Our Bob Is An Awesome Bob!

Last weekend we decided to get away for the weekend and chose Black Barns Farm Campsite near Burham-on-Crouch & Maldon.

It’s a lovely small site, very friendly & quiet. We went there just to get away from it all, and it’s great if you just want to sit around and relax or are passing through.

http://www.blackbarnsfarm.co.uk

Website says £7 but it’s now £10. Showers, toilets, wash basins, free use of freezer. There’s an electrical hook-up & a tap.

The pitches are near to the chickens, guinea fowl & ducks and you can buy eggs from the site.

Views across the the River Blackwater estuary are great, and it’s where we took this picture:

Bob was great again, and it gave us a useful trial run to perfect sleeping arrangements with a baby so we’re sorted for Europe in the summer.

Have a go!

Techenders is a technical weekend organised through the Just Kampers Forum. We would have gone to Techenders 13 but we were in Bali and L was born two days after Techenders 14 – we’ve been waiting to attend one for over a year. Techenders 15 was our first foray into weekend ‘meets’ and we were a little bit nervous of what to expect, after all what do we have in common with the other people beyond ownership of a VW Camper?  The meet was held in Leicestershire and despite putting our names down several months in advance we only decided for certain to go the weekend before.

Bob had only been back on the road a week and so I did a few test runs to make sure she was OK, and then on the Friday we took her out and washed her with a pressure hose and cleaned and hoovered her interior. After stocking her up with food and clothes she was ready.

The trip up to Techenders was fantastic. A little cold as it was an early-ish start but no rain, no wind, not much traffic and Bob running like a dream. We arrived without having to stop and with L contentedly staring at me, transfixed by my mirrored aviators! With only a rock & roll bed in the back I had the pleasure of L‘s company in the front which, for most of the time, was lovely. We parked up next to a smart looking T25 and nervously looked around at the Splitty, assorted T2s, T25s, T4s & an original Beetle and wondered how we should introduce ourselves and who to. That problem was solved as almost immediately ‘Superhands’ came over and after saying nice things about Bob showed us how our fuel tank vent pipe was badly split and needed replacing. If we found out nothing else during the weekend…

As a picture to capture the sense of Techenders 15 this is pretty rubbish (I didn’t get around to taking a picture from the other side with all the other vans in the background!) but it does show us camped up so it’s something! Saturday was spent watching other people service and repair their vans. There were people making a custom interior, others doing services and more trying to tune and improve the way their vans ran. By the time we arrived there was already one engine out due to a clutch being replaced, and by Saturday afternoon a routine carb replacement had turned into engine out number 2! (Both vans drove home by Sunday afternoon.) Lunch was a vegetable chilli made by another Techender and was enjoyed by all including L who seems to love spicy food.

Saturday evening H took L to bed in the roof and I stayed up to have a couple of beers around the camp fire with the others. L‘s first night camping went well for her as she was well wrapped up in her grobag and I was OK downstairs on the rock & roll bed in the double sleeping bag, but H was freezing in A‘s single sleeping bag and didn’t sleep well at all. Next time I’ll have the smaller sleeping bag as I don’t feel the cold so much, but it was also a reminder that there’s only canvas between you and the outside temperature when you’re up top.

Sunday was much colder and saw several people who had been there since the Friday gradually leave as they finished sorting their vans. We had a go at some tuning and Bob’s running speed was altered somewhat. Although she was running well, a go with the strobe showed the timing to be too far advanced. Dad came up to to have lunch with us and after saying our goodbyes to the other Techenders we left with a long list of small but important jobs to do and reassurances that Bob is actually the very nice van we hoped & thought she was.

The journey home wasn’t quite as relaxing as the one to Techenders. L was tired and irritable, I was just tired and the crosswinds… The A14 isn’t a good road to drive a vehicle with ridiculous aerodynamics on and after the previous day’s chilled driving I was constantly on my guard for Bob being blown around. L picked up on my apprehension and that made her worse. Eventually the wind died down, we got off the A14 and after a couple of feeds L was much happier. As for Bob, well an occasional misfire suggests that she has been tuned down a little too far so I’ll have to sort that soon along with the rest of the  jobs list, but otherwise she was great. Again.

Techenders 15 was a very enjoyable weekend. It was great to spend time with other people who ‘get’ what it is about a VW Camper that makes them special (and that was enough to have in common to get along) and it was an opportunity (taken) for H & I to learn a lot more about how to keep Bob running well. It also pushed me towards wanting to take Bob onto the continent this summer. It’s the vibe, it does things to the mind…

So…great company, great vans, great camping – roll on Techenders 16 in September!

Bob & Mandy (for that’s what I call her in my head – take this to be an official announcement!) meet for the first time!

Alfie & I (assisted by Dad via live ‘phone link-up) got Bob going after 6 months of hibernation. I believe we flooded her at first but she got going soon enough and drove (almost) flawlessly round the estate whilst being moved between our front and rear gardens. Almost flawlessly because she’s never liked low revs & first gear when she’s cold and after 6 months asleep it was more obvious than ever. She didn’t cut out though and the brakes were fine. In hi-tech news you may notice the solar battery trickle-charger in the side window – works a treat!

