The Consequences Of Bad Decisions
When it comes to building something that's as complex as an overland truck, you'd better have all your ducks lined up. And if you're smart, every quacker in your flock will be clever, and highly skilled. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. With our builder, not only were the ducks not lined up, they weren't even swimming in the same pond.
Three of the four screws had fallen out. This is the leading edge on the roof. If the last screw had come out, the wind from high speed driving would have lifted the panel off the mount, and torn it from the truck. If it were to hit another vehicle, or a person on the roadside, it could easily kill them.
Our truck build is the inevitable outcome of just such a flock. The litany of mistakes caused by bad judgement and improper implementation left us with an exploration truck that had a totally different focus than what we were expecting. Instead of exploring the planet we live on, for the first two years of ownership, and indeed even longer, we were exploring every new problem that cropped up, seemingly every week.
From small, but still serious things like the under length screws that were supposed to hold the solar panels on the roof, to potentially life threatening catastrophes like multiple broken body mounts that hold the 18,000 pound habitat to the truck frame, we've experienced it all. Luckily, we didn't experience the worst case scenario when the life threatening failures took place.
One of the two main body mounts that sheared completely off. If the failure had happened when we were going fast, and travelling around a curve in the highway, the shift in mass would have easily laid the truck over on its side. The result of such and event could easily be severe injury or death for those in the truck, and the same for anyone that the truck slid into.
Fortunately for us, our knowledge and skill set meant that we could correct the many defects and failures that were created by those whom we consider to be incompetent.
We were able to tackle each problem and either repair it, or in the case of the broken body mounts, re-engineer and completely rebuild them. Since we live 3900 kilometres away from the builder across an international border, and had no confidence in them anyway, we decided to fix every problem ourselves, big or small. It was a lot cheaper than paying for 700 gallons of diesel to drive to the builder, and back. Sure, for a failure as serious as the delamination of the outer skin on our driver side wall, we were asked to bring the truck back to the builder. But even in that case, the fix they rendered also failed in relative short order and it came as no surprise that we had to redo it ourselves, and at our own expense.
For the full story on the wall panel delamination, and the fraudulent deception perpetrated by the builder and his staff, go here.
For the smaller items, well… the builder literally described them all as "chicken shit". Seems to me that if you collect together enough bits of chicken shit, you end up with a big pile of crap. I guess the builder was right.
Click the links on the side of this page to read about our journey through hell. The upside at least is that the repairs and rebuilds we did ourselves have finally yielded the truck we thought we had contracted for in the first place. We now have a reliable and safe exploration truck that we can not only be proud of, but one that will also last us for many years.
It's painfully ironic that the worst decision of all wasn't one made by the builder, but rather the one we made in choosing this body builder in the first place. In hindsight, we should've had our truck built in Europe, or even built it ourselves. Any extra cost and logistic challenge would have paled in comparison to what we experienced here. Hopefully you'll never suffer the same mistake we made.
Read about the builder’s only real concern regarding our truck.