The alternator has landed

Yes, I finally got my hands on it this morning and rushed it round to A2B - and it fits. Huge sigh of relief. So hopefuly they can nail it into place this afternoon and tomorrow I can take it to Rob at Bin Sulayem Garage for testing, and then to the TRA for registration. The door is re-painted, the few odd jobs they had to do are done and who knows, we might even have the chance to take it for The Final Shakedown before the DC.

Tyres for the trailer have had to be sourced from UK, because none that are here have the right load rating. And the supplier in UK couldn't ship outside the EU. So I ordered them for delivery to my Dad in Kingsbridge, who then had to individually wrap them (why?) before TNT would pick them up on Friday. As long as they arrive sometime this week that'll do, because I don't need the trailer till this Friday.

Lots of information has now been posted on the ADDC website, including the start list where I am seeded at 214, ahead of Fadi Melki (who beat me last year) and behind Dave Mabbs (who I beat last year) - go figure. But who cares, once we get going the numbers are academic. It looks a strong field - maybe another top 10 finish isn't on the cards.

I've reached the point where excitement and panic are pretty equally balanced. Last year's cooling problems and this year's disaster at Hail are still too fresh in my mind. I just want to get Day 1 out of the way without any dramas, then I can settle down.

See ya later, alternator

There's not much that attaches to the serpentine belt that hasn't been changed since the Beast came into my posession. The AC compressor has been binned and replaced with a spring-loaded jockey wheel. The water pump has been replaced with one that doesn't have a viscous fan. The P/S pump just got changed as well. And now it's the turn of the alternator. (I'll say that again for those of you who didn't get it first time - the TURN of the alternator. It rotates, you see - please try to keep up.)

The nice man at Bosch told me the voltage regulator had ceased to regulate and the bearings were noisy, and maybe he could fix it. Yeah, right. Unfortunately, the required parts for this Delphi alternator are 'not coming in Dubai' to quote my friend the Grumpy Goat. So after fruitless waiting for Mr Bosch to fix it, and equally fruitless searching for parts in the darkest recesses of Dubai and Sharjah, I decided to hit the internet - because you can find anything on Ebay.

Bingo! Mr Kovaleski in Connecticut had the exact alternator in its original GM package for a starting bid of $100, and when the hammer came down no-one else wanted it. So Mr TNT wil be picking it up shortly, hurrah.

Other bijou problemettes have been addressed by A2B, the fans re-wired, the hub re-sealed and the door taken off for beating and painting. So sometime soon we should be able to get it re-registered.

The clock continues to tick.

Long Way Out

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. My business partner and part-time blog-napper knows a few people. People who know…people. A certain celebrity was visiting, and would like to go out in a race car. So when he asked if the Beast would be ready, I naturally lied and said yes. This was before I realized that the pump would take two days to fit and that the oil line had been sabotaged.

But by dint of ignoring anything vaguely work-related for a week or so, it all came together, and on Wednesday we were out in the desert with that star of stage, screen and TV – Charley Boorman! He and his sidekick, Billy ‘Biketruck’ Ward were out for an appearance at the Dubai Literary Festival, and had a day free. So Dave Mabbs (Team FJ), Mark Powell (Team Saluki) and I shared the arduous task of blatting round the desert for the best part of a day with them, which was great fun.

Well, most of it – except the bit where I managed to prop the car up on a damn great rock near the Saddle, and the bit where the alternator packed up and the battery went flat, and we had to be towed. Both times with Billy ‘the Jinx’ on board. So I explained that they’d actually been on a shakedown, and as bikers accustomed to things going horribly wrong, they took it in their stride. And a nicer couple of blokes you couldn’t wish to meet.

We ended up seeing their show on Friday, which was great fun, and then meeting up again on Saturday at a charity fundraiser for Tony Jordan, a biker involved in a horrendous crash at Dubai Autodrome in November.

Anyway, the race car is back at the Al Quoz Hospital for Poorly Race-cars, the alternator is allegedly being fixed elsewhere and I’m starting to panic because the DC looms ever closer.

Still pumping..

How hard can it possibly be to fit a power steering pump? A couple of bolts, a couple of hoses and Bob’s your uncle. If only life was that simple.

Turns out the pump reservoir wasn’t exactly made for this pulley, and the pulley fouls it, so I have to insert a washer behind the pulley to make everything fit. Then the pump has to be spaced off the block so the pulleys line up. Looks like about 10mm, so I get an aluminium spacer made up, which needs a bit of filing to make it fit round the bolt head which hold the existing plate onto the block. But of course then the pump retaining bolts are too short, and of course they are UNC thread which means I have to go hunting for them. Another hunt into darkest Awir produces the required 6-rib drive belt 2040mm long. But the plumbing turns out to be complicated enough to necessitate a house-call from the Hose Doctor, but at last it’s all working. A five minute job has taken almost 2 days.

