mostly ideas pilfered from large expedition vehicles. The simplest option seemed to be to mount the tyre on the roof of the cab. I would only have had to mount a platform on the roof of the cab using the threaded mounting points provided by Mercedes from the factory, and fitted a simple swinging arm and chain block to get the wheel up and down. I quickly decided against this option due to the additional weight on the cab mountings. The cab is already far heavier than intended due to the all the armour plating from it's life as a Brinks truck, and so I wanted to avoid putting more stress on the cab hinges and the hydraulic tilt system. In addition, the front axle is rated at 5 tonnes less than the rear, and so putting the weight so far forward isn't preferable. For the same reason I discounted the option of mounting the tyre on a bull bar type bumper.

The roof of the box body is almost completely covered by hatches and solar panels and so mounting the tyre on top of the living accommodation was impossible. In addition, at 2.5m wide, Jim is already a handful on narrow roads and so mounting the tyre on the side of the body would have been absurd. This left me with finding a way to mount the tyre at the rear of the truck.

Bloody Insurance

I hate the general bureaucracy that comes with owning possessions in the modern world, but the last few weeks have really got my goat. Amongst other things that we've had to cancel, change or create, have been: Bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, human vaccinations, pet vaccinations, water accounts, gas accounts, electric accounts, landline accounts, broadband accounts, mobile phone accounts, house insurance, pet insurance, shipping insurance and truck insurance.

Most have been relatively straight forward, but I'm struggling with getting Jim insured for our travels in the US, Canada and Mexico. There are a number of bureaucratic issues with getting insurance for Jim in the US, the primary ones being:

1. Jim is not registered in a US state
2. Mercedes Atego 1823s do not come up on insurers lists of American RVs and when they do a web search they find lots of pictures of flatbeds, beavertails, box trucks and tippers.
3. I do not have an American address to register the policy at.

A few companies seem to be able to insure a foreign registered vehicle, including Thum, Poli Seek and Progressive, but it seems that only Thum are able to do it without a US mailing address. Too bad because their quote was over $6,000 for a year.

My Apologies

I apologise for the extremely scant blogging recently. Here's a short video as compensation, the first time I've used my new GoPro camera: thanks Leigh!

Storage Space

Despite Jim being considerably bigger than most European motorhomes, the space inside is still fairly small, especially when compared to some of the huge trucks and coaches you see at Teknivals and on traveller sites. I have so far managed to squeeze in seating for five people, a full size double bed, a bathroom with a shower, sink and toilet, and will soon have a kitchen with a fridge, oven, hob, and sink; however one thing that I can foresee a shortage of is storage space.

The garage/boot area under the bed is pretty sizable, but it's only really suitable for items like chairs, spare parts, recovery gear, tools and other general items which are rarely used, or only used outside. I don't think that Naomi would appreciate having to jump out of the truck, walk around the back, drop the taillift, and unlock and open the doors, to be able to get a change of underwear each morning, or get a teabag. I therefore need to find space inside the main body of Jim for all the items we'll use day-to-day.

With the bedroom largely finished, I was left with a space approximately 50cm wide, between the back wall of the bathroom, and the front wall of the bedroom on the offside of the truck. It's not a very wide space, but at 75cm deep, and the full 1.83m height inside Jim, the volume is fairly sizable.

As with all space in Jim, it would be too simple to use it for one purpose. To make my life slightly more difficult, I decided to fit an air conditioner in the bottom of the space. The air conditioner is a Dometic HB2500 and is designed to be floor mounted, discharging heat and condensate through holes cut in the floor. The first job was to cut the necessary holes, giving me another opportunity to play with the plasma cutter.

I then fitted the retaining straps which hold the air conditioning unit to the floor, and ran a mains AC power feed to the back of the space. The air conditioner uses about 900w at full power in cooling mode (more when heating); this means that most of the time it can only be used when plugged into the mains, or running off the generator. The inverter is just about powerful enough to keep up with air conditioner, so in extreme weather, I should be able to run this unit off the inverter whilst we are driving to assist the cab air conditioner in cooling the space down.

I could then install the air conditioner, and run the ducting up the back of the storage space. I had originally planned to use the space as a wardrobe with fixed drawers in part of the space, but the depth would have made it difficult to use, and so I ended up deciding on drawers. This had the advantage of not needing the pipes to be boxed in, as they wouldn't be exposed.

I screwed together a box for the air conditioner; it can be taken apart in a few seconds if I ever need to get to the unit for repairs. The grill at the front is for the intake air and is just a piece of stainless punched sheet fixed to the back of the laminated plywood.

I had originally ordered some 90 degree elbows to help fit the unit in the tight space that I had, but I ended up not needing them. One of the ducts kinked slightly so I may end up using them in the future, but as you can see it worked fine without them.

I forgot to order any clips for the ducting. Not wanting to waste time ordering and waiting for them, I cut something suitable out of plywood offcuts, they work very well and are probably more rigid than anything I could have bought off the shelf.