Dec 7 (Day 311) - Cervantes to Jurien Bay

We celebrated our first combined morning on the road with pancakes for breakfast, which Bek cooked for us (thanks Beks!)

 

Breakfast together

We spent a bit of time looking at the manual water pump tap in their caravan which didn't seem to be working, but after disassembling it and finding nothing of concern it turned out the water tank was empty! Apparently it had overflowed when they'd gone to fill it before leaving so they thought it was full but something else must have caused that.

By about 11am we'd finished everything and headed down to Cervantes for a swim.

The ocean at Cervantes was simply gorgeous! Beautiful white sand and clear light green water blending into darker blue further out.

 

Thirsty Point, Cervantes

After a good half hour swim we dried off and headed up to a park for lunch. 

We then intended to head out to Indian Ocean Drive, and the GPS showed a track north rather than doubling back. We decided to take this, but found it was a sand track. It looked pretty reasonable so we decided to give it a shot. If this is sounding familiar from Lancelin, the irony did strike us later! No this time we didn't get bogged, but what started out as nice wide firm sand track slowly got narrower and narrower and narrower! It was only a bit steep in a couple of places but the sides of the van had a thorough exfoliation from the leaves of the trees along this track, and they knocked the magnetic towing mirrors off Mim's parents' Mazda BT50!

Trying to assess the problem on our van

So we were all relieved when we came to the end, and were just pulling out onto the road when Mim's mum called over the radio to say our van was running sideways down the road! We'd only been back on the road for 50m or so but even in that time I could feel something wasn't right. So we pulled over again and saw the rear right wheel was right back against the mud flap! It looked exactly the same type of problem as when we broke the leaf springs on the Cape, but it was back even further this time!

The separated set of leaf springs -
there's supposed to be a bolt coming
up through that hole holding all the leaves together!

On closer inspection we saw the springs themselves weren't broken thankfully but we did find what had happened. As we were right on the side of the road with a bit of a slope (as you can see above), we couldn't easily do the job there so we pulled the mudflap off to stop the tyre dragging, then gently nursed the car around 180 degrees to go back to the exit of the sand track where it was off the road, flat and relatively firm to make jacking the van up much safer.

So what had gone wrong? Well - the leaf spring assembly consists of several different length strips of spring steel stacked one on top of each other, going from shortest at the bottom to longest at the top. At the centre of this assembly there is a bolt going through all the pieces of steel to hold them all together, and this bolt had snapped. That meant the individual leaves could move forwards and backwards independently of each other, rather than staying together as a unit. And since the axle is attached to these springs, when we'd applied the brakes these leaves had simply slid backwards and taken the whole axle back with them!

Pulling the wheel off

Grandad helping Matt cut the thread off the
U-bolt to hold the springs together

Once we worked out what the problem was it wasn't too difficult in principle to cobble together a temporary fix - the hard part was finding a bolt exactly the right thickness, but eventually Mim found a spare U-bolt which had the right sized thread. Matt cut that down, then we damaged the thread at one end with a pair of pliers and screwed a nut onto it (to try to approximate a fixed bolt head), popped the springs on the thread, added another nut at the other end and clamped them together as best we could without removing everything. Matt is getting more and more involved in these sorts of jobs and really likes the hands-on mechanical side of things.

Bush Mechanics Inc

Finishing up the job

It took probably a couple of hours but once it was done it satisfactorily got us the 20km up the road to Jurien Bay where we bought some high-tensile bolts to do the job properly (there was a risk the mild steel ones we'd used might tear over time). In Jurien Bay we got some food from the IGA, refuelled and refilled the water tanks (particularly for Mim's parents as theirs was empty, although we'd gone through one tank since leaving Perth). That done, we headed east for about 20km to a rest stop for the night. The first one we stopped at was lovely but had no phone signal (which would have meant no evening for Greg spent writing the blog, woo hoo). So we moved onto the next one which wasn't as nice but had signal.

While the girls cooked tea, I pulled the wheel back off, undid all our work this afternoon and refitted it with the new high-tensile steel bolt, nut and a nyloc lock nut locked together with the high-tensile nut and with Loctite on the threads to make triply sure they don't come undone! This took most of the evening, and Matt did probably half the job.

We're not really getting very far each day in our travels! But we don't have a particular timeline we're trying to follow at this stage, other than we only have about a week and a half before we intend to be back in Perth.

-- Greg