Hitting the hills

A great way to find flaws is through testing. What better test than a bolt down the country to the south downs followed by two days of touring?

A very last minute holiday plan saw us hitting the road on a Wednesday, heading from Lincoln down to roughly Brighton way. We then tried to complete a Geotour of the Southdowns taking in 40 different sites across the whole range of hills. This would present a range of challenges to find issue with the van whilst driving in varied situations not to mention actually camping in it.
Here is what I found with a few pics along the way, I was on holiday after all.
A nice viewing point and it's not raining as much
Old rifle range
From the get go the speedo didn't work which is a super start. I had no speedo and an injection light but a working tachometre. Also the cruise control worked so clearly signals were coming from somewhere. After a few miles the speedo started to come back to life and was basically back to working properly a few miles later. Every time it kicked in or off it took the cruise control out but at least I didn't have to judge the speed from the tacho anymore. This problem reoccured for a shorter length of time on most restarts depending on how much we used the power during the night. I have found out that the speed sensor can cause this fault (I was thinking it was a cluster or low voltage issue) so you can look forward to this fix in the near future.

Oooo sunshine
The van hungrily drank most of a tank of fuel getting down to the start point hinting that it wasn't too chuffed with going above 50mph. It seems okay at 60mph but even briefly going over for overtaking clearly had a big impact.
Once we were down there we were mostly making relatively short 2-20 mile hops ranging from duel carriage ways to tight dirt tracks winding up hills and through rivers. Oh it was shitting it down with rain so everything was soaking wet.
The van chugged up even the steepest of hills, handling passing moments and without getting too flustered once I was used to what it had to offer. Even the boggiest verges didn't stop us with the van draging itself through some fairly deep water too.
more water around than under the bridge
What this did highlight though was a weak clutch that would slip if you were to eager on the throttle during gear changes and a handbrake that wont hold the van on anything other than the slightest of undulations. 

All of this water fording did cause a couple of issues too. The horn packed up on day two but this was fixed with some wire wiggling, all of the brakes now squeek thanks to dirt ingress (or I used all of the pads up going down those hills) and the exhaust snapped aft of the silencer. Brilliant.

As for the camping side of things, aside from the water system needing a clean out and the water tank being split, things didn't look too bad. The van was comfy and warm thanks to the Webast air top. Hob and fridge all did their thing and all of the new entertainment/comfort stuff we did the other week worked a treat.
One of the draws managed to come out, exploding into many pieces so that will need fixing at some point but that is about it.

Plenty of jobs to do but nothing drastic. I'm sure I will let you know when I get round to them.

Last cache of the holiday it wasn't all rain and soggy socks.

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