Garage: Part 2

While we started off being on the ramp, a week or so in, we were relegated onto the garage floor. I had hoped to drop the front suspension, but now we were back on four wheels, our focus instead turned to the electrics. The welders focused on the front panel we had just bought, first chopping off Ruby's old acne covered face in preparation for the new young one. Ruby could at least seek some comfort in knowing she wasn’t the first middle aged woman to head to South Americas for a face lift.

In order to get to this point, the windscreen was now out, along with the dashboard and I was faced with a horror of my own creation; the front cab wiring. When Ruby was first put together, it was in my college, with bits that I ripped out from whatever car was lying around my workshop. By this point, Ruby was the VW equivalent of Frankenstein. It had gotten to the point where I was almost embarrassed for people to look at the front electrics, as it might make them question my ability as a mechanic. It’s always the way… Professional chefs have messy kitchens, mechanics have dodgy running cars.

This was my major project. 

The front electrics operated to a point, but we often had problems due to loose or bad wiring, whether that was because Aimee had climbed up under the dash or not. Then it was a rather confusing time to try and trace the errant wire in, amidst the mess of spaghetti I had created. For a while I had wanted to rip the whole thing out and start again, but this is no quick fix. First, we wrestled out the dashboard.

It wasn’t just the aesthetics that were a problem. When I had first set up the front I had based the system on the original VW one, and just included a larger fuse board. As the years had passed, we had added to the system. Now we had reached a point where, if you were unfortunate enough to be driving at night in the rain, the headlights would flash in time with the wipers. If you operated the handbrake enthusiastically the radio would turn off and the heater matrix fuse had blown some time ago. While on a day to day basis it was fine, I couldn’t help but long for a proper system that could handle everything not this train wreck.

Now was the perfect time. With the dashboard out anyway, I had the best access. I bought a big universal fuse board from Amazon, that would house not only the fuses but also all the relays, and then I set about deciphering our system, 6 years later. I began to create a proper wiring diagram as well as a labelled picture of the fusebox. If future me needed to trace a wire, it would now be an easy task. Compared to the current situation, which would normally feature me half lying on the cab floor with the brake pedal stuck in my hip, test light in hand, randomly prodding wires and wondering if they were connected or whether they should be. 

As I had picked a completely different fuse board for our system, I scrapped VW’s wiring diagram and went for my own custom system. We now had an ignition relay, properly loaded cables and designated earth points. Needless to say, this was a pretty time consuming project. Not only did I have to plan and redesign the whole system, I had to adjust the existing wiring to fit. I wanted nice neat cables, routed in conduit. However, everything was a different length. This often meant cutting the wire, and soldering in a length of wire between the two connections. Fortunately, I had treated myself to a big box of heat shrink and a proper crimping tool to make the job more manageable. While I got stuck into this, Lee tackled the inside roof of our pop top. 

Sometime, back in Colombia, our headlining had parted company with the roof. We had bought some spray glue and tried to reattach it when we entered the country, but after a measly 48 hours it had all fallen off again. The thin foam layer glued between the fabric and the roof had disintegrated, meaning every time we stuck it up it just pulled different bits of foam off. It wasn’t easy to glue either. We tried to work around the roof catches riveted to the ceiling, while fighting gravity, as it stretched the fabric further and further out of shape. In the end, we had lost our patience and let the lot hang in a huge annoying air bubble. It seemed the best course of action would be to remove it completely and simply paint the roof. To fit more fabric, we would probably need to remove the roof completely, and anyway, I’m not too in love with ‘leatherette’. One of the garage dogs, Brandon was much more into it.

Naturally, nothing is as simple as 'just painting’ the roof. Under the fabric was clumps of degraded foam and the glue that still held it there. It took a lot of cleaning to get back to the roof itself, a rough fibreglass surface. As they always covered them in fabric, this was unfinished fibreglass. Rough, uneven and also very flexible.

We went through around 7L of filler to get a surface that was close to level, before we could even start to think about paint. Naturally this took a lot of time and resulted in many sore arms and necks, after hours of sanding the ceiling. The garage, at least, had an electric sander which definitely made things more manageable. For the best part of a week we were very glad we had access to the shower.

