I believe every single post on this thread has giving very valuable advice & survival items/techniques suggestions which I personally love.
I’m gonna be praying for you and of course sending you positive vibes…
1000% excited to follow this journey with you, if its on here, YouTube or some other media form.
Loving this whole idea, mindset & challenge.
Regardless of how much you plan & bring along gear to be prepared for the worst scenarios, shit is gonna happen brother. Just be aware of it & adapt accordingly… Stay safe
May be an idea to bring a fishing pole “just in case” you need an alternative reason to be in questionable areas, you could use this as a excuse to be passing through.
Man I worry WAYYY too much cause my list would be insane haha. From a thin rain coat, to having “Tire Foam” for punctured car tires…
The gear is very slowly starting to trickle in. This really isn’t the kind of adventure gear I’m used to, but it’s awesome and feels like Christmas. The winch and bumpers will be my next purchases in the next week or two. This month and next the focus is on reliability and recovery. Then, after that, suspension, snorkel, roof rack, and then all the other odds and ends. I’m going to install the radiator myself to save money; I’ve got the time and it’s an easy job.
The hi-lift Jack is on the left, traction boards in the middle, and the radiator and hoses on the right.
I ordered a good chunk of my tools for the trip; they’ll arrive Friday.
The timeline is going well. I can already tell that if I want to keep my September hard time, budgeting and prioritizing are going to be essential. There are so many more incidentals than I imagined… which is a quite ironic segue to my next thing… I’m ordering 2021 Mexican Grand Prix tickets as soon as they go on sale. I’d like to invite anyone who wants to join.
Things are moving forward very well. This is definitely going forward!
Good news! Most of the tools for the trip have arrived. I’m not going to get many more, but there are still quite a few I need. But, the bulk of tool purchasing is done. I’m struggling to figure out how to carry/organize them in a bag or in the car.
Now for the bad news. The first mechanic I used for the brakes botched it and I have to have that redone. Then, mechanic I was using for the electrical isn’t going to be able to do it. He recommended a more specialized shop. But, now for the silver living. There’s a local shop that works on Suzuki Samurais called Petroworks. I’d had issues with them in the past (they caused this electrical issue I’ve been chasing for years), but there’s new ownership and all new people, so I’m going to be having them build it. It’s going to make it so, so much easier.
I’d personally use a “hockey bag” of sorts, stack all my car fixing tools & fluids in it, inside the trunk. I like having a “Bag” filled with items for a specific task. Beats having to search through a truck of non organized random bags looking for that 1 item ya need lol
I pulled a near all-nighter last night working on the electrical system. I’ve been able to eliminate 90% of the backfiring / lack of spark by tracing wiring and making sure contact points are clean and that things are securely fastened. It’s interesting, because it gives me the feeling or indication that it’s something relatively minor, but then also, on the flip side, because everything electric I do seems to make the problem a bit better, maybe the issue is a combination of weak contact points or weak grounds throughout the entire system? If that’s the case, is a new wiring harness needed?
Either way, it’s big progress.
Those pop tops are such cool vehicles. It’d honestly be pretty ideal for me. I think a lot about doing the van-dwelling life. Ironically, though, this seems like the worst country to do the van life thing. How long did you have yours for?
Absolutely! Each of those is a must, though I’m starting to have concerns about space. I’m going to have a get a roof rack so I can store the fluids more out of the way. I usually carry spare fluids with me on just normal drives and even then, they take up an amazing amount of space.
Fucking tell me about it! There’s a leak around the master cylinder. It was one of the parts they replaced, so either the part is bad or they installed it poorly. The reason I paid to have it done in the first place is I have a hernia at the moment that makes that kind of work challenging, and I don’t have another person to bleed the brakes here. At least the master cylinder is a cheap, easy to swap out part. Mechanics are gettin pretty bad, though.
That’s exactly the kind of setup I want, a large but flexible bag/case. Do you think a hockey bag is strong enough? The tools are a good 50 or sounds pounds. In the military, in the field, tools are often rolled up in these roll-up carriers. That was my second idea, a fabric strip with pockets that can be rolled into a spiral. Anything that’s not a hard shell case. I’ll check out Craigslist for hockey type bags.
I think regardless of the solution we end up at, we can all agree that a hard shell would take too much space and just having all the tools in a giant pile would make them unusable to the point of ill-utility. I counted last night and my tool kit will be around 320 pieces when it’s done.
Holy shit that kind of stuff makes me nostalgic. I’m not sure why, but I feel like my trip isn’t going to be that magic and special because I feel like the world isn’t magical and special anymore. I can’t imagine overlanding back when it was such a fringe thing.
The aussies are crazy about overlanding, definitely the craziest of the developed countries in terms of interest. A lot of rigs in the Bush look single purposely built for it; I remember hearing that there are like 1,000 mile of stretches of Australia without gas, services, and good roads.
Yes. Soft shell for tools is a great idea. One To place socket wrench tool kit🔧& another one for others. Ect
The large hockey bag wouldn’t necessarily be for carrying all the tools at once, (probably too heavy to carry that way) more of a storage place while In the truck and to litterly keep people seeing what your carrying on board
I grew up on the Leyland brothers, classic stuff! They are almost as infamous as Alby Mangels’s world safari series where every episode his bikini clad co-host was a different girl and years later it was revealed he never even left Australia and lied about his locations… what a legend.
Excellent news! I’ve surmounted, literally, the biggest obstacle in all of this: I got my vehicle registered. Anyone who lives in CA with an old car knows just how difficult it is to deal with emissions and regulations out here. I could have literally spent months and thousands chasing tiny details trying to get it to pass. I got lucky!
I also replaced all the worn vacuum hoses/lines. And cleaned all the electrical leads. It made a huge difference. In just the last couple days I’ve had it, the difference is night and day. I’m still losing spark at the top of the rev range, but I got at least an extra 1k of WOT rpm out of everything.
And here’s a pictures of the blank canvas that is the engine bay. This is a picture of default, baseline.
and of course sending you positive vibes…
you could use this as a excuse to be passing through.
