As largely expected, the Fraser trip turned out to be a comedy of errors. A week on Fraser isn't exactly a moon landing, yet there were still plenty of cock-ups.
Before we had even left (in fact the night before), I got a phone call from one of the guy's GFs to say that his flight back from Mt Isa had been at first delayed, then cancelled completely. Apparently some bird, the avian variety that is, got knocked for six on landing and they weren't going to take any chances. Given that Qantas has a maintenance record as impeccable as the Pajero, it was probably a wise move.
Even so, it threw a spanner in the works of the plan to do a very early morning drive up to Fraser to beat the heat. The drive takes a good 3 hours, or more. (Depending on how many breakdowns you have.) And being that the Pajero air-con had been replaced with EFI gear and a second alternator, I was keen to avoid the heat as much as possible.
The flight delay turned out to be quite handy, it gave us the opportunity to change the wheels over from mud tyres to more sand capable ones in natural light. That revealed that the lower ball-joint mount bolts had undone themselves. Later model Pajeros have some sort of retaining mechanism if something like that were to happen. The wheel will slap around like crazy but probably won't go Back to the Future on you. The early model Pajeros have nothing of the sort. If they fail you become a road condiment. Guess what we have.
The other issue was mystery fuel leak. Fuel was leaking from the fuel tank where the fuel sender and fuel lines enter the tank. It looked like it was seeping from the rubber seal around the sender unit, but the tank was now full for the drive up, and it would have required draining the tank to fix so we decided to ignore it. Later it turned out it was a broken hose clamp on the return line. Whoops.
Some mate of Greg's had turned up at the last minute and decided to go even though he was completely unprepared for a week on an island. (Other than that he had queued up a whole bunch of torrents to download while he was away.) I'll get to that later though.
The flight from Mt Isa had finally been rescheduled for a 12pm departure with a 2pm arrival which was cutting it pretty fucking close to catch the last ferry to Fraser at 5pm. We had already decided to go up in the morning anyway. If they made it, we'd be there waiting with cold beers in hand, if not they'd spend the night at Rainbow beach and catch the first Ferry over.
The drive up for us was almost uneventful. Constant 80s pop classics and the occasional game of guess the rattle, knock or grind. Somewhere before Gympie the Pajero started playing up. No power, huge flat spot at around 1/4 throttle. I pulled down a side road and popped the bonnet. It felt like an air leak, so we tightened a few loose inlet hoses and took a quick blast up and down the road. I very nearly ran straight through both lanes of Bruce Highway when the brakes pointed out the problem. It was the brake booster line that had come free. Probably should have checked that. I'm pretty sure my arse was clenched tighter than the callipers were while the Paj was running down that hill towards the highway.
With the brake booster line securely clamped, we headed off again with full power. And brakes. The official Pajero theme song was declared to be Livin' on a Prayer, but we did eventually make it to the barge.
Arriving on the island, the weather couldn't be much more perfect. Only a slight breeze. Not a cloud in the sky. Hot as hell. The island was packed to the rafters. Driving by the main draw card on the beach, Eli Creek, was like passing a private school at 8am. I've never seen so many 4wds in one spot, probably 200 or so and a smattering of Unimog-powered buses. We settled on a camp site a few kilometres north from there, just a few metres from the beach. We threw some tents up, inflated air-beds and got stuck into some serious drinking.
Luke and his misses arrived some time later, having made the barge with perhaps 20 minutes to spare. The only problem was one of the bolts retaining one of his rear shock absorbers hadn't. His arrival would have looked more at home in a Rodeo.
Some girl I work with had told me she would be on Fraser at the same time. And later in the night I went for a drunken wander up the beach, I recognised her car. As it turns out our camp-sites were only about 200 metres apart. It was New Years Eve, so I dropped in and said hello. Her friends were either dog ugly or blokes, and I can't stand her at the best of times, so I said my goodbyes pretty quickly. Despite the proximity I didn't bother to talk to her again the whole week.
Back at camp, we got a fire going. I'm sure there's a law against it, but to keep it as legal as possible we cooked up a curry in it. A madras even. The prep took a bit longer than expected, so the curry didn't actually arrive until after 1am. It was awesome though.
