After a sleepless night worrying about what could be wrong. ‘Maybe there was a fundamental flaw that can’t be fixed???’, ‘Maybe she’s just too old’???
We headed back to Hamilton to await our fate. Yes she failed and yes there was a list of things that needed to be fixed. An engineers report was needed for the passenger seat (where in god’s name do you get one of those?), the brakes weren’t braking evenly, we had rust in a couple of places, the window wipers stopped working(they were working???), she smoked( something we could do nothing about as we had already taken her to the diesel mechanic who told us the O rings in the engine were worn and the only way to fix that is to replace the motor, but for what we were doing (travelling around N.Z) it would be fine.)
All very doable things. The relief was audiable. We were still on track with the plan.
I swear mechanic’s and those in the truck industry are the nicest people. So many strangers were able to help us and point us in the right direction. We were so green and knew no one in this industry in Hamilton. Sitting ducks for being ripped off. An example of this, was sitting in the VINZ office pondering how we would find an engineer that could certify our seat and a nice ‘Trucky’ over heard us and gave us the number of a guy, who gave us the number of another guy, who knew the guy we needed to talk to.Their aren’t many people in the Waikato that can do LT 400’s.
We organised what we could, packed up for Christmas and went on holiday up north.
John came back to Raglan to work on the nessarary jobs. Bless him. He was so over it. The last jobs sucked, really difficult welding in tiny spaces, dealing with the slightly bizarre, topae wearing engineer that wanted the passenger seat reinforced so that it was strong enough to tow the whole bus by. The crazy part is we aren’t required by law to have seat belts as it was originally converted into a motorhome before the 1980’s when the law changed. So it will make little difference when the children go flying through the front window, that the seat won’t move.
All the same while everyone else was enjoying there summer vacation, fishing and surfing, Johny was working 12 hour days to finish, along with the help of our mechanic friend. Little did we know but he had terminal cancer at the time and would pass-away 3 months later. He was the most amazing selfless man who really got a kick out of helping people. Thank you Chris from the bottom of our hearts – you were an incredible man and helped us to achieve our impossible dream.
We had 21 working days to complete the work. With a couple of days to spare we travelled back to hamilton to re-test.
We failed again. This time it was only the Brakes.