Aaron's Day Out

Yesterday I decided to take a day out to just enjoy myself and forget about the stressful situation surrounding me in London.  So after dropping Beany at school and Micky at the child minder I drove out to the military training site known as the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.  It's a fair drive, but I had all day and what a nice summer's day it was.

Remember if you click a photo you can see them all bigger like a photo album, though you won't see the commentary that appears on this page, so perhaps read this page then click on a photo to view them bigger.

Military vehicles were practicing along this part of my route but I knew not to take a photo, as I've been chased down for that once before and made to delete the photos.

I had to divert my intended route here because red flags were flying where I had planned to go, which means they're firing live shells and if you proceed past the flags a mortar could land on your car!  Actually there was a serious incident recently where the army fired a live mortar and it flew well out of the red zone, over two villages before blowing up in a farmers field.

This place that looks like a village isn't quite what it seems.  It's in the middle of the Salisbury Plain, miles from anywhere and is known as the German Village.  The army uses it for test combat training and you can't go in there.

The next photo shows the German Village in the distance.

In winter this whole place is much more of a mud bog and more care is needed to make sure you don't end up getting stuck.  But in summer it is much drier and not challenging for the Mitsubishi, which would probably have coped just fine even had I left it in 2wd mode.  That said the wheel ruts are deep in places and occasionally I hear my bash plates scrape the ground.  I have nearly 300mm ground clearance under my bash plates, so despite the lack of mud a car still couldn't come out here even in summer conditions.  Even the Santa Fe would be at risk of getting bellied on the tracks with deep ruts.

Still some water around.

The photo below shows the new roof rack and bag I have replaced my roof box with.  It's working out very well. I stopped here briefly to make lunch, but I didn't have time to stop add long as I would have liked as it was already time to head back to London to pick up the kids.

All in all an excellent day and I successfully, though briefly, managed to forget about difficulties in London.

Extending the rear storage and fridge unit in the car

Whilst the unit I made is excellent overall and performs really well, I felt it could be improved. Here's what I did:

These tiny brackets are for the thermos, which we've learned needs to be kept in position, especially when bouncing around on a 4wd track.

This is a divider for the cutlery draw beneath the fridge.

And here's the draw with new brackets and divider fitted.

Everything is now tightly kept in place.

This picture shows new side panels under construction.  These extend the top of my wooden unit to go from window to window.  I've cut these to fit the available space precisely using a jigsaw.

Trim going on.

Here you can see the left side panel being test fitted to the main unit.

Main unit back in the car without the new side panels.

With the left side panel in place

It wasn't so easy making a bracket for the edge by the window glass, yet support there is needed. You can see a special bracket I fabricated in this photo.

Here's a close up of my special bracket. I had to learn to weld aluminum to make this.  Luckily aluminum welds at relatively low temperatures so oxy acetylene isn't needed and instead my small propane torch can do it.

These are brackets I made for the main body side.

See how with the panel fitted the available shelf space now extend right to the window, plus nothing can fall down the sides now.

This photo from the under side of the panel shows how all my brackets work to support weight loading on the panel.  The plastic support in the picture is part of the Mitsubishi design and is bolted right through to the metal, so it is a strong place for my special bracket to mount on.

I used the new right side panel to reposition the spotlight to a much more effective position.

Job done. Top shelf surface area has been increased by a approximately 25%.

I also added dividers to the other drawer too.