Big Bertha’s tyre’s cost Big Bucks! And failure is either due to punctures or blowouts, which are normally caused by running an under inflated tyre at high speed. The set tyre pressures are governed by the axle weight, speed and surface types – all taken from the Michelin tyre data sheet. Dave fitted a tyre pressure monitoring system (TPMS), with […]
Big Bertha is a complicated beast; our hot water and radiator heating comes from our Alde boiler. We can heat that water using gas, electricity (when we are plugged into a shore supply) or using the engine heat (when driving). You can imagine the plumbing involved! And you can also imagine our dismay when we discovered a puddle underneath it […]
Bertha had not benefited from so much attention for a long while, as she received at TM Trucking’s “spa” and she made it known that she was not ready to leave soon. Every time we took a test drive, there was some new small issue that needed sorting. A week after our “goodbye” braai (bbq) we were still there! However, […]
Big Bertha is around ten years old now and, given the next leg of our journey will be in South America, where there is no MAN presence, we decided to treat BB to a top to bottom full service. Choosing the right garage that would not treat BB as just another truck was not easy. However, I asked for recommendations […]
Big Bertha, our expedition truck, has travelled a whopping 250,000km!! BB left the MAN factory in Germany on 13 February 2012 before travelling to Bocklet in Koblenz, Germany, to have the body fitted. This took around a year and BB’s first owners, The Overlanding Family, registered BB in the UK on 21 February 2013 and covered 199,608km before handing BB […]
Big Bertha has been on the road since 2013 and some parts are coming to the end of their useful life. BB has air suspension (springs) on her rear axle and the air bellows that support the weight of the truck eventually wear out. We noticed that BB sometimes sank overnight on one rear side and on investigation Dave found […]
Although choosing to stay in Zambia due to COVID 19 for all of 2020, we unfortunately did not have the opportunity to explore Zambia as much as we would have liked. Big Bertha developed a front and rear wheel hub bearing oil leak in March and this was not fixed until December. This is the biggest disadvantage of travelling in […]
When driving off road, it can be very advantageous to deflate our tyres thereby greatly extending their footprint, or contact area. Deflating helps driving in sand for example. Letting air out of our tyres is fairly straightforward using my ARB deflator from my desert driving days – it’s a device that extracts the inner Schrader valve, but keeps it captive. […]
Having waved ‘au revoir’ to Big Bertha on the dockside at Sheerness Port on a blustery July day, we have just been very happily reunited 34 days later in a hot and sunny Walvis Bay, Namibia. BB was shipped here on the Glovis Summit, a so-called RoRo (roll on roll off) vessel. The ship called in at a number of […]
We have been busy readying Big Bertha for the next leg of our adventure: Southern Africa. Several companies have helped us and we would like to say a big ‘thank you’ here. MAN Truck and Bus, Exeter A big thank you to Alastair, Leah, Stuart, Sam and Matt for looking after BB whilst in the workshop for its service. BB’s […]