I’m going to take her out for a small drive today where I’ll do the tyre pressures and fill her with fuel, and then tomorrow it’s off on a longer run to pick up a bath for the garden. She’ll probably need a clean too.

This is the first time I’ve ever woken something from hibernation and years of watching the Blue Peter tortoise in my youth make me want to go and rub a damp cotton bud over Bob’s lights. Maybe I’ll just polish the chrome eyelids instead…

Bob’s asleep for winter under her Just Kampers cover. Come the Spring I’ll start getting her ready for a lot more use next year.

Many, many months ago I promised some pictures from our first holiday outings in Bob.

Here goes…

Playing cards in rainy Wiltshire having been to see Stonehenge on our way to North Devon. Our first night all together in Bob!

Next, at our campsite in Devon with J‘s van getting off to a smokin’ start!

It was the first time we’d tried the awning and because we were doing a fair bit of driving around we didn’t attach it.

We went into Exmoor to visit the village H‘s parents lived in and had a picnic :

but only after a lengthy spell sat behind the locals!

We did the Devon-Essex run in one run which took about 10 hours as I had to keep stopping to rest.

After a day of washing and clearing out Bob we were off again to a woodland campsite in Suffolk. As we weren’t planning to move Bob for the week we fixed up the awning to Bob for the first time. It was very useful, especially as H‘s sister and her family were camping on the plot next to us and we had lots of bikes and toys to store.

Overall then two weeks of enjoyable camping and 1200+ miles covered without a hitch, made all the sweeter after the problems we’ve had with Bob. She did us proud though and we’re thinking about Europe next year with Liesel!

After last week’s Photosynth effort Murph came along with his snazzy new camera and took 300+ shots of Bob. We fed them into the Photosynth software and…a pretty good effort! I particularly like the button which shows how the software has created an overhead 3D rendering of the area from the inputted photos, so in this case you can make out Bob, the skip, the fence/gate and even bit of next door’s garden. Cool!

I might do an inside-Bob one of these in the future…

A not entirely successful 360 view of Bob on the day before our first anniversary of ownership!

In fact, it’s about a 60 degree view of her because I couldn’t get around the sides properly to take enough pictures. Soon! To see all the pictures I took click on the 9-dot button at the bottom.

A weekend of maintenance on Bob saw us (as in Dad assisted by H & I) get loads of jobs done both in readiness for camping and because they really needed to be done.

In no particular order we:

• Checked the front brakes – all good.
• Connected the pipes on the water tank properly so they don’t leak.
• Worked out why the water pump wasn’t working (and identified that it will probably need a return valve).
• Made sure that the oil was OK and at the right level.
• Tested the fridge to make sure it works on gas – it does!
• Put draft excluder on the louvre windows to stop it blowing a gale through the back.
• Did a temporary fix on the clunking wiper arms that stopped the clunking and will keep them going until a permanent solution in the autumn.
• Fixed down the kick plate properly.
• Put together a small spares kit to carry around and checked that the jack worked.
• Did a few small bodywork repairs.
• Gave the windows a proper clean.
• Stopped the rear hatch from rattling.
• Re-aligned the passenger-side door after last month’s fence post accident.
• Made it possible to shut the engine bay lid without having to bang it to with your fist.

In addition to all that we sorted out various electrical issues. The electric windscreen washers have never worked. We were told when we bought Bob that it just needed some water in it, but we filled it up and it still didn’t work. When we pulled back the panel to look this is what we found – a mass of wires and a washer motor hanging loose behind the front panel. The motor was broken. It was simply too old and weak to pump the water up to the washer jets. We went and bought a replacement and fitted it on a hand-made bracket to stop it rattling around.

The wiring was something else. To the left  is a picture of the washer switch, which as you can see had been wired in using speaker cable. Not wanting to leave the dashboard wiring in such a state we went about rewiring various sections and re-routing wires which seem to have been put in without any thought to keeping things manageable and/or tidy. Behind the fuse box we found two still- live wires that had simply been cut off and left untaped and potentially dangerous.

To add to the wiring woes, we found that one of the inside strip lights was overheating and burning its circuits when you switched it on. Thankfully we never used the light, although if we had I hope the amount of smoke it gave off would have alerted us to the danger.

In all, we removed a substantial number of wires that were either dangerous, too long, incorrect or, as was the case a number of times, simply not needed anymore as the components that they had once served had been removed and the wires left for posterity.

Since we’ve owned Bob the number of (quickly sorted) shortcuts we have found to have been made during her restoration has been alarming but accepted with light-hearted sighs, but when it involves dodgy and potential very dangerous electrics it’s difficult not to have a sense of humour bypass.

On the plus side Bob ran beautifully and barring a loss of main-beam for a stretch on the way home (a loose cable on the fuse board) gave us no problems whatsoever – a fantastic improvement over last time I drove her to Stratford way back in January.

Whilst other parents sat on wet chairs and braved the winds at Cressing Temple I sat smugly in Bob with the side door open and kept warm and dry. And when the rain stopped and the sun came out, Bob just looked cool…

Then we came home via McDonalds, eating our meal at the table in the back of Bob. Fast food has never been such a chilled experience!