I was up the next morning after barely 4 hours sleep. It was stupidly hot already, even in a fairly breezy tent. The place was only going to get hotter, so we smashed out breakfast, and headed out.
The first place we got to was a lake, its name has completely escaped me. The lake wasn't particularly exciting at all, but it was full of turtles. They were everywhere. Despite the number of turtles and the fact it looked like a giant pool of turtle shit some tourist bird was swimming in it. Crazy Europeans. It was fucking hot by this stage though. I stuck to the cold beers to stay cool.
I handed the keys to the Paj to Greg's mate who had been hassling me to get behind the wheel. He kept getting it bogged and rode the clutch the entire time, but whatever. This way I could drink beers (more easily at least). When the stalling, bogging and being a driving instructor got old, I swapped into Jeep's passenger seat as it had air con. The ride in the Jeep is pretty horrible, way too much in the way of dampening or something. You feel everything, but the air-con made it bearable.
We headed back via the in-land roads to the main beach, then up to Eli Creek. The creek is fed by a massive spring, so the water coming out of it is cool and perfectly clear. The water flows surprisingly quickly, and winds around down to the ocean. Its depth and width vary quite a bit, but its usually about half a meter deep and a few metres wide. As it crosses the beach its a bit of a traffic hazard, especially late at night. Its hugely popular on hot days, and when we got there it was like parking at Indro shopping centre. All the length of the creek, except for the beach, groups of people had set up shade cloths and were sitting on camp chairs half under water and drinking beers. Others were further up sitting around in the shade of the trees with an esky floating beside them, dodging people floating down the creek on air mattresses, body boards and inner tubes. It is not a bad spot to hang out, there's just far too many kids.
The batteries supplying the inverter that runs the fridge weren't charging properly for some reason, so we decided to head back to camp to try sort that out. Cold beers were of high importance. On the way back Jeff who was still driving the Paj decided it would be cool to drive through a huge puddle of water at full speed. The problem was it was low tide, and the pool of water was salty. The Pajero immediately shut down. Everything in the engine bay, every connector, sensor and both alternators were soaked with salty water. Great move, Jeff. We snatched it forward out of the deeper stuff and set about individually disconnecting each and every plug and hitting everything with WD40. It took about 20 minutes of that before we could get it started again. I didn't let Jeff drive it again.
The next day the weather went south. The winds picked up and it rained on and off, and the temps dropped right off. The tiny $25 tents I had bought weren't exactly water-proof. While we were out all my bags got soaking wet. Awesome.
The rains had made a real mess of some of the inland roads, and even the beaches had twice as many washouts as normal. When beach driving at night you could expect several hard brakes from 80km/h to avoid doing an endo into a creek. The salt through all the electronics was a pain. Any time the engine bay got even the mildest splash of water something would shut-down. The fridge batteries were now almost completely useless, and the fridge would only run when the car was running. I'm not sure if we lost an alternator or not, but they simply wouldn't charge.
While driving to the Western beach via the in-land roads to collect crab pots a light splash from a puddle on the road caused the Pajero to come to a halt with about 5 massive backfires in row. It was pouring rain at the time, and some passing randoms helped us move it to a slightly less dangerous spot while we tried to dry out the engine. Not an easy task in heavy rain, and not exactly enjoyable conditions. The dizzy was a bit damp but while trying to remove it one of its retaining clips flew off into the bush, never to be seen again. Awesome. Another big dose of WD40 on everything and the car was moving again.
It was well and truly dark by the time we got back to camp and the others had progressed from amusement at our likely predicament to genuine concern and had been grabbing recovery gear and preparing to drive out to find us. The concern returned to amusement when we arrived, soaking wet, pissed off and hungry.
The rain continued to pelt down that night. Jeff as I had said was completely unprepared for camping. He had refused the offer of a spare sleeping bag back at Greg's place before we left. And as it turns out hadn't thought to pack anything but sleeveless t-shirts and shorts. He figured it would be hot. The pouring rain and strong winds made it quite freezing, even though he was in a dry tent. Apparently he gave up and slept in Jeep, he'd been getting on my nerves even before the salt water driving incident, so I had a bit of a smile on my face when I found out.
