Trial and error (without the error)

Its been over 18 months since the last time we went camping, and the long-distance survivability of the Previa is also an unknown quantity, so we decided it was worth going for a test run.

Breaker Breaker One Nine

All the cars on the ScumRun are encouraged to fit a CB radio for free communications while on the road.  We did this last time, so we are doing it again.  The antenna that was used on the GTO suffered a Gregg induced failure (it was taken out when he did a rapid, unexpected, reverse park into a tree), but as we are teaming up with Adam and Mike this time, we had another one we could use.  This was fitted to the front part of the roof, as the rear part cant be use when the moon-roof is retracted.

After a bit of fiddling, we decided to route the cable in via the moon roof.  Due to the way Toyota tend to do their sunroofs, we could do this without too much fear of a leak (the roof pushes down on a lip, rather than butting up).  Unfortunately there's no real clean way to do this other than with duct tape.

Inside the cabin, the routing options are equally limited without spending a lot of effort ripping apart the roof so we opted just to hang the cable via the hand-holds out of the way.  This then goes down to the floor, secured where possible, routed to the center of the car where the CB itself is mounted.

Currently we only have it sat on the floor, but in the final form we will have a box of some kind sat here for the CB to attach to.

Electrickery

We have been slacking a little on our updates, so there are a few to come over the next few days.  The first of which is electrics...

This car is going to be wired... literally.  We are a team comprised of techno geeks so going anywhere without at least 3 electronic devices each is unheard of.  As a result this van will be toting around phones, gps, CB radio, powered cool box, cameras, plus anything else we want to fling in to the mix.

Quite a bit of tech, so we need a way to wire it in.  The current cigarette lighter is only rated to 10 or 15 amps. Daisy chaining everything out of the dash like that would look terrible, likely be a fire hazard, and also be prone to breakage.  We needed to do it properly,  so the first step is to run a decent wire into the cabin from the battery. We still had some of the heavy duty 30amp cable we used in the GTO, so out comes the drill...