TheLongRideHome with Wally, Luke & Lotzy is done and dusted, we’re all home safe and sound,
Can’t believe we’ve just ridden 10537 klm across this enormous endless country and back in a fortnight,
As any trip goes, there were huge highlights and a few disappointments. To spend the trip with these lads was a huge highlight, they all went above and beyond with helping organise our side of the ride, there was always a supply of red frogs or snakes at our stops,
and helping poor old Maggie Mae when we were struggling with 80 klm head winds, gusting to who knows what, (more for fuel reach than lack of power) or flat batteries and sourcing stuff/flagging complete strangers down,
Anton lent us a set of jumper leads in Central WA which will be replaced and returned with brand new ones.
#wheatlandmotel in Dalwallinu WA gave us free of charge and wouldn’t accept any $ for a battery charger that we used every night on our return trip, both the leads and the charger will become part of the ride tool kit from now on,
And the #Dalwallinuhotel for a free round of drinks after hearing our Story of the Blackdog ride, they took a couple of pictures and were going to put a little story together for the pub,
And 3 1/2 litres of oil was used
The wash up
The 18 inch wheel experiment was a fail in as much as fuel consumption goes,
the fact that the wheel will fit, albeit a little redneck, (although with a machine shop and tools it could be made to fit correctly) so there’s gearing options available .
the motor was always in working mode, at 3100 rpm and 100 kph I’m thinking because of the load, the vacuum advance was always on, so the carbs would’ve been running on mains not idle, even at 4500 rpm whistling along, the load compared with the 17 inch original was still heavier,
Where it would come into its own would be on the Autobarn’s of Europe where fuel isn’t really an issue for the speeds being travelled, I wouldn’t like to actually hazard a guess at what top speed would be, far quicker than the speed rating on the tyre is for certain,
The charging system issues are in the harness or the plugs connecting everything, after stopping in Perth for the replacement parts, 1 part of 1 day was the only charging that happened, it’s quite stressful trying to manage riding 1000 klms a day on 1 charge, every time you touch the brake the voltage drops, the coils obviously used most of the power. The initial morning start used up to 1.5 volts straight off, We were roll or push starting it during the day , no headlights, blinkers or phone charging and a lot of gear change breaking, the one most noticeable thing was when the charge system is down, on deceleration the motor backfires really bad, as opposed to when the system is charging, there was none, so I don’t know whether that means the coils are hooked into the system somehow , as 1 person on our trip suggested,
What’s the country like? Bloody enormous is what it is, the great southern wheatbelt lived up to it’s name, 000’s of square kilometres of wheat, and the storage capacity of the many silo sites was on another level, the small sites would’ve catered for many 10’s of thousands of tonnes of grain let alone the huge sites
The Australian bite was pretty cool, to be able to stand on the cliffs and look south made a person feel quite insignificant in the scheme of things,
The roads and the road system are not even comparable to the crap here in Qld, I was expecting a lot more larger truck combinations to be on the roads than what there was,
You can have the headwinds to yourself, that’s one thing that was starting to wear you down, it didn’t matter what direction you were going, it seemed to always be a headwind, there was probably 2 days out of the 14 that were tail winds
Relive decided it didn’t need to keep the ride , so there’s no record, so maybe it didn’t happen
Maggie Mae will be fixed,
I can feel a video building with Errol pulling a wiring harness apart
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