The next morning the rain had stopped, and though the clouds still looked menacing the sun was shinning as often as it wasn't. I had left my phone on charge on the back seat the day before. It had fallen down onto the floor of the car and as the Pajero isn't exactly water tight, when I found it it was completely submerged. I actually wasn't that upset over it, as I had been needing an excuse to upgrade, but the photos taken on the trip end there as a result. After removing all the vitals from the phone I could and giving it a proper burial, we made a trip back down towards the south of the island. We were all running pretty low on fuel by this stage and the wind had taken a lot of the beach with it. Even at low tide the drive was horrible on fuel, the sand being so soft, and the breaking waves making it a bit risky to drive along the thin strip of hard sand at the water line.
To try save a bit of fuel I turned in to one of the inland roads. We were heading to Lake Mackenzie, so we eventually had to go inland anyway. The inland roads are usually pretty rough, so what a lot of people do is drive out of the established tracks slightly to the right or left so that you run on the softer sand and hopefully avoid the corrugations, exposed roots and so forth. Its not especially safe, especially at speed, so you need to keep on the ball. If you drop a wheel back down into the tracks the car will rail road, unless you give it plenty of steering in the opposite direction.
Generally you try to stick to the tracks and just pull out of them when you see its about to get rough. You burn a bit more fuel driving on the softer sand, but because its a nicer ride you can generally hold a bit more speed. While coming down a sweeping left hander I was sticking just outside the tracks on the right hand side, when the rear inside wheel slipped off down into the outer track. That change in orientation pushed the front inside wheel down into the tracks. The angle the tyre hit the tracks pulled the wheel even more to the left and despite my attempts to pull it back it jumped the inside tracks and we went into the metre high sand embankment and came to a hard stop. Reversing out was making all kinds of horrible noises, body was rubbing on tyre.
I drove down the track a bit and out of the way to inspect the damage. Suspension hadn't been damaged, but the bull-bar had bent around collected the body and pushed the inner guard into the tyre. It wasn't close enough to seriously damage it, but would rub slightly on a slight left turn. The parker lens and bulb was smashed, but the indicator was fine.
I pulled the bar mostly straight by looping a snatch strap around a tree and onto the end of the bar. A couple of quick reverses and it was nearly back to normal. The impact had snapped the mounting bolts, so we had to tie it in place to stop it falling off. Greg found a hammer and knocked the panel away from the tyre.
In this time it took to do all this the Pajero had run out of fuel. We threw our last 20L canister of fuel in and drove on. We arrived at the lake with enough time to finish 2 beers each before the others arrived, I guess that's how long it takes when you want to avoid walls. We hung around at the lake long enough to get an eyeful of tourists (and fat bald dudes) then the rains returned. We headed back via a fuel station. For some reason they had brought in fuel rationing, no more than 30L a car and they had no diesel or premium. 30L wasn't really a lot. I also grabbed a pie, as any food that required refrigeration was now ruined due to the failure of the fridge. We could only keep beers cold by storing them in the freezer compartment. It wasn't all bad, I guess.
We headed straight back to camp. A good distance away to drive at least the tide was on its way out. We had to drive back through Eli Creek. All around the Island in the stores and ranger offices are photos of people getting themselves into trouble in it. Stalling, and their car getting buried in sand. I had always thought I was better than that. Unfortunately, the car was still hyper sensitive to water. We were quite a long way behind the others, so they didn't see us cross. (The Pajero had been losing power due to the fuel system clogging itself again.) I slowed right down to enter the creek, but about half way through the engine cut out. I hopped on the blower to get the others back to pull us out in case we couldn't start it. They were quite a while up the beach, and I don't think they realised that we had stopped in Eli Creek as it took them a couple of minutes to get back to us. The quick flowing water quickly started to dig out the sand around the tyres on the left hand side and the car started to put on a bit of a tilt. I would have been amazed to watch how quickly it happened, if it wasn't that I was experiencing a mix of anger, embarrassment and mild panic. The area around the creek was nowhere as busy as it had been days before, thankfully. Some Scottish tourist came over and offered his assistance, though I think it was more out of curiosity than any ability he might have had. After a few minutes of the WD40 routine, the car kicked back into life and I got out of there as quickly as possible.
