Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving. ~Albert Einstein

well, i took the battle truck up to blenheim to my grand parents farm for a bit of TLC and give it an oil change, water change, filter change and generally get some things sorted for it.

everything went well, the oil in it was disgusting, changed that, changed the oil, then the fun started. it really started to piss down and i couldnt quite get the plug for the radiator back in place after id flushed it, and was getting quite wet in the rain. my uncle came over to have a look at the magnificent battle truck, and passed on this piece of advice.

“do you know what would make that job a whole lot easier?”

“no-what”

“if you wound up your drivers side window the rain wouldnt get in it’

oh great. i had completely forgotten if left the window right down as i was reaching in to start it quite a bit when i was flushing the radiator i forgot all about it when it started raining. sigh.

i ended the day reasonably happy with my skills at pretending to be a diesel mechanic, id even re routed a couple of pipes in the engine to make it run smoother, fitted another pipe to the turbo so that was all sweet, tightened up a couple of belts so that the aircon actually works now, but it was still quite hard to start some days, so i ran it down to blenheim toyota where my mate jp works, and he did a compression test on it and had a look and gave me some bad news.

the engine of this fine battle truck it worn, but the compression is down in the back 2 cylinders, and you have a lot of blowback in the engine (smoke going everywhere but where its sposed to) so the rings may be gone as well, and one of your injectors leak which is why its hard to start.”

so next on the list is some second hand fuel injectors from the wreckers, then i might get really brave and take the head off the engine and hopefully see if the gasket is just leaking causing the lack of compression, but i dont think it will be that, and im buggared if i know even where to start replacing the rings, so that sounds like it may cost me some dollars. sigh. but jp said i could just keep running it, and it will still go, just not as well as it could do. maybe when ive got some spare time ill delve deeper into the battle trucks inner sanctum and see what the hells going on in there, in the mean time ive just added road side cover to my insurance for 40 bucks a year just in case shit does happen

this is my new battletruck, a barry crump special.

its a toyota hilux ‘92, its brilliant. i dont have a co-pilot like barry crump did (scotty) but i do have access to some dogs, so i could possibly re-create his adverts and drive off a massive cliff then wait for the dogs at the bottom hahah

i bought it on trademe, with a very cheeky low bid. i just chucked it on before i went out training on sunday, then got back from riding and the auction had closed and i had a truck!!! brilliance really.

its up in tauranga at the moment so the dude up theres going to chuck it on a boat down which is mint, should be here in a week or so.

the best feature about the battle truck is that it can run on cooking oil. seriously it can. so whenever im a bit low on diesel ill roll some stuff out of the kitchen, apparently its even better for the engine and it runs smoother and better for the enviroment. that whole carbon footprint thing again i guess.

wish it was here a touch earlier, ive gotta drive down to invercargil this weekend for testing some wheels out on the track

the academy and bikenz are doing a study type thing and trying to decide whats better out of mavics,zenn disks, and front mavics and zenns and tri-spokes, cause apparently a tri spoke on the front is actually better, but something about a disk helps even it out, so theyre not sure whats better. ill find out i guess over the weekend. i think it involves me doing numerous laps with different wheel combos on at different wattages with srms on, so it should be interesting times ahead!