Pinky promise, next post is not revolving around fixing our van – Pt.3

You might want to skip towards the end, if you don’t care about car stuff, just FYI…

Is that… Jesus? Nope, just a Deception Bay resident going for a morning walk with his dog. He’s a good buoy. Well, in my last update it appeared we found someone to help us fix and to tell us everything about our car that could need fixing someday, buuut overnight this turned up.

Agh. No clue where this comes from now. With the engine previously bathed in oil, coolant and power steering fluid, it was impossible to determine where this came from. Well, at least there was a glimpse of hope that all the smeary stuff finally gave in to gravity while the newly topped up fluids are keeping to themselves. But well, our van hasn’t got the track record for us to hope for the best. We decided to spool down a few km’s and checked it up again. After all, we want to do at least 500km’s with our new timing chain before being comfortable with going long distance.

At the laundromat. Waiting for the machines to finish, we strolled around. I would have thought that in a country where the majority of people appears to be christian, more shops would be closed on a sunday, but apparently that’s just a fad of my homecountry. While getting groceries we spotted an auto parts store, and since our drivers side speaker was blown out we got a pair of new ones. Damn it, that’s why I hate shopping. In the end of the day, you don’t know where all the money went.

The door panel came off quite easily, and finally seeing the speaker, it definitely had been time for them to get replaced.

Seriously Mitsubishi, did you pull these out of the ruins of Hiroshima??

Those plugs arent standard, and neither are the wire colours.

Also, the old speakers had a a very obscure 6.5″ mount opposed to the industry standard of 6″. Duh. This was supposed to be a quick timekiller while waiting for the laundry. After arguing if we should just return the speakers because nothing seemed to fit, we gutted the mounts of the old speakers for some improvised washers.

Laundry was done and dry for hours and we were still fiddling with our speakers. And somehow, this up there snuck up to us.

Just in time we threw our camping table with half of our front doors on it into the back of our car like a stretcher into an ambulance and hid under a canvas roof in anticipation of a hailstorm.

We probably waited for 40 minutes or longer with scratchy, bulky door panels on our laps until we finally decided to find some kind of roof to at least get our car into a state that would allow us to sleep. Naturally, shortly after we found a suitable spot, the sun came back out again.

The fitted new speaker, sitting tightly between our improvised triangular washers.

Molded into the plastic plug, we found quite normal clamp-type connectors. Albeit not industry standard (as it seems to be with every single detail of the original sound system), with a bit of plier action they now sit tightly.

Since the new speakers have small, integrated tweeters sticking out we had to cut out the plastic grid supporting the metal mesh. The mesh neatly hides all of the jagged cuts. This is what I call masterful sloppywork. Works fantastically and looks shitty, but only if you take off the cover. We still had some last tweaks to do, but since the sun was setting we hastily bolted it all back on and drove off into the suburbs.

Thats were we stumbled onto the Kangaroo fight club. Those two sadly only started boxing after moving out of the light, otherwise there would be a video for you to enjoy. Standing roughly 1,7m tall and packed with bulging muscles, we didn’t dare to get close.

Look, a swimming campervan!

Did I mention there was some work left? Well, I lied. There was tons of it. When disassembling the doors for our speaker job, we noticed that the protective foil was broken and in dire need of being patched up, also our new speakers were putting out suspiciously little base even after adjusting the equalizer.

Gaffer tape is your friend.

Reading around on the forums I quickly found the reason for the lack of base: A set of tweeters below the dashboard, wired in parallel to the door speakers. The original set of speakers was (hopefully) kind of adjusted to each other so the tweeters would take the high pitches and the door speakers the lower sounds. If you throw in a new speaker which had integrated tweeters (which are, again, adjusted to each other), a ridiculously high amount of power is put into the higher pitches by both speakers. In this case, the tweeters had already been replaced by someone who obviously was in the need of hearing aids (pun intended), otherwise he would have at least unplugged the door speakers. I was kinda sad to unplug these since they are decent, but to put them to use we would probably have to rewire them to the rear speaker cables, that wouldn’t be worth it. Why? Because now, with full power, the new door speakers are splendid. We also noticed that the rear speakers are still working, but sadly, they are muffled by the mattress and storage boxes, we would only be able to use them when sitting on the rear edge of the car with the boxes out.

The head unit equalizer has got 13 bands to adjust. I may come off as an audiophile, but I’m not that much of an audiophile. Again, a strange choice of radio from the previous owners when looking at the shoddy speaker setup. If you’ve made it this far into the post, congratulations! You’ve managed to get past the boring fiddling-with-the-car-part, we’re finally back on the road (for now).

Finally we got out to some dirt tracks. Wild horses included. Definitely better than wild cattle, because those have a track record of blocking the road and trying to lick our car.

Pothole spotting duty. In case anyone with a badge asks, this was all on private ground! Prove me wrong!

Testing the waters. 0.6 Flip-Flops. I guess that a level of 1.8 Flip-Flops will get our stuff in the back wet, fording depth for the engine may be 2.5 Flip-Flops. Honestly, I don’t want to find out.

Felt incredibly scary, and looks absolutely ridiculous on film. But here’s our first fording experience, and I’m already sure that I will never be grow fond of possibly submerging my home on wheels.

Reminds me: I still hope to learn to ride properly…

Now were in the kids corner of a public library, scrounging for wifi and power. The car seems to be kinda sorted out as there was no more spillage, now we can slowly start to look for a job…