Roofrack
Well keeping in tradition of nothing going smoothly for me the roof rack was no exception. My dads mate "Ducky" said he had the perfect roof rack for us, he said it was off another Landcruiser troop carrier and was just sitting at his other house waiting to be used. So of course we jumped at the opportunity to collect this amazing fabled roof rack, so the weekend we decide to go and get it "Ducky" discovers that the roof rack had been stolen from his other property... Yaaaaaaay. I wasn't all that suprised by this news, i had thought to myself that this was way too conveinient and easy thins just never work out the way they should. So after that depacle we went with plan B which was a roof rack my mate Costa had offered us, it was a white steel roof rack which would have needed some modifying to make it strong enough to mount the roof top tent to, so we took that roof rack home with the intentention of using it as a starting point for what could be. Ducky came up for a beer with my dad and saw the roof rack we were intending on using. He took one look at it and called me over, at this point i was wondering what he was going to say to me, he had a strange look in his eye. But luckily for me that strange look in his eye was generosity and he offered us to use the roofrack off of his 4wd. In his words "Better than stuffin' round with that other thing", i couldn't have agreed more. Ducky's roof rack is a nice solid aluminium roofrack, much more suited to the rugged old bumblebee than the dainty white roof rack (no offence Costa). So the next task at hand was to have the roof rack fitted, even this was not a seamless process, suprise suprise.
The first attempt at fitting the roof rack let the guys know that the top of bumblebee was too wide so custom mounts had to be made out of Aluminium thanks to agweld bullbars for supplying us with them. (gotta love the beer economy).
Once the brackets and spacers were manufactured we went to agweld for the second attempt at fitting the roof rack. This time at least it fit over 'ol bumbles massive head but the brackets wouldn't clip into the roof gutters properly, turns out the roof gutters had been bogged up by the previous owner. So after scraping out the guttering where the brackets were to be we finally got the roof rack fitted. ahhhhhhh got there in the end.
Roof top tent
So no that that shitfight was sorted moving right along to the next. I need a place to sleep and i prefer something enclosed and with a bed. The solution was a roof top tent because im not willing to sleep in the back with nelso as much as he would like me to. Anyways we sourced the tent through all things off road and my parents generously bought it for me (i can't believe the help we've recieved from our awesome family and friends to get this expedition underway very moving!) anyways enough witht the sop the tent is super sweet, but as with everything, it wasn't just a bolt on and walk away job infact as of now i'm still waiting for the pat to come in to resolve the issue. The issue being that the ladder that you use to climb up into the tent also acts as the support for the unfolded side, the issue we have is that the bumblebee is so damn tall that the standart ladder doesn't reach the ground HAHAHAHA*sigh i actually was a little bit shitty about this when i found out, but im getting over it. We've ordered an extension for the ladder and that should be here tomorow. then we'll be ready to head off. We are hoping to have the Bumblebee all packed up and ready to go tomorow, so i'll take lots of pics of the loaded rig and do another update for you all. :)
Check out the awesomeness below that is the roof top tent in its folded out glory!!
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Craig, I think you are a closet journalist at heart. Love your tales as they evolve. Look forward to hearing more as you travel. Have a great time and make sure you post heaps of comments and photos. Take care. Penny
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