Posts for category vehicle

Our choice of a new adventure vehicle came on the heals of a good experience with our Provan Tiger during our 19 month, 60,000 mile Americas Trip and in the face of a recent purchase (as it was then), and a happy experience with a used 2008 Earthroamer.

The topic that got me started down the path of "another vehicle" was the question of maintenance and repairs. Our Tiger-Chevy Duramax was incredibly reliable in South America, BUT it was clear from conversations with Chevy dealers in various countries that repairs on the engine/transmission would have been very difficult. Those vehicles, the Duramax engine and Allison transmission are not used in any commonly available vehicles in those parts of the world.

For those like me that do not (or at least did not) know much about the Unimog U500 I am including some spec sheets and a general discussion of the vehicle. It is worth noting that I could not find a spec sheet for a 2003 vehicle so have resorted to a document published in 2009. This later model vehicle has a Euro 5 engine (and as such required BlueTech fluid and ULSD fuel) rather than Euro 3 engine in our vehicle which has no issue with high sulfur fuel.

We chose to have GXV build and mount a Safari version of their camper box. You can get the general dimensions and layout of this box from the drawings in the images below (just click the thumbnail to get a larger view).

Pictures from a visit to the factory late in the construction phase.

Some photos of the build in progress.

We took delivery of the completed vehicle the week beginning May 7th, 2012. I spent most of that week at the GXV premises learning about the vehicle, dreaming up new things for them to do and completing the usual paper work.

The first thing one notices about a U500 is just how far off the ground the driver seat is. There is an initial feeling of being up there but it is not obvious until one gets onto the road that this truck is actually taller than the tractor of an 18-wheeler. From the U500 drivers seat one can see the roof of an 18-wheeler cab.

The truck has some other interesting control features that are worth noting.

As promised in our Journal entry for 19th Sept 2012 (click this to see the entry) here is some detail of the actual fixes/upgrades accomplished at the GXV factory.

A brief run down on the work carried out during our visit with Rob Pickering in La Junta, CO during the week of Sept 24th 2012.

This is the first of a series of posts related to the electric system in our GXV expedition vehicle. My aim in this series of articles/posts is to outline the original mission of the electrical system, analyze how well the originally supplied equipment meet that mission, describe what modifications and upgrades I have made and what lessons I have learned, and what problems (if any) are still outstanding.

In the first post in this series I outlined the mission for the electrical system of our GXV expedition vehicle and described the electrical system as originally delivered.

Two effects combine to render the truck alternator ineffective as a charge source for the camper battery pack.

In the previous posts we looked at the capacity or rating of the various chargers and components in the camper‘s electrical system and concluded that possibly the system has too little charging capacity given the size of the battery pack.

I initially installed a single Battery-Battery Charger (B2B) in the camper in November 2012 but that original B2B failed within a week and was returned. I installed the replacement in mid December 2012 and used it for travel through the US South West and the Baja during December 2012 and January 2013. To date the replacement has continued to function without problems.

So given all that I (think I) have learned; how do I currently manage the camper battery pack.

After almost a years experience with the camper electrical systems I would have to say I am not very impressed with the system design.

I have agonized for sometime over what to do so that our GXV camper can make effective use of 230V/50Hz shore power. Specifically this question focused on replacing or supplementing the inadequate Mastervolt 12/35 charger that came as original equipment in the camper.

According to wikipedia an aneurysm is a balloon like bulge in the wall of a blood vessel. Well today I learned that motorhomes (or more precisely Global Expedition Vehicles) can also suffer from aneurysms; and the bursting of one particular aneurysm turned our motorhome into a good imitation of a water fall. Specifically 50 gallons of water washed through the camper and flowed down the entrance steps in a beautiful, though frightening, cascade.

The astute reader will recall that in August 2012 during our visit to the GXV factory we had a 3rd fuel tank installed. Following the installation it quickly became apparent that filling the tank with fuel was a problem. Specifically the filler neck and hose were too small (in diameter) and had an insufficient slope. This problem manifested itself by fuel backing up in the filler neck and pouring over the ground.

About a week ago I discovered the thread on Expedition Portal that someone had started about the problems we had with our vehicle near Yakutsk. Since then I have followed the discussion with interest (using my iPhone) but because of lack of real internet connection have not been able to contribute. So this post will for the moment be my contribution. The reason for doing it this was is that I can prepare this post offline and send it to our website even if my connection is slow.

If you have been reading our journal (or regular posts) you know that on Tuesday 4th June Mike Van Pelt, the owner of Global Expedition Vehicles, arrived in Ulanbaatar to do some upgrades to the camper mounting system on our vehicle.

This is a maybe overdue update or exposition of our long term experience with the electrical system of our GXV truck.

It seems like the first article about the plumbing in our GXV camper was Aneurysm published back in early 2013. That is why this one is called Plumbing, Part 2. I was prompted to write this post by a recent water leak we had in the camper. That got me thinking about the other couple of problems we have had with the fresh water system over the past 1-1.5 years and the lessons I have learned from those incidents.