When we got back I pulled out all the fuel rail gear and put a compressed air down the lines. That same horrible black shit was back for some reason, despite there being a fuel filter just before the fuel rail. When reassembled, the car was back to full power. I still have no idea where the black shit is coming from.
Thankfully, the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful even if the weather didn't improve. Meals became increasingly vegetarian as nobody wanted to risk the effects of dodgy meat when the nearest toilets were 10 minutes drive away. I refuse to shit in the bush as I'm no longer a practising Catholic.
The drive home itself lead to more comedy. The Pajero had only a quarter of a tank remaining, it was all 91 octane ULP. The beach was now completely soft sand, which loads up the motor a lot. The Gen2 Magna ECUs run knock sensors, but we didn't have one attached. The result was that we had to run in second gear the whole way back up the beach to try avoid loading the motor. Regardless, any patch of particularly soft sand and it'd knock like crazy. As you can imagine the fuel disappeared pretty quickly. The challenger was mostly in the same boat, though Luke's concern was more that he didn't have the power to cut through the soft stuff. By the time we made it to the in-land road that bypasses the now inaccessible beach pass, both cars were on E. The Jeep still had an 1/8th remaining. The bypass road is thankfully gravel, which is normally a pain due to the corrugations, but when running on fumes its a god send. Even so, the Pajero coughed to a halt no more than 2 km from the barge. The Challenger by now had the fuel light on, so we attempted to siphon fuel from the Jeep. Presumably this happened a lot to Jeep owners in the past (likely without permission) so some sort of anti-syphoning system was installed. Despite the fuel light, we tried the same on the Challenger. No goods there either. We were sizing up the fuel system in the Jeep for a way to pump out fuel there when out of the blue an RACQ bloke pulled up asking if we needed help. He gave us 10L of fuel for the mainland cost ($10) and off we went.
We had just got on the barge amazed out how lucky we had been when over walks the barge attendant to tell Scott that his trailing arm on the front drivers side was dragging. As in, his front diff was supported by a single trailing arm and a panhard rod. The bolt had either snapped or undone itself.
We managed to scavenge a 8mm bolt that at least held the arm in place, although the vibration was apparently quite noticeable even at low speeds. Given the original bolt was 12mm, its not really surprising. The bolt held till we got back to Rainbow Beach, where it was replaced with a brand new 10mm bolt, as that was the largest the hardware store had. Scott did manage to get back to Brisbane on 4 wheels though.
But yeah, fuck we're amateurs as this.
Before we had even left (in fact the night before), I got a phone call from one of the guy's GFs to say that his flight back from Mt Isa had been at first delayed, then cancelled completely. Apparently some bird, the avian variety that is, got knocked for six on landing and they weren't going to take any chances. Given that Qantas has a maintenance record as impeccable as the Pajero, it was probably a wise move.
Even so, it threw a spanner in the works of the plan to do a very early morning drive up to Fraser to beat the heat. The drive takes a good 3 hours, or more. (Depending on how many breakdowns you have.) And being that the Pajero air-con had been replaced with EFI gear and a second alternator, I was keen to avoid the heat as much as possible.
The flight delay turned out to be quite handy, it gave us the opportunity to change the wheels over from mud tyres to more sand capable ones in natural light. That revealed that the lower ball-joint mount bolts had undone themselves. Later model Pajeros have some sort of retaining mechanism if something like that were to happen. The wheel will slap around like crazy but probably won't go Back to the Future on you. The early model Pajeros have nothing of the sort. If they fail you become a road condiment. Guess what we have.
The other issue was mystery fuel leak. Fuel was leaking from the fuel tank where the fuel sender and fuel lines enter the tank. It looked like it was seeping from the rubber seal around the sender unit, but the tank was now full for the drive up, and it would have required draining the tank to fix so we decided to ignore it. Later it turned out it was a broken hose clamp on the return line. Whoops.
