Eric or Erica?

A surprisingly tricky question!

There has never been a doubt in either Mick’s mind or mine that backpacking tents are female, hence we have Rita, Susie, Vera and Connie.

When we bought a motorhome, I declared that, being so much bigger and beefier than a tent, he was clearly a boy, hence he was called Colin and his successor is Bertie.

Neither of us has ever named a car, however, in my mind cars are female. Erica is currently a car, but will be becoming a campervan and if motorhomes are male then surely campervans are too. Or are they? I could be persuaded either way.

That leaves Eric(a) a state of limbo, not knowing whether it’s the final letter or the brackets that will be dropped from his/her name.

(Footnote: Rita is a Tarptent Rainbow. Susie is a TN Voyager Superlite. Vera is a TN Voyager. Connie is a TN Laser Competition. Colin was a WildAx Constellation. Bertie is a Hymer B444.)

 

Project Eric(a): Part 5

Just one final post to give a bit more information about Eric(a) before we get into the nitty gritty of ripping apart and modifying (although if you watched the video tour at the end of the last post, you'll know most of this already).

Here are a few key stats, that we knew before we bought:

• (S)he's a Peugeot Expert Tepee Comfort (‘Comfort’ is the lower spec of the two versions of this model; we would have preferred the Leisure) in length L1 (the shorter of the two lengths available)
• 2 litre diesel engine
• 6.5 years old
• 18000 miles on the clock
• More than a full service history (5 main dealer service stamps in 18000 miles!)
• MOT until next February
• No significant MOT failures or advisories in its history

Based on the majority of other similar vehicles we’ve looked at, and the very limited photos I’d seen in the auction house’s catalogue, I also expected that:

• Eric(a) had been in private ownership as part of the Motability Scheme;
• the WAV modification had been carried out by Allied Mobility and was its ‘Independence’ model.

After taking delivery, it didn’t take much looking around to make me suspect that my first assumption was incorrect (it turned out that the second was too, but I didn’t find that out until a few hours later). This was the first clue…

Who needs instructions as to how to open a driver’s door?!

…but it wasn’t until we poked our heads inside that the clues started mounting up. The colour scheme didn’t shout ‘private vehicle’, nor did the head bumpers above all three rear doors, the grab handles, the emergency exit hammer and the fire extinguisher.

A quick look at the previous owner on the V5 (and Googling the company named) didn’t help confirm who had operated the vehicle, but then I looked at the Taxation Class, which I expected to be ‘Disabled’. It said: NHSV. We had unknowingly bought an ex-NHS* patient transfer vehicle, converted by O&H (a van-to-ambulance converter).

Not what we expected, but fortunately not something we found at all off-putting: the layout was as expected and one of the most striking things at first glance was how tidy this car was. Vehicles that go to auction are not tarted-up for sale, and some of them are in real states of filth, but aside from some crumbs on the passenger seat and something of a glitter explosion over the floor in the back, this one looked strikingly clean and tidy, with the only notable internal damage being some scuffs to the dashboard on the passenger side. It’s certainly in better condition than the few ex-Motability ones (that had been tarted-up for sale) we viewed back in November.

So far, so good. Now it was time to start the removal of the interior, hoping that didn’t throw up anything unexpected …

To be continued…

By the end of Tuesday all external door handle operating instructions (plus the ‘Diesel Only’ notice) had been removed and the glue residue cleared off. In doing that I noticed bits of glue residue from where neon chevrons had been removed from the tailgate – I decided to ignore that for now!

 (*As an aside, we’d considered a couple of ex-Council Expert Tepee WAVs that had the appeal of being the longer wheelbase version of the Expert. One we rejected on the basis of its tax band, and the other on the basis of its MOT history. It had repeatedly failed on major points, some of them notified as dangerous. So, whichever council had owned it had clearly been driving members of the public around in a dangerous vehicle, not just once or twice by almost every year. As I don’t know which council, I can’t name and shame them.)

 

Project Eric(a): Part 4

At 9am on 21 July we had dismissed the notion of buying a car at auction. Less than twenty five hours later we had, via a broker, bid on two cars, on consecutive days, and had successfully purchased one.

We then set about trying to be patient in waiting for delivery* and every now and then had to reassure ourselves about having given a not-inconsiderable sum of money to a random stranger off the internet who could have absconded with it for all we knew**. The tiny residual concerns we had on that score weren’t helped when the first delivery date was cancelled on the day, then all went quiet about a possible delivery the next day. Then on Monday 3 August it was confirmed that Eric(a) would be with us by the end of the day – and so (s)he was.

It’s a strange thing, buying a car you’ve never seen. In fact, neither of us had ever even driven an Expert. We did, however, have the benefit of having seen a condition report and high-level mechanical report (the good report in the latter was backed up by the delivery driver, who sang the car’s praises as he handed over the keys).

