One step at a time

Well, Tabitha's not so much travelling at the moment as sitting in our parking lot rusting relaxing. Least, we hope she's not rusting - have noticed some rust underneath, but haven't had a chance, and am not really sure how, to assess just how bad it is.

Tabitha's relaxing because we can't get her started. I drove her home no problems, but we suspect that lots of sitting in traffic, at night, with little chance to get some good volts up (gotta love London driving) meant that her battery dropped below the point where it could start the diesel engine. Charging her off our poor little Fiesta did no good, so our next step was to buy a mains to outdoor wassitthingy adaptor so we could charge the battery from the household mains (one of our sockets has an excellent in-build circuit-breaker, just in case there was any dodgy wiring).

It arrived this week, and we were looking forward to getting her going today.

We plugged the adaptor in the mains socket. We got the lead out of the van. We noticed the socket in Tabitha was female, so connected the male end of the lead. We took the other lead inside... the adaptor also ends in a female socket. Bugger. I don't know how the previous owner used the mains on Tabitha, but while I don't know much about eletronics, I do know that you can't plug a female into a female...

Shush girls ;)

So we're back at square one. Advice from the Bedford CF messageboard suggests that Tabitha should really be an outie, so we're going to buy another socket and give Tabitha's electrics some gender reassignment.

Inside the girl, today's task was to paint the ceiling of the cab. She originally had some vile blue plastic stuff stuck to her there, but it was ripped, and being somewhat curious, I ripped it further to see what was underneath. Rust, and lots of it, we first thought. It was only after buying a truckload of rust paint, and peeling off the blue plastic today, that we discovered that the 'rust' was actually some kind of yellow-brown dried foam stuff. Insulation maybe? No idea, but it's coming off now, albeit with a lot of paint stripper, acetone, and elbow grease. We won't be painting her today.

Will also started changing the cupboard and drawer knobs inside. A couple were missing, so I thought it would be nice to replace the whole lot with some nicer ones. A pretty minor task, but it's these small touches that I believe will make travelling in Tabitha a much nicer experience.

So, of the long long long list of things that we want to do to her, we've barely scratched the surface, but it feels good to be working on her together, and there's no rush.

Peta