Some mate of Greg's had turned up at the last minute and decided to go even though he was completely unprepared for a week on an island. (Other than that he had queued up a whole bunch of torrents to download while he was away.) I'll get to that later though.
The flight from Mt Isa had finally been rescheduled for a 12pm departure with a 2pm arrival which was cutting it pretty fucking close to catch the last ferry to Fraser at 5pm. We had already decided to go up in the morning anyway. If they made it, we'd be there waiting with cold beers in hand, if not they'd spend the night at Rainbow beach and catch the first Ferry over.
The drive up for us was almost uneventful. Constant 80s pop classics and the occasional game of guess the rattle, knock or grind. Somewhere before Gympie the Pajero started playing up. No power, huge flat spot at around 1/4 throttle. I pulled down a side road and popped the bonnet. It felt like an air leak, so we tightened a few loose inlet hoses and took a quick blast up and down the road. I very nearly ran straight through both lanes of Bruce Highway when the brakes pointed out the problem. It was the brake booster line that had come free. Probably should have checked that. I'm pretty sure my arse was clenched tighter than the callipers were while the Paj was running down that hill towards the highway.
With the brake booster line securely clamped, we headed off again with full power. And brakes. The official Pajero theme song was declared to be Livin' on a Prayer, but we did eventually make it to the barge.
Luke and his misses arrived some time later, having made the barge with perhaps 20 minutes to spare. The only problem was one of the bolts retaining one of his rear shock absorbers hadn't. His arrival would have looked more at home in a Rodeo.
Some girl I work with had told me she would be on Fraser at the same time. And later in the night I went for a drunken wander up the beach, I recognised her car. As it turns out our camp-sites were only about 200 metres apart. It was New Years Eve, so I dropped in and said hello. Her friends were either dog ugly or blokes, and I can't stand her at the best of times, so I said my goodbyes pretty quickly. Despite the proximity I didn't bother to talk to her again the whole week.
Back at camp, we got a fire going. I'm sure there's a law against it, but to keep it as legal as possible we cooked up a curry in it. A madras even. The prep took a bit longer than expected, so the curry didn't actually arrive until after 1am. It was awesome though.
I was up the next morning after barely 4 hours sleep. It was stupidly hot already, even in a fairly breezy tent. The place was only going to get hotter, so we smashed out breakfast, and headed out.
The first place we got to was a lake, its name has completely escaped me. The lake wasn't particularly exciting at all, but it was full of turtles. They were everywhere. Despite the number of turtles and the fact it looked like a giant pool of turtle shit some tourist bird was swimming in it. Crazy Europeans. It was fucking hot by this stage though. I stuck to the cold beers to stay cool.
I handed the keys to the Paj to Greg's mate who had been hassling me to get behind the wheel. He kept getting it bogged and rode the clutch the entire time, but whatever. This way I could drink beers (more easily at least). When the stalling, bogging and being a driving instructor got old, I swapped into Jeep's passenger seat as it had air con. The ride in the Jeep is pretty horrible, way too much in the way of dampening or something. You feel everything, but the air-con made it bearable.
The batteries supplying the inverter that runs the fridge weren't charging properly for some reason, so we decided to head back to camp to try sort that out. Cold beers were of high importance. On the way back Jeff who was still driving the Paj decided it would be cool to drive through a huge puddle of water at full speed. The problem was it was low tide, and the pool of water was salty. The Pajero immediately shut down. Everything in the engine bay, every connector, sensor and both alternators were soaked with salty water. Great move, Jeff. We snatched it forward out of the deeper stuff and set about individually disconnecting each and every plug and hitting everything with WD40. It took about 20 minutes of that before we could get it started again. I didn't let Jeff drive it again.
The next day the weather went south. The winds picked up and it rained on and off, and the temps dropped right off. The tiny $25 tents I had bought weren't exactly water-proof. While we were out all my bags got soaking wet. Awesome.
The rains had made a real mess of some of the inland roads, and even the beaches had twice as many washouts as normal. When beach driving at night you could expect several hard brakes from 80km/h to avoid doing an endo into a creek. The salt through all the electronics was a pain. Any time the engine bay got even the mildest splash of water something would shut-down. The fridge batteries were now almost completely useless, and the fridge would only run when the car was running. I'm not sure if we lost an alternator or not, but they simply wouldn't charge.