Except – there’s a pool of oil under the car when I stop. And it’s not ATF, it’s engine oil. Remember the hose which failed in Hail? Well, its neighbour has decided to leak in exactly the same place, which is a bit of a coincidence. Inspection shows it has also been cut on the top surface. I’m now convinced that someone sabotaged the car while it was in Hail. If only they’d known how crap our power steering was, they could have saved themselves the trouble…

By now I’m on first name terms with the guys at Advanced Technical and Engineering Services (ATES) in Al Quoz, so they make me up a replacement hose while I wait, and finally everything works.

But why, you might ask, am I doing all this myself? Because, dear reader, a certain VIP visitor has been promised a passenger ride in the Beast the next day!

Pump my Ride

The interweb is an amazing thing. Once you know what your problem is, there’s bound to be something out there to help you solve it. It would be more useful if it told you all that stuff before the problem occurred, but somehow that never happens. Which brings me to the question of power steering pumps, about which I now know enough to bore you senseless.

Looking back, I find that we’d already replaced the p/s pump once, because it wasn’t giving pressure. We then replaced it just before the rally for the same reason, but the pulley then wasn’t tight on the shaft. (Pressing the pulley onto the shaft, and expecting it to stay there, is one of those really naff American engineering ideas.) Then we replaced the pump again before day 2 and the pulley was welded onto the shaft, and even that didn’t last. Are you beginning to see a pattern here?

The reason for these repeated failures is now pretty clear. The p/s pump had a remote reservoir, connected to the pump by a flexible hose. The pressure side of the pump goes to the steering box, the return from there comes back to the tank, from which the pump is sucking fluid. And it sucks big-time. According to my new friends at KRC, this pipe should be able to withstand a vacuum of 28” Hg., and if it’s not, it will collapse under the suction of the pump – especially if there’s a bend in the pipe, which there is. And when that happens, the pump will fail – either the seals will fail, or the pump will stall, in which case something else will give – like the non-existent bond between the shaft and the pulley, for example. Apparently this is the biggest cause of p/s pump failure, but you can eliminate this potential weak spot by using a bolt-on reservoir.

A new GM p/s pump is Dh 1700, without a pulley or a reservoir. An after-market KRC pump with bolt on reservoir and splined pulley is only slightly more. Yes, 17 splines give the pulley something to actually grip onto, and a nut tightened to 46 lb/ft to make sure it damn well stays there. I like the sound of that. So I’ve given the plastic another good spanking and ordered a shiny new pump with all the toys, and eagerly await its arrival. The only downside of this arrangement is that a bolt-on reservoir tends to make the fluid run hotter, but since I will use a slightly larger 6.5” pulley, the pump will run slower and hopefully that won’t be too much of an issue.

No-one has been much help on the ARB front diff problem. I have the part number of the flange which I need to replace, but even appealing direct to ARB hasn’t produced any response. So I guess I’ll run with the standard front diff.

Last weekend I was down in Liwa to run through this years Day 4 route (basically last year’s day 3) for Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, to check that no-one has built any new roads, fences, camel farms or other obstacles in our path. Turns out the only major issue is at the start, where last year’s seldom-used gatch track is now a major construction highway, so they need to change that bit. The worst bit of the route – and of the rally – is the section from Ghayathi Rd back to the Crescent Rd, about 30km of unadulterated hell. Driving it with no vehicle tracks to follow othe took us nearly 2 hours, during which the car wasn’t horizontal for more than about 5 seconds. One bowl follows another, and it’s as a soft as a very soft thing. And in another month’s time it’ll be even worse, and as hot as hell. At 355km, Day 4 looks like being a long, long day, and I foresee many cars being time-barred at PC4. Let’s hope we’re not one of them!

Hail Day 3

Once again we are up at sparrow-fart to unleash The Beast from its cage that is parc ferme. It's barely light and it's damned cold - a thermometer reads 3 degrees c as we head out through Hail for another 100km-plus liaison to the stage start. The steering is OK-ish - there's a wobble at certain speeds on the road and I suspect the steering damper is on its way out.

On the road, the engine water temperature never exceeds 50 - and that's without using the twin electric fans! So we seem for have overcome that problem at least. At the start we head off for a 212km stage, again new to us all. It promises some rough and rocky sections and I worry about tyre pressures. In the end I stick with 18/19 as the majority of the route is sand.

