And so it begins

Right thats it.   Everything is packed (we hope) and we're off to dover.  More updates to come... stay tuned.

Last minute sponsor update..

Those of you paying attention will have noticed a fairly epic spike in our charity raising.  We have now surpassed the £1000 mark all thanks to Aquadition Ltd

Thank you so much for the money and it all goes to a good cause.  Having exceeded this mark Gregg now has to follow through with his threat to shave his beard when we beat £1000.  We will be posting video of this when we do it on the launch day.

For those of you still to donate, please give anything you can via our just giving page by clicking the JDRF logo on the right or clicking here:

Anything you give will go direct to the charity, along with 25% gift aid.

Thanks everyone.. this is going to be awesome.

Preparing to prepare the preparations

This update we have some last minute prep work and modifications.  There were a number of things that were "nice to have" that we wanted to do if we had time so over the last few days I have managed to sort most of them out.

First up, a non-slip mat for the passenger side dash.  One thing we noticed during the test run was that the dashboard is quite slick, things slid all over the place.  So now they wont.  Sorted.

Next up, the center console.  I built this following the run as we needed a better way to mount the CB, somewhere to store bits, and additional cup holders :)  I added carpet and non-slip mat to finish it of.

Next item on the list, the CB speaker.  The internal speaker is small and very quiet, so we have attached an external one.  This is now "mounted" to the center of the rear seats, facing forward meaning everyone can hear it loud and clear.

Next we have the health and safety.  We had a fire extinguisher, but no-where to put it.. now we do :)

Lastly, we have the tech-controller.  As you may have noted in an earlier post, we have an automatic relay to turn on / off the power to most of the car when the engine switches on / off.  That leaves us with a small issue.  We cant use the lights without the engine running.  So to get around this I have wired in a set of bypass switches.  Not only that but have also rigged up a set of sealed lead acid batteries as backup that can charge while we are moving so we don't even need to use the car battery, reducing the risk of accidentally running it dry.   The USB ports were just some spare units i had for another project, so I fitted them into the dash as more ports are always handy :)

Just a few days left now, if you haven't already donated, please visit our Just Giving page and drop a few quid.  Its all for a good cause.

A sticky situation

Due to availability of people, and the order in which the stickers arrived, the sticking of the van has spanned two weekends.  First pass was Gregg and I, applying the non-serious stickers.   

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...