Merry Christmas Everyone

Merry Christmas everyone and a happy new year.

A quick update, Tracey and I have sold
the Patrol an have purchased a Toyota Landcruiser 76 Series Wagon. V8 power should sort the towing duties out.

We take delivery of the wagon in Feb 2010, so just a little wait!!! I will update with some photos of the new tug when we get it.

Cheers for now!!!

At the MotoGP

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Qualifying today and the shot taken is at turn 1. The weather has been wet but has cleared up for the events over the last couple of days.

Cowes Caravan Park

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A quick shot of the caravan park we are staying at.

Made it to Phillip Island

Arrived at the Island just after lunch today. In true island fasion the weather is cold and blustery. The attached shot is at the Cowes Caravan Park.

Nearly to Melbourne.

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We have travelled about 1600klm up till now and we are about 50klm from the Victoria border. This is our lttle camp spot on the Newell Highway. Push into Melbourne tomorrow and onto Phillip Island. Very very windy today the radar on the BOM website says it's 35klm/h.

On the way to Phillip Island for the MotoGP

We are at Coonabarabran on the way to the MotoGP. At a caravan park that is nice and quiet.

Brisbane in a blanket of dust.

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Brisvegas as seen from my office window after a dust storm rolled in mid morning. This is looking toward the Storey Bridge.

Patrol at the doctors.

Well we had a second opinion on the tuning of the patrol yesterday and it was not good! The dyno indicated that the air fuel mixture was lacking and that can be one of two things, the fuel pump or the turbo! Both expensive! :-(

The car is at Northside 4X4 at the moment to have the fuel pump pulled out and checked over. Hoping that it is a simple fix, so fingers crossed it all turns out. We are also going to get a water to air intercooler fitted at the same time. The new intercooler will help in keeping the engine cooler when towing. I will update when we know more.

3 weeks to go until we go to Phillip Island to see the MotoGP. :-)

VMS Replaced Today

We have been having trouble with the in car navigation system we purchased 6 months ago. I went and had the system replaced today and so far, so good!
The guys at Olbis have excellent service and woud not hesitate to recomend them to anyone.

PS This is being blogged from my iPhone!

Birdsville And Back !

We have now completed the shakedown trip to Birdsville and back. Tracey and I had a great time and everything went really well. The van was perfect and no major breakages occurred which is good news.

After getting an early start on the Saturday morning we did a full days travelling to a free camp at Morven. We set up in the rest area and as we were having a beer a fellow came up and informed us that the showgrounds had hot showers and power for a donation. Oh well, live and learn I guess!

The next destination was a free camp at J C Hotel Ruins about 30km from the turnoff to Birdsville. This left us with a reasonably short run on the third day to Birdsville. We had the whole of the camp site at J C to our selves and enjoyed staying out in the desert in the silence. The picture on the right is the Ruins site.

The run into Birdsville was all dirt road, the Birdsville Developmental Track is in pretty good condition. The drive was great and we got into Birdsville about lunch time and proceeded to the Pub to have a few cold ones! We stayed at the Birdsville Caravan Park for $25 a night. All the amenities were great and the sites were good as well.

During our stay a Birdsville we went to the Working Museum, Big Red and had a curried Camel pie at the bakery. We went for a drive to the edge of the Simpson desert and drove the Patrol up Big Red as last time we were there we only did Little Red. So this time we made sure we got the right hill!!

All in all a great time at Birdsville.

On the way home we stayed at Mungallala next to the pub there for $11 the night. Decided to have a pub meal and a couple of drinks. Next stop home was at Windorah and a camp spot on the banks of the Cooper Creek. This was a great spot where once again we had a camp spot all to ourselves. The following day was home!

Off To Birdsville !!!

It's been a while since I have updated our blog. Not much has been happening, we have done a couple of short trips in the van to Stanthorpe and generally getting used to the features of our new home.

We are heading off on our "Shakedown" trip to Bridsville. Birdsville is near the Queensland, South Australia and Northern Territory borders and is approx 1600 Km West of Brisbane. We will take 3 days to get there with the Kedron in tow.

The trip will serve as a learning experience as to how we will be able to handle the distance and more importantly the dirt stretch of road at the end of the trip, about 200 Km of it!

Looking forward to seeing how the car and the van goes.

Finally Got Our New Toy !!

The day finally arrived to pick up the Kedron, we were so excited !! We went to the factory first thing in the morning and spent the best part of a half a day with the guys out there taking delivery of the van. Nothing was too much trouble for them and they spent a lot of time explaining things to us. Then it was time to have my first van towing experience and had to get it home. All went well and we got the thing home in one piece.

Everything in the van is perfect and we spent the rest of the day looking and playing with all it's features. We proceeded to spend the night in it to test out the bed. All good !!

Our first trip in the Kedron was to Somerset Dam Recreation Park. A long weekend was planned and off we went. The spot out there was great if it weren't for the 2000 other people that managed to make it out there as well !!

All that said we had a great 4 days testing the van and all it's amenities. Everything is all still perfect !! Kinda waiting to for something to fail!

Bring on our bit lap of the block !!!!

Picking up the Kedron tomorrow.

