Saturday 20 September 2008

Making progress, slowly

Making progress, but slowly, is how we left it at the end of our last full post nearly three weeks ago. Things slowed down even more after that, but we finally seem to have things moving in the right direction again.

At that stage we had done all that we could ourselves, and were waiting on the opinions of various people who we needed to certify certain aspects of the vehicle.

Because the Camel Trophy Land Rovers have roll cages fitted we needed to engage the services of a Low Volume Vehicle certifier. The roll cage, even though it was fitted by Land Rover Special Vehicles division when the vehicle was first constructed, is classified as a modification, and as such must be certified for use in New Zealand. The LVV certifier instructed us to fit approved padding to some parts of the cage, which we have done, so now we are awaiting the arrival of our modification plate and for it to be affixed to the vehicle.

Two small areas of corrosion and some small patches of surface rust need to be repaired, but the repairs must be carried out in accordance with the directions of a Repair Certifier. It seemed to take some time to get a repair certifier to have an initial look at the vehicle, but now that one has, we have his proposed course of action and have got cracking putting it into action. I have been backwards and forwards to Auckland every day to work on the Land Rover, and by the time we have finished it will be as good as new.

So we are making progress, but it is very slow!

In the meantime, it has stopped raining so much and the ground has started to dry out at last. Mum and Dad are still putting up with us, and we have been enjoying copious amounts of large, juicy grapefruit from the tree, as well as delicious home cooking and too much dessert.

We had originally hoped to be heading south around this time, but obviously that was too optimistic, and at this point in time it still isn’t clear just when that might be. Hopefully by the end of this week we will have a clearer picture of how things are looking with the vehicle and when it might be going back to the compliance centre for a retest.