We decided to stay another 2 days, mostly because I discovered a broken bracket on the front anti-roll bar. It is a serious bar about 55mm diameter!!! Thought I had been imagining the tracking being a bit odd. We are not going anywhere like this, and it is of course now Sunday so no welding shop til Monday. Maybe at Babinda or certainly Innisfail. |
| What it should look like |
By Monday morning we are seriously down on battery power. They are not holding up like they used to, and they are now four years old... Should have bought the Blue River batteries before we left. Thought about it; oh well! We will have to run, 'the generator' which is permissible 8am til 8pm. The 2.6KVA Kipor puts 16amps into The Redarc BMS. The load gets 6Amps (the fridge takes nearly 5 and runs about 70% of the time - it is warm here as well as wet...) and 10Amps boost into the batteries. They come up ever so slowly... we will see how we go.Decided we better get some more petrol for the generator anyway, so headed out to the highway intersection - Murrawinni. filled up the Suzuki too. No 'Womans Day' for Maz tho - her usual Monday morning treat. Raining raining still, Under trees too so absolutely no solar from the amorphous panels, altho the new crystalline panels on the front turret occasionally give a tiny bit to the bus batteries. ( the controller has volt and current readouts) No opportunity to try the satellite system either thanks to the trees.
Eventually Trevor turns up (4PM) with the welded bracket. Looks like a decent job. The crack is close to a bolt hole so we agreed he would stay away from that to avoid re-drilling 14mm or the needing a round file job. I had already bent the distorted bracket back to nearly round. Used the tow bar 50x50mm mount and the neck as a lever. Did not even draw blood - which is rare for me. Re-installed without drama. We were lucky we didn't lose the nolothane bushes...