Well the day has finally come! We go to the Kedron Caravan factory tomorrow to pick up the Top Ender. We have both taken the day off as they require a half day to go through all the features the van has and to show us the ins and outs.

I am feeling a bit pensive about towing the van home as I have never towed anything that big before. Practice makes perfect I guess! Will post a couple of photos once we have the van home.

Caravan Half Done!

As mentioned before, we went to Brendale in Brisbane to the Kedron Factory to have a look at the progress of our caravan. A lot has been done! The walls are up and most the interior is in. The Kedron guys did a lovely job fitting the inverter we supplied as well.

Nothing is too much trouble for the guys and gals at the factory.

Kedron Caravan on it's Way !!!!

Kedron phoned up the other day to tell us that the van had been started. Exciting times !!!
Then a couple of days ago they phoned again and informed us that the walls were up and they had started to fit the inside of the van out.

We will be invited to the factory again to have a look at the final stages of the fit out to make sure everything is to our liking. All the wiring will be done and the van will be waiting for us to give the nod to clad the outside.

Have also organised for the car to have a turbo and exhaust upgrade in the next week or two, this will add about another 1/3 power to help with the towing of the Kedron. Will update when we have had that done.

Go To See Kedron Caravans Tomorrow !!

Well the time has finally come to go to Kedron Caravans to finalise the build of the caravan that we will be taking on our trip around Australia. The visit will include a tour of the factory and finalising the build of the van that we will be delivered with. We will be talking to them to add a 3G Ariel, UHF Ariel, bigger TV, inverter fitted and potentially a diesel heater. I will update on the heater as it it expensive but all the forum member would not be without them I am told.

Both of us are quite excited as this signified that before too long we will be taking delivery of our new baby. First week in May we are told. Will update with impressions of tomorrow. The below picture is the model of the van but not the colour.

Our RC 40 Series Cruiser Crawler

As a sideline to preparing to go on our adventure, Tracey and I have purchased R/C Crawlers to get our scaled rock crawling jollies. Hope this will save some money on the damage the Patrol could potentially get. Cheaper to throw this little thing down the hill than the 1:1. We purchased the Tamiya 40 Series cruiser just over a week ago and have built and painted it. Tracey loved it and we have purchased a crawler for her as well. Hers is an Axial AX10 and is a proper out of the box competition crawler. Should be good to see how it goes.

VMS Navigation Fitted.

We purchased a VMS 3000 navigation system last weekend and fitted into the dash of the Troll. The unit replaces the factory stereo double din slot. It's a 7" touch screen with 4WD Navigation, Street Navigation, iPod connectivity, Radio, DVD, Reverse cameras etc.

We are pretty happy with the unit as it allows us to hook up our old iPod and have all our tunes in one spot. The 4WD navigation is in the form of an application called Ozi Explorer. The Ozi app is very very flexible and is provided with all the Hema maps for Australia. The Street navigation is provided by the iGo application and is the normal Navman or TomTom fair. Seems to work fine.

Next............Engine mods including 3" exhaust and Turbo tweak. Unleash the power!

Tyres and Suspension DONE !!

The tyres and the suspension have been fitted and have made a huge difference to the car. We had the Micky Thompsons fitted along with the steel rims. The car looks pretty tuff now!



We had the 2" suspension fitted to the car. The OEM suspension is really not too good at all, once the after market gear was fitted the car handled sooooo much better. Not to mention the extra clearance!. The rear end of the car is backed up with a fitting of a pair of PollyAir bags. This will help with the weight of the van.



We are really happy with the way the car is now, albeit we have to air the tyres down to get it into the garage. :-)

Tyres and Suspension....

Well, we ordered the suspension, tyres an rims today. We have ordered Lovell extra heavy duty springs combined with EFS Elite shockies. These are the same as we had fitted to the previous Patrol and were very happy with them, so I got them again. Decided this time to replace the steering damper as well. We will fit an Iron Man steering damper. John from 4WD Suspension Components will fit the gear Monday Night.

The tyres are Mickey Thompson ATZ 285/75/16. We went for an all terrain this time as we see ourselves doing more and more tarmac and dirt road driving instead of a weekend 4WD "Toy". The rims are 16" Dynamic steel. The 16" tyre was about $100 cheaper than the 17" tyres that we would have to fit to the factory rims. The factory rims will be put on eBay which should help pay for the ATZ's. I will upload picture when the work is done.

The Start

Well, this is the first of our blogs.

We are preparing our car ready to tow a Kedron Top Ender caravan around Australia. We have chosen a 2007 4.2 Litre Nissan Patrol and have just had the bullbar, brush bars and sidesteps fitted by TJM at Coopers Plains on the south side of Brisbane. They did a fantastic job at fitting the accessories.

Next thing to do is the suspension and tyres. We have decided to fit a 2" suspension lift that will be fitted by a local guy that will supply extra heavy duty springs and shockies. The tyres we are going to fit are Mickey Thompson 285/75/16 ATZ's, these are an all train tyre. We will also trade the aloy 17" rims for black 16" steel rims. The suspension and tyres/rims should be done in the next two weeks.