For the next fifteen minutes our attention was split, 50% in being polite and chatting to the delivery driver whilst he waited for a taxi and 50% trying to look at what we had bought. I soon spotted a few things that made me think that this car wasn’t entirely what I had expected…

 

That’s a bit of an unfair cliff-hanger on which to leave this instalment, but if you want a sneak preview of what’s coming, you can click ‘Play’ on the link below to watch this short (3-minute) video tour, made on Eric(a)’s maiden voyage to a local nature reserve.  

(*In normal times we would have attended the auction ourselves, paid in full before we left and have arranged to pick up the car within 24 hours, but these are not normal times and we had to wait for the broker to arrange delivery. The auction house’s Covid-secure procedures include an appointment system for collecting cars, which has introduced its own delays.

**A bit melodramatic. Among other things I knew about the broker, I checked that he is registered with the FCA, which seemed a good indication.)

Project Eric(a): Part 3

Subtitle: We don’t make things easy for ourselves, do we?

We’d slept on it over the weekend and the ex-MoD vehicle, up for auction on Tuesday morning, still looked too good to ignore, even taking into account the faff that would be involved in MoTing and registering and the unknown as to how long it would take DVLA to process the paperwork.

Then I saw a newly published advert for another vehicle, of the same make/model/spec, for sale in Blackpool. This one was a Wheelchair Adapted Vehicle (WAV) and was much higher mileage, but we could see it before buying, it would come with a warranty and, of course, it was registered so we would be able to drive it immediately.

A quick change of horse, then! We were going to go to Blackpool! Not until Tuesday though, because by now I was taking part in the Virtual Lakeland 50, I had 9.4 miles to run on Tuesday morning and I didn’t want to have to come up with a suitable and appealing route in a strange place. Bertie was duly packed for a couple or three days by the sea and arrangements were made to see friends in the area.

My run on Tuesday morning happened very early, because I’d been awake since 3am when I’d had the sudden flash of realisation that we were backing the wrong horse and that the ex-MoD vehicle was the vehicle we should have gone for.

I was back from my run at 7am and I woke Mick with the news of my early-hours realisation. “Are we too late to change our minds?” he asked. Bearing in mind that the auction for the ex-MoD vehicle was starting at 9am and that we hadn’t lined up a broker to buy it for us (the auction house currently being closed to the public), I opined that we were. Thus, at 9am we were on the phone to the dealer in Blackpool to double check, before we travelled, that no-one had snuck in and bought ‘our’ car from under us. They had. What a blow!

It was now gone 9am and our fall-back option was in an auction that had already started. Cue half an hour of headless-chicken activity: confirming with the broker that our car was far enough down the running order to give us time to instruct a bid, followed by the swift signing of the brokerage contract and the transfer of a non-refundable sourcing fee* (the most off-putting element of the transaction). 

By lunchtime we heard back: our bid had not been successful.

The ex-MoD vehicle on which we were thoroughly outbid.

We didn’t need to return to the drawing board as we already had our fallback plan: another Expert (WAV) going under the hammer the very next morning. A lower spec vehicle than our top two choices, but (undoubtedly due to Coronavirus) there’s a scarcity of Expert Tepees on the market at sensible prices at the moment and this one had enough good points to make it a contender.

We instructed the broker as to our highest bid and set about waiting until Wednesday afternoon for news.

The news was good! We had bought a car. A car that we had never seen, and wouldn’t yet see for another week or two after paying for it, but at least the period of the full-on search had been short (and we secured it for £400 less than our highest bid, which was a bonus).

 

Eric(a)

 
(*The broker’s sourcing fee gave us unlimited bids over an unlimited period and would also have covered us giving them our criteria and setting them on the task of doing the searching. Because they are a high-volume customer of the auction house, they pay much lower fees than the general public. The sourcing fee we paid to the broker plus the reduced auction house fee came to slightly less than the auction fee we would have paid if we’d been able to attend the auction and buy for ourselves. The off-putting factor was that, given our timescales having already sold our old car, if we weren’t successful in buying at auction, we were looking at writing off a chunk of money if we were then to buy elsewhere.)

Project Eric(a): Part 2

Recap: We’d sold the car on the Thursday and needed to source a new(er) one, but with the slight impediment that we now didn’t have a car to use to go looking for a car*.

The first task was to put together a shortlist. Too many hours spent staring at laptop screens, scrolling-scrolling-scrolling and making notes. There were moments of amusement, like the Mercedes Vito that looked good until I reviewed the MoT history and found that it had an MoT in 2014 at 35k miles and then another in 2019 at 117k miles, with a big gap in between. Conversely there was another that had been owned by ITV and had been MoT’d every 6 months without fail (presumably a condition of insurance when carting around famous people?).

By the end of the Friday we’d conceded that to buy a Vito whose history we trusted, it would be a white van, probably a 1.6-litre engine and with between 75k and 100k miles on the clock (on the plus side, we could have got one that was only 4 years old). I would have gone for a white van (and then retrofitted some rear windows) if the vehicle met all of our other ideals, but in the dozens of potential vehicles we noted, not a single one of them did.

