Onwards we go

This is Abby writing now, primarily to convince you that I'm actually here. If you are following this blog principally out of interest in the 101, you may as well skip to the end of the day's entry now as I'll let David add a little postscript.  For anyone else, it is still running and still leaking oil.

 

I thought a little update on what we've seen and done might be appropriate.  This morning we wandered around the old Portuguese fort of Azagula, in the town of El Jedida.  It's a UNESCO world heritage site and also frequently utilized as a film set.  There are several similar cities along the coast here but we may not have a chance to get to many more as we feel a strong urge to head south as quickly as possible.  My flight back from Dakar is booked for April 28^th which is in a little under two weeks from now.  The week's enforced sojourn in Spain somewhat ate into our margin of error timewise.

 

As far as the landscape goes, it really is so far surprisingly similar to the UK; perhaps to Yorkshire ?  The main differences that we notice are that instead of fields being bounded by hedges or fences as they would be at home, fields here are delimited by impenetrable forests of prickly pear.  Also, there is an abundance of working animals.  Donkey carts seem to outnumber cars by about 2 to one on the arterial north-south route we are using.  Horses are also pretty common.  As on previous days, the people we pass are all very obliging.  Police, children and lorry drivers are all waving and smiling.  We think it must help to have a vehicle that looks like an explosion of enormous tootie-frooties. 

 

Another thing I thought worth mentioning is an update on how we are doing in ourselves.  We are eating well and feeling pretty good.  We've found a French owned campsite to stay in tonight.  It has the luxury of hot showers and clean facilities so we are really happy.  We tend to stop for the evening around 6 pm as this gives us an hour before dark.  We also hope to start early as it's light from 6 but this has not materialised the last two days.  David is doing really well with the driving.  He is, however, usually covered with a thin sheen of oil stains and is unable to stop tinkering with the car engine or the interior of the living quarters unless I actually instruct him to.  I think that even when driving part of his brain is working on the next modification he can make.  Actually it's pretty comfortable as it is.  Mostly I sit up front and navigate or supply jelly beans at intervals but occasionally transfer to the back to read or prepare food.  I am somewhat surprised by histamines at the moment having been caught out by a few nasty insect bites in Spain which have variously swollen and changed colour.  Here in Morocco the insects are far fewer but we seem to have arrived right in the middle of a hayfever season and as I type this my nose is streaming.  However, we're not expecting the pollen count to be so high in Western Sahara.

 

Happy Easter to you all for Sunday.  Not very optimistic about finding a church for  tomorrow.  But then we couldn't find one last year in Tehran either.  Over to David now…. 

 

Numerous phone conversations & messages from Rog set me to checking the flame traps between the carbs and the sump (Rog's suggestion:  "to clean them, set fire to them, but not on the truck"), and the valley gasket.  I concluded my V8 doesn't have flame traps, and it doesn't have a breather from the crank case either, but it does of course have a valley gasket, which I unearthed after removing various paraphernalia from the top of the engine.  This is one of the bits that Salamanca did for us.

 

I was surprised to find that some of the bolts were quite loose;  I think they must have forgotten to tighten them.  I did them all up to about the correct torque (the one tool I left at home was the torque wrench), and was actually quite optimistic that I might be getting to the root of the problem.  However, having run all day and lost loads of oil again, I was wrong.  The oil is almost definitely leaking out of the valley gasket;  why a brand new gasket should be doing this is something I'm not sure of, and I'm also puzzled as to why it's leaking oil all along the uppermost edge, when in theory the oil within shouldn't be pressurised.

 

Whilst putting everything back together I also found that one of the LPG vacuum pipes was connected wrongly, meaning the damper pistons in the carbs were being sucked out of the way when running on petrol, not LPG.  The puzzling thing here is why the carbs would work at all when set up like this.  I changed it round but it doesn't seem to have made much difference.  Odd.

 

I could refit the valley gasket, but it would be a good few hours' work, and would involve draining the oil and water from the engine, so I'm loathe to do it unless I'm actually moderately sure it'll help.  Loose bolts notwithstanding, there's no reason why Salamanca's work should be problematic;  either the (metal) gasket fits or it doesn't?