The route starts off with some wide plains where we can use some of the Beast's speed, but soon we're into twisty, bumpy tracks among small dunes, and areas of sharp stones hidden in the sand. We run wide at one point and I see a nasty rock just too late to avoid - the front right is punctures and the rim is damaged. We swing into action with the trolley jack and rattle gun. We're not exactly F1 standard, but our wheel change is pretty slick, and we head off to the viewing point just ahead where Sheila, Osama and Desert Knights service team await. Then I realise that the rear right is damaged too, and when we stop just past them to change it, they run up to assist in another wheel change. Oh, and the battery clamp has come loose and the battery is just lying there, and the wash-bottle is only held on by one bolt. So we ditch the wash-bottle, refit the battery, bin the damaged wheel and rim and continue. But carefully - because we've now run out of spare wheels.

The steering is a bit stiff but manageable - until we reach 144 kms, when it becomes very heavy. Oh no, not again! We've lost the belt - and the welded-on pulley. This time the pulley is gone for good and we're completely stuffed. We inform control through the Iritrak and wait for the sweep team to arrive.

Their brief is to tow us to the nearest tarmac - but the guys from Jeddah 4x4 go the extra mile - well, actually it's more like an extra 100km. They argue with the police, who finally allow them to tow us to the outskirts to Hail, where we get a recovery truck to deliver us back to Rally Control. (Towing through Hail in the rush hour would have been suicidal!)

So once again we take 8 hours of penalties. But we do have a finish - 29th place (i.e. last), which is better than 5 others who failed to start day 3! The closing ceremony is scheduled for 'sometime after 5pm' and we're determined to get the car over the finish ramp, come what may. It eventually kicks off at 9pm, by which time most of us have lost the will to live, having been hanging around since about 3pm. The engine runs - but with no water pump operating, I don't want it running for any more than a minute or two at a time.

Finally it's our turn, and we park it on the ramp to shake hands with Someone Important - probably the new head of SAMF. We accept our finishers' trophies and suddenly it's all over.

Not our greatest rally, really, but we've had fun. Richard has been an absolute star, learning rally nav and tripmeter-calibration on the job, getting stuck in with some awesome bush-engineering. What can I say about Sheila? She's been running the show, organising food and running around with Osama out on the stages, and out with various other strange men to find parts. Osama, Tariq and all the guys from Desert Knights get a special mention for all their help, as do Jeddah 4x4 Club, whose menbers form the sweep team. Matar Al Mansouri, who stayed late to help us fix our oil pipe, Saeed Al Hameli for the transport, Elie Semaan (the Clerk of the Course) who probably should have given us even more penalties than he did - and so many spectators and competitors who became our friends and saviours over the course of a week in Hail. Many, many thanks to you all - and yes, despite everything, we'll probably be back next year.

The results are here.

Another day, another disaster

We're up at the crack of dawn for our 100+km liaison to the start of Stage 2, which is completely different from last year's stage. A new railway blocks access to the part of the desert we used in the last two years, so it's terra incognita as far as most competitors are concerned.

We start fairly cautiously, aware of the possibility that we may have more belt-related problems. All goes well for the fisrt 10km - then, yes you guessed it, the belt comes off. And the power steering pulley. A short walk back into the stage and I retrieve both - but how to press the pulley back onto the shaft, to at least get us out of the desesrt? The Sweep Team come, look, and continue, and then the police arrive, look and hang around.

A plan evolves. I drain the p/s reservoir into a handy water bottle (the reservoir conveniently holds 500ml of ATF) and dismantle the pump from the block. Then we sandwich the pulley and the pump between the hydraulic jack and the rear tow-hitch and press it back together. This is not the standard workshop method and in fact knackers the pump (we find later), but we're pretty pleased with our bush engineering. We can't get the pulley on far enough to line up, but with the belt 2/3 on the puiley it's enough to get us out of the desert. We trundle back to the start, nursing the engine at 2200rpm, followed by our police escort.

Our journey back to Hail is slow and uneventful, and we divert to the Sinaiya to find a workshop to solve our problems. It's run by Khalid, and Arnold, a pony-tailed Filipino, is the foreman. They seem happy to stop whatever they are doing to help us out, Arnold sources a new pump and then beats the old pulley back into shape (yes, we knackered that too, and he couldn't find one the same). As well as pressing it back on, Arnold welds it to the shaft for good measure to prevent it slipping off again. We head back to rally control, just in time to put the car into parc ferme. Everyone is happy to see us and offers sympathy and encouragement.

Another 8 hours of penalties are added to our one hour from day 1, but we are assured a start on day 3. We're last (of course) but we're back in the race!