Stamping around the world, one stamp at a time..
Travelling Southern Africa in a converted 1980's 4×4 fire truck called 'Sloth', what could possibly go wrong?
Updates coming in thick and fat now!
We perhaps have been spending ages with some of the hydraulic work and several frames, the roofrack is coming together pretty fast now! Johan had measured, cut and drilled everything to size and with help off Corné, the main frame has now been put together. All aluminium and the pictures do not do the work justic!
Hopefully soon this will all be put into place, as in 2 weeks we are off to paint the rest of the truck!!
More and more progress, the more time (and money) we spend, the more that things progress.
So we now have the tank from our dry toilet in place, situated in a frame behind the rear wheel together with the hydraulic pump for the spare wheel lift thingie out the back.
Mocking up done, welds in place, now we need to finish the outside of it and paint it too.
The famous Nike! question from long ago right?
Well, in a truck you usually have plenty of air, as the brakes are air operated. In a very simple way acutally, air pressure is what keeps the brakes from braking. If you haven’t got air pressure then the brakes do not release, a very heavy spring keeps the brakes in place and the truck does not move.
We got air to spare! Loads of air as we moved a few bits and pieces around and went from 2 large air reservoirs to 5 smaller air tanks that we fitted under the cabin.
Now we have air for the brakes, air for the front and rear seats and air for…. our mechanically sprung cabin too!
Yannick and Joop converted our truck cab from spring sprung to air sprung, with ride height adjustment too! Meaning, more people in the cabin does not affect the ride quality. In the large fire engine cab this does make a huge impact!
Did I spell that right?
I sure hope so! Anyway, this little video show the difference between tapping on metal or on bitumen. Ofcourse I should have tapped from the outside to truly show the difference but still, you get the idea I hope.
I must say I do feel a bit stupid for not having taken more videos or photos of the whole cut and glue part, but hey, I’m new to all of this…
oh oh the joys! The joys indeed huh? This shows you lot a little of the roof as well as the lining and the wiring.
I took down all of the roof, door and rear wall lining to get cracking with sound proofing.
This was ofcourse also the right time to remove much of the old fire truck wiring that was left over in the cabin. We had some holes in the roof welded at the same time (i guess people didn’t think these trucks would last as long as they did so never bothered to treat against rust).
All that is left now is some wiring witha nice 12v feed (hard to come by in a 24v truck), 4 strains of speaker wire, 2 antenna wires, 2 4G antenna wires, a GPS wire, a front camera wire, a rear camera wire plus I forgot to reroute the internal door light wire… Man, did I just make it worse????
Been busy the last few days with updating the truck cabin, added a lot of bitumen to help reduce the noise in the cabin and added some Armaflex too.
Stripped off must of the interior, which wasn’t very hard I must say, many little screw that held the cardboard plates in places but all was well after that.
Then added the bitumen plates all over, I did read on the interweb that about 25% of the walls/floors etc should be covered in the stuff but I must say I did do a whole lot more. Roof, back wall, back floor as well as the doors got done. Front floor I will do once I have installed the Isri air seats there too.
Bought the stuff here: https://www.heatshieldings.com/en/black-absor-sound-deadening.html , nearly broke my back trying to lift the boxes…and cut my fingers a few times during installation because of the aluminium that runs throught the bitumen.
Then on rebuilding the walls I thought it wise to install new speakers and radio too, I got hold of a Joying single din Android radio a while back that should suit us well.
Come with 4G antenna’s, sim slot, GPS receiver, WiFi and a whole lot more and after the initial installation (too many wires all over the place) I’m really happy.
Together with our Garmin Dezl truck navigation, this should suits us well.