Another Step Forward with the Fuso

 Its been another couple of months and Ive taken another step forward with the truck project... I got a call from the company in Oregon saying the zero-torsion subframe I ordered was ready.

So, I got a one day temporary registration for the truck, took a day off work, fueled it up with a full tank of diesel and drove 500Km down to Portland Oregon. I had prepared earlier at home by building a wooden loading frame and bolting it to the bare chassis of the truck, so now all I had to do was load the subframe on (and the set of slide out stairs that I ordered with it), and then strap it down and drive it back home. 

I got there at about 3pm and they loaded it all up with their fork-lift (the whole thing weighs in at about 600KG or so) and lashed and bolted it three ways from sunday so it wouldnt move... The ride down from Vancouver was rather uncomfortable because without any load on the back the heavy suspension was as rigid as a steel beam and even a nice 6-8 lane highway isnt that smooth with a truck in this condition... So I lashed the load down pretty good.

Then, I drove back to Vancouver. The ride back was quite a bit better than on the way down due to the extra 600Kg, and round trip 1000Km took me about 11 hours total so I did OK.

Then I went back to work for the rest of the week and started doing the work to mount the frame to the chassis on the weekend. It took me about 3 full days to get it all bolted on securely, which was quite a bit faster than I thought it might be... It cost about twice as much as Id hoped it would, but Im pretty happy with it now and Im ready for the next step.

The "axial Pivots are on the forward section of the subframe and there is one on each side allowing the truck chassis rails to move independently up and down at the back end. 

And the "twinned" rear crossmember pivots that allow the rear end of those chassis rails to move in opposite directions without the torsion loads transferring to the sub-frame.

Support brackets for the rear crossmembers to attach to the chassis rails... I had to make a few spacer blocks and drill about two dozen half-inch holes in the chassis but it was not too bad on the difficulty level, though I did destroy several drill-bits doing it all by hand with a battery powered drill and no cutting fluid (cos Im drilling mostly horizontally rather than vertically with a drill press where its all much more controlled.

Stairs in "close quarters ladder mode"

Stirs in fully extended mode

And that next step was waiting for some more bits to arrive... Which was the new bullbar and roof-rack that I ordered and they showed up a month or two later and were duly fitted to the truck in a couple of weekends. 

Bullbar, roofrack and brush-guards added.

But Ive also placed an order for the foam/GRP habitat box too... Its also extremely expensive and takes a few months to get made, so Im not expecting that till about end of January, but here is a rough picture of it.

The windows and door will move around a bit, but they will be cut into the panels after assembly (the habitat gets shipped as a huge flat-pack and you either have to assemble it yourself or pay someone with the large work-space and the right tools etc to do it for you) so for now its still flexible, and Im back to waiting.

Thats all for this update.

Moving Forward Again at Last.

 Its been about 6 months since my last post... Not much has happened in that time other than life progressing as it usually does. But Ive been basically unable to do any useful work on my overland truck project in all that time and Ive found that to be very frustrating... a whole winter and spring and half of a summer with nothing to work on... That's not good for me :)

I was planning to go on my European moto tour this year as I recall, but I decided to postpone for another year for a couple of reasons...

1) I didn't really have a good plan for a motorbike in Europe yet... So I wasn't really ready.

2) I had committed to meet my sister and her husband in Hawaii in July this year... which is kinda in the middle of the touring season in Europe and I didn't want to be flying all over the globe for multiple objectives... way too expensive, but I also hadn't seen my sister for several years and didn't feel like declining the opportunity to meet up.

3) The money coming in from my working is pretty good right now, and with this truck project costing so much, I think it would be pretty stupid to turn down the money for the present... Im sure the company profit margins will decline soon enough, and then so will the employee bonuses, and seems like a better time to "take my leave" :)

So, Im still in Vancouver and still working , and still tinkering with the truck.

But the impasse is finally resolved.  The problem was that I needed to sell the dump box off the truck before I could do any prep work on the chassis or install any other stuff (like a sub-frame or the habitation box). I did get the suspension upgraded with longer travel parabolic springs, and I did get a set of rims for it for larger tires but that was about all. And I advertised the dump box on Craigslist here for the past six months but it just wasn't getting much interest. So, a couple of months back I fired up my old Facebook account (which had been inactive for about a decade!) and put it on Marketplace there, and that helped and after a couple of months I finally got a buyer... I got less money than I had hoped for ( a lot less than it would cost to get a new one thats for sure)..

Now it has no box on it, I can clean up all the rust and re-wrap the wiring harness.

But now the box is sold, so I can move forward.  First thing was to clean up the chassis and get rid of 15 years of rust and grime.  So a few sessions of working with a compressor and a needle scaler and its looking a lot better... There was a decent amount of surface rust but nothing structural. So so far so good. Now I paint on a rust converter to neutralize the remaining minor rust and turn the Iron-Oxide into Iron-Phosphate, and then coat that with an encapsulator (flexible paint).

And in the mean-time, Ive decided what to do about the sub-frame... which is a bit of a technical challenge.  There are a couple of different approaches to this... Many people go with a subframe that mounts to the chassis with a dozen or so spring tensioned floating bolts, and this would be the easiest way to go if I were to build it myself or through a local welding shop. But its not the best option in my opinion as it does still transfer tortional loads to the sub-frame and it leaves the subframe/habitation "floating" when things get rough or windy or unstable. The alternative is a pivot mounted sub-frame. Its a lot more complicated in some ways but it transfers zero torsion from the chassis to the sub-frame ands is a truly solid mounting base. I would prefer to go this way but its more complex and would take a lot of time and effort to build with a local fabrication shop... But there is a company in Oregon (near-by relatively speaking) that is producing these types of sub-frames en-mass... Its still very expensive, but thats the way Ive decided to go, so Ive committed to the spend and have placed my order :)

So, now I have a couple of months to complete my cleanup work on the chassis till I get the sub-frame. then I will likely need a month or so to fit the subframe on ... I just don't think it will be as easy as they seem to think it will be... (call me a pessimist :)  Then after thats on, I will place an order for the habitation box. There are two companies I could work with on this and I'm not sure which one I will choose, but I have some time to decide.  Ive already decided the dimensions of the box but I wont know where to put the door quite till Ive got the sub-frame mounted and can see where I can fit the slide out stairs... But, all in all, I should have the habitation box on the truck by about Christmas this year I think... and its also extremely expensive! 

So, the truck project is moving forward again and the big spending phase is well and truly in progress... OMG this project will be expensive... Its costing me way more than the up-side of staying at work during these "good times" is bringing in.  Im no doubt kidding myself here but Im hoping I will get some of the money back out of it when I decide to sell it, and the rest of the value is in the projecting and traveling... and Id have to pay for that portion in my retirement anyway... its already factored in to my rough financial plans... sorta... I hope?...      Ouch, the spending!

And I also did some crappy paving in my back yard to "secure" the steep slope in front of the parking area for the truck... Its so steep I need to use the 4WD mode of the truck to get it in there and even then it tends to churn the wheels and tear up the soil... so now its paved and should be good to go.  We shall see.