That being said, the shower did leave a lot to be desired. With the humidity reading off the scale and the normal temperature inside being around 15 degrees, you wanted a nice hot shower to wash off the layers of caked on filler and dust. The shower though, was one of those electrical ones. This particular one gave lukewarm water at a reasonable water pressure, and hot water when you fiddled with it using a pair of pliers (there was no tap anymore) until it was a small dribble. A lovely hot dribble, but not one really capable of cleaning much. Our solution was to heat and fill two buckets of water on the stove and then use our USB shower along with the regular shower. This, while being a bit of effort, was well worth it after a day of roof prep. We hoped that in the end all the work, and a fair amount of money to do it, would be worth it.

While we had been busy, several days had passed since anyone apart from us had worked on the van. For the first time since arriving in the garage, we were starting to get slightly twitchy about how long we had been in garage and how much work had actually been completed.

After cutting off the panel, she sat faceless, while we butchered the inside. I continued with my electrical project, which was slowly taking shape and we hoped that soon, the pace would pick up a bit and everyone would descend on Ruby, armed with power tools. But the day just never seemed to come. 

Carlos, who had, eventually, welded the front panel back on had left, along with another bloke. Apparently, the other bloke had accused the owner of not paying him, and it turned out that Carlos had taken both his money and the other guys and done a runner. Now with as many cars as ever, and two pairs of hands down it seemed we were at the bottom of the list. 

With the new panel on though, I could now try and sort our wiper issue. When we had bought Ruby she had a seized wiper motor. The previous owner had decided that the best way to fix that would be to put some mole grips on the splined section of the wipers arms and ‘loosen things up a bit’. Needless to say, all they achieved was to completely trash the wiper arms and so our wipers were attached with screws, not the best system. Now with good access again, it seemed like the perfect time to sort this problem. Mike, our friend in The States, kindly sent us some replacement parts as they were none available here. While these winged their way to us, we headed into the capital to meet up with our friend Alex who had got an Amazon parcel for us. This one contained a few bits and bobs but most importantly right now, the new fuse board.

We got lucky again here as Mauricio needed to deliver some car seats to someone in the capital and a prepaid taxi was heading that way. We jumped in for a free ride, saving ourselves a load of time and money. While the taxi got us a large part of the way, we still needed to navigate an hour's bus journey and half hour walk to get to his place. 

It was a short and sweet kind of visit, we paid for our stuff and left laden with several boxes which I would delight in going through later. In the meantime, something else important was about to happen. 

After spending long days in the garage working on Ruby, we returned to our room every night, only to be greeted by a sad Aimee every time. Sometimes you could hear howling and scratching at the door from outside. She crawled on to our laps at every opportunity and refused to be separated from us. While I love a needy cat, it was for all the wrong reasons. Like us, losing Lizzy had broken her. She was so confused and alone it broke our hearts. We all still felt the gap that Lizzy had left in our lives and we felt that we  weren’t really ready for another cat. At the same time, we knew that some day we would get her a companion and now seemed a logical time. Not only were we next to a huge city, where adopting a kitten was a very easy thing to do, but we also had the time to introduce them in relatively neutral territory and complete all the paperwork before the border crossing. As you need a 6 week period to vaccinate a kitten before trying to cross the border, you do have to time things right.

And so, we found ourselves in an Uber leaving Alex’s house and heading towards Tumbaco. I had arranged for us to adopt a kitten with someone via Facebook and we were a mixture of sad and excited. After a short journey, we stood outside on the pavement and waited for the lady to appear. Soon, she arrived with a howling laundry basket and presented us with three kittens. We picked the one that was trying to escape as it seemed to have the right kind character and that was it. Five minutes later we had another cat, as easy as that. 

Despite the cost, we ordered a taxi back as it seemed a little unfair to drag our new kitten around on the bus. While we sat in the back, we debated over a name over the continued howling. In tradition with the names of all our cats, she was named Alexis, after the band Alexisonfire. After a little while she had settled, and this adorable ball of fluff got ready to meet her big sister and Lexi had become a permanent part of our travelling family.

Back at the garage, we put the pet carrier on the bed. Aimee jumped up, sniffed it, and promptly hid under the bed, not to be seen again that night. Despite the fact she was ten times bigger, she was terrified. Lexi on the other hand had no problem crawling into the sheets between us, purring loudly, and falling asleep. We had a strange mix of emotions that night. It was impossible not to love a cute little kitten, but at the same time when she did something that reminded us of Liz it was impossible not to be sad. Naturally all of this magnitude was lost on her, she fell asleep inside my hoody for the evening, only waking up to poo on the bed in the middle of the night.