Where to start? Dave noticed that Big Bertha has been consuming coolant (antifreeze) in the last few months. Around a litre over 1000km. Not a lot, but concerning nonetheless. It could be for many reasons – being a modern engine, the coolant circulates everywhere: in the EGR cooler, block, cylinder head, compressor, and the high pressure and low pressure intercoolers. […]
We stopped for a roadside pee and afterwards Big Bertha refused to start. Our toilet break lasted six days!! There were signs of our impending problem that morning – when we were a looong way from civilisation and had parked a few kilometres off the road! Big Bertha really didn’t want to get going and grumbled when we tried to […]
Do you remember when there was no Internet or World Wide Web? It hardly seems possible that we survived without it. It is now like a drug – we are almost addicted to it. Five days without WiFi and we are climbing the walls. Some days Francine and I actually have to talk to each other! We normally satisfy our […]
“But how are we going to wash our sheets and towels?!” – That was Francine’s first reaction when Dave suggested a life of living in a truck. “Oh, we’ll find somewhere. There are always laundries around, most of the campsites have washing machines and, if they don’t, you can always find someone willing to do your washing for you for […]
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 […]