While driving to the Western beach via the in-land roads to collect crab pots a light splash from a puddle on the road caused the Pajero to come to a halt with about 5 massive backfires in row. It was pouring rain at the time, and some passing randoms helped us move it to a slightly less dangerous spot while we tried to dry out the engine. Not an easy task in heavy rain, and not exactly enjoyable conditions. The dizzy was a bit damp but while trying to remove it one of its retaining clips flew off into the bush, never to be seen again. Awesome. Another big dose of WD40 on everything and the car was moving again.
It was well and truly dark by the time we got back to camp and the others had progressed from amusement at our likely predicament to genuine concern and had been grabbing recovery gear and preparing to drive out to find us. The concern returned to amusement when we arrived, soaking wet, pissed off and hungry.
The rain continued to pelt down that night. Jeff as I had said was completely unprepared for camping. He had refused the offer of a spare sleeping bag back at Greg's place before we left. And as it turns out hadn't thought to pack anything but sleeveless t-shirts and shorts. He figured it would be hot. The pouring rain and strong winds made it quite freezing, even though he was in a dry tent. Apparently he gave up and slept in Jeep, he'd been getting on my nerves even before the salt water driving incident, so I had a bit of a smile on my face when I found out.
The next morning the rain had stopped, and though the clouds still looked menacing the sun was shinning as often as it wasn't. I had left my phone on charge on the back seat the day before. It had fallen down onto the floor of the car and as the Pajero isn't exactly water tight, when I found it it was completely submerged. I actually wasn't that upset over it, as I had been needing an excuse to upgrade, but the photos taken on the trip end there as a result. After removing all the vitals from the phone I could and giving it a proper burial, we made a trip back down towards the south of the island. We were all running pretty low on fuel by this stage and the wind had taken a lot of the beach with it. Even at low tide the drive was horrible on fuel, the sand being so soft, and the breaking waves making it a bit risky to drive along the thin strip of hard sand at the water line.
To try save a bit of fuel I turned in to one of the inland roads. We were heading to Lake Mackenzie, so we eventually had to go inland anyway. The inland roads are usually pretty rough, so what a lot of people do is drive out of the established tracks slightly to the right or left so that you run on the softer sand and hopefully avoid the corrugations, exposed roots and so forth. Its not especially safe, especially at speed, so you need to keep on the ball. If you drop a wheel back down into the tracks the car will rail road, unless you give it plenty of steering in the opposite direction.
Generally you try to stick to the tracks and just pull out of them when you see its about to get rough. You burn a bit more fuel driving on the softer sand, but because its a nicer ride you can generally hold a bit more speed. While coming down a sweeping left hander I was sticking just outside the tracks on the right hand side, when the rear inside wheel slipped off down into the outer track. That change in orientation pushed the front inside wheel down into the tracks. The angle the tyre hit the tracks pulled the wheel even more to the left and despite my attempts to pull it back it jumped the inside tracks and we went into the metre high sand embankment and came to a hard stop. Reversing out was making all kinds of horrible noises, body was rubbing on tyre.
I drove down the track a bit and out of the way to inspect the damage. Suspension hadn't been damaged, but the bull-bar had bent around collected the body and pushed the inner guard into the tyre. It wasn't close enough to seriously damage it, but would rub slightly on a slight left turn. The parker lens and bulb was smashed, but the indicator was fine.
I pulled the bar mostly straight by looping a snatch strap around a tree and onto the end of the bar. A couple of quick reverses and it was nearly back to normal. The impact had snapped the mounting bolts, so we had to tie it in place to stop it falling off. Greg found a hammer and knocked the panel away from the tyre.
In this time it took to do all this the Pajero had run out of fuel. We threw our last 20L canister of fuel in and drove on. We arrived at the lake with enough time to finish 2 beers each before the others arrived, I guess that's how long it takes when you want to avoid walls. We hung around at the lake long enough to get an eyeful of tourists (and fat bald dudes) then the rains returned. We headed back via a fuel station. For some reason they had brought in fuel rationing, no more than 30L a car and they had no diesel or premium. 30L wasn't really a lot. I also grabbed a pie, as any food that required refrigeration was now ruined due to the failure of the fridge. We could only keep beers cold by storing them in the freezer compartment. It wasn't all bad, I guess.
