Monday 28 September 2009

Waiting...

Still waiting for the Landy to come back from it's major service before we push the big red button called 'point of no return'...

Tuesday 22 September 2009

Landy Service

Our Landy is going back to Church Road Motors in Barnes for a major service tomorrow. The guys there did a great job on welding the rear cross member so we are making use of their services again. Many areas of the vehicle are still a black box to us. We didn't get a service history with the vehicle (well, one that can be backed up with receipts) so we are going to for a major service on brakes, steering, fluids, shocks, cam belts, wheel alignment, gearbox, transfer box...

In doing some minor servicing ourselves we realise now how long it takes to do things yourself. Its definitely more fun doing things yourself but for speed and quality of workmanship we are handing our landy over to the pro's.

Monday 21 September 2009

The route...version 105

So three months and counting till we fly home. WOW, time has really flown.

To give the family and friends a rough idea of our time scale:

January 2010: South Africa, Botswana, Zambia

February 2010: Malawi, Tanzania

March 2010: Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya

April 2010: Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt

The rest is TBC...but here is a rough idea:

May 2010: Jordan, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Greece

June 2010: Albania, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Italy, France, Switzerland,

July 2010: Germany, Netherlands, Antwerp, Belgium, France, UK

...a new and much prettier addition to the team :)

Ally finally gets an invite to the blog!! Hmm, I see we will have to work on communication.

Sunday 20 September 2009

Rust treatment




The door sills of the Landy are badly rusted. Here's is our brief process to treat the rust and paint.

We purchased some wire brushes and abrasive sanding disks. A couple of hours grinding down the rust leaves you with a good surface to clean with solvent. Let this dry then apply metal ready products. We gave the surfaces a liberal coating of the amazing POR15 product. Then some primer on top and finally green paint. We have been struggling to find the right paint colour. Our landy's paint codes don't match the colour so we are not sure what to do next. As the rust treated area will mostly be covered by rubber sills we have decided to live with the dark green paint I bought. Its not close to our colour but we needed to get moving with the treatment so on goes the dark green.

A week after performing this treatment we noticed some of the green didn't bond well in certain areas. This was because we didn't allow the primer to completely dry. Good lesson - don't rush the job. It only cost you time later to do the job properly.