We headed straight back to camp. A good distance away to drive at least the tide was on its way out. We had to drive back through Eli Creek. All around the Island in the stores and ranger offices are photos of people getting themselves into trouble in it. Stalling, and their car getting buried in sand. I had always thought I was better than that. Unfortunately, the car was still hyper sensitive to water. We were quite a long way behind the others, so they didn't see us cross. (The Pajero had been losing power due to the fuel system clogging itself again.) I slowed right down to enter the creek, but about half way through the engine cut out. I hopped on the blower to get the others back to pull us out in case we couldn't start it. They were quite a while up the beach, and I don't think they realised that we had stopped in Eli Creek as it took them a couple of minutes to get back to us. The quick flowing water quickly started to dig out the sand around the tyres on the left hand side and the car started to put on a bit of a tilt. I would have been amazed to watch how quickly it happened, if it wasn't that I was experiencing a mix of anger, embarrassment and mild panic. The area around the creek was nowhere as busy as it had been days before, thankfully. Some Scottish tourist came over and offered his assistance, though I think it was more out of curiosity than any ability he might have had. After a few minutes of the WD40 routine, the car kicked back into life and I got out of there as quickly as possible.
When we got back I pulled out all the fuel rail gear and put a compressed air down the lines. That same horrible black shit was back for some reason, despite there being a fuel filter just before the fuel rail. When reassembled, the car was back to full power. I still have no idea where the black shit is coming from.
Thankfully, the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful even if the weather didn't improve. Meals became increasingly vegetarian as nobody wanted to risk the effects of dodgy meat when the nearest toilets were 10 minutes drive away. I refuse to shit in the bush as I'm no longer a practising Catholic.
The drive home itself lead to more comedy. The Pajero had only a quarter of a tank remaining, it was all 91 octane ULP. The beach was now completely soft sand, which loads up the motor a lot. The Gen2 Magna ECUs run knock sensors, but we didn't have one attached. The result was that we had to run in second gear the whole way back up the beach to try avoid loading the motor. Regardless, any patch of particularly soft sand and it'd knock like crazy. As you can imagine the fuel disappeared pretty quickly. The challenger was mostly in the same boat, though Luke's concern was more that he didn't have the power to cut through the soft stuff. By the time we made it to the in-land road that bypasses the now inaccessible beach pass, both cars were on E. The Jeep still had an 1/8th remaining. The bypass road is thankfully gravel, which is normally a pain due to the corrugations, but when running on fumes its a god send. Even so, the Pajero coughed to a halt no more than 2 km from the barge. The Challenger by now had the fuel light on, so we attempted to siphon fuel from the Jeep. Presumably this happened a lot to Jeep owners in the past (likely without permission) so some sort of anti-syphoning system was installed. Despite the fuel light, we tried the same on the Challenger. No goods there either. We were sizing up the fuel system in the Jeep for a way to pump out fuel there when out of the blue an RACQ bloke pulled up asking if we needed help. He gave us 10L of fuel for the mainland cost ($10) and off we went.
We had just got on the barge amazed out how lucky we had been when over walks the barge attendant to tell Scott that his trailing arm on the front drivers side was dragging. As in, his front diff was supported by a single trailing arm and a panhard rod. The bolt had either snapped or undone itself.
We managed to scavenge a 8mm bolt that at least held the arm in place, although the vibration was apparently quite noticeable even at low speeds. Given the original bolt was 12mm, its not really surprising. The bolt held till we got back to Rainbow Beach, where it was replaced with a brand new 10mm bolt, as that was the largest the hardware store had. Scott did manage to get back to Brisbane on 4 wheels though.
But yeah, fuck we're amateurs as this.
2009-01-06 00:53:55 ( 1 Comments )
2009-01-07 15:03:57 by hlohan
pumping up air mattress via exhaust = mind blown
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