There were many pages of notes like this

Back to the Peugeot Expert Tepee, then! This is a vehicle generally used for one of two purposes: 1) a 5-7 seat taxi; or 2) modification into a Wheelchair Accessible Vehicle (WAV), often as part of the Motability scheme. The main difference (ignoring the WAV mods) is that the latter are commonly 1-owner, low mileage vehicles that have been serviced religiously every year, whereas the former generally have scarily high mileages and hard lives. Our focus was decidedly on the WAVs.

Then I found something almost as rare as hens’ teeth: a high-spec, very low mileage, unmodified Expert Tepee. The downsides were that it was being sold at auction (not currently open to the public, due to Coronavirus) and its previous owner was the Ministry of Defence, so we would buy it unregistered (and I’m sure I said after importing Bertie that I wouldn’t choose to go through the registration process again). It also wouldn’t have an MoT, causing me to fall down a rabbit hole of reading legislation to find out if we could legally drive it to an MoT station before it was registered (bearing in mind that it couldn’t be registered until it had an MoT) and talking to insurers about insuring an unregistered vehicle against its VIN. It was the ideal vehicle, but was it just too much uncertainty and hassle?

We slept on it over the weekend.

To be continued…

^{(* We could, of course, have put Bertie back on the road, but being just past the middle of the month, I held off buying the road tax until we really needed to go somewhere. It was an inconvenience that we sold the car just as the fridge was nearing empty, but the following week I managed to secure a grocery delivery only a couple of days after it reached the point of complete bareness (with the freezer not far behind). I thought I’d ordered plenty, but I hadn’t factored in how hungry I would be whilst running the Virtual Lakeland 50. I then couldn’t get another delivery slot and there was no way we were paying for a month’s road tax for Bertie at that point, just for the few days left in the month. By the time I finally went shopping on 1 August cupboards, fridge and freezer had reached an all-time record state of emptiness.)}

Project Eric(a): Part 1

I’m not sure where to start with this tale. Perhaps last November is an appropriate place?

Our car was getting a bit long in the tooth and in need of replacement (we bought it in January 2013 to fill a temporary need, intending to sell it 3 months later), and if we were going to buy a new(er) car, then why not one big enough to house a bed and a kitchen? After all, surely it’s perfectly reasonable for one married couple to own two campervans? A big one (Bertie) for comfort on longer trips and a tiny one for day trips and short stays in the UK. It was in November 2019 that Mick came to agree with me that this was a sensible way forward and the hunt was on.

Research ensued. Spreadsheets were populated. The conclusion reached was that the best way to achieve our aims* within the budget was to buy a vehicle and do the conversion ourselves. We started scouring the market to see what would suit our needs and narrowed it down to two vehicles: a Peugeot Expert or a Mercedes Vito (both of which come in car and van versions). In late November we came within a hair’s breadth of buying an Expert (hindsight: wish we had!), but we had a wobble and decided we’d prefer a Vito.

An eye was kept on the sale ads through December and we attended a couple of auctions. We were back at the auction in early January, but by then we conceded the project was going to have to be put on hold as we were due to head off to Spain a couple of weeks later. That didn’t leave long enough to be sure of selling the old car and we didn’t want to find ourselves with two cars over that period of time. Plus, when were we going to find the time this year to do the conversion?

Oh, if we’d known then what we know now! Fast forward to mid-March, when we unexpectedly found ourselves back at home with all the time in the world to be working on fitting out a vehicle … if only we had any way of sourcing one … or buying the materials needed for the fit-out … or any prospect of selling the old car privately.

As lockdown started lifting, we decided that we needed to take action. We didn’t want to keep the car for another year (it had been absolutely reliable through our ownership, but at 11.5 years old it was becoming increasingly likely that things would start to wear and break). However, our uncertainty as to the state of the second hand market, given how recently movement restrictions had been relaxed, was such that we felt we had to put the cart before the horse and sell the old before seeking the new, even though that was going to leave us without a car in which to go and seek a new car.

The car sold right in the middle of July (for, I reckon, £500 less than we would have got back in January). The hunt for a new vehicle then started in earnest.

To be continued…

 
(*We could have bought an off-the-shelf van within our budget, but it would be quite old and high mileage. Moreover, tiny campervans within our budget that have been insulated, have a heater and have a toilet are so rare that I’ve not yet found one.)

USB Sockets for Bertie: Why? (And Update 2)

Conrad asked: “What do the new USBs allow you to do that you couldn't before?”

The short answer is: “Technically, nothing.”

The longer answer:

When we’re on the road in Bertie, we are usually off-grid, relying on his 12v leisure battery for our power requirements, including charging phones, watches and the like via USB cables.

Bertie came without any USB sockets, but we have managed for 3.5 years*, albeit with a little inconvenience, by using the one 12v socket on his habitation side**, however, that socket is not conveniently sited and requires the use of a USB adaptor. Fitting the new sockets kills two birds with one stone: accessible sockets and no need for multi-way USB adaptors. 

Here are a few photos to illustrate the location of Bertie’s only 12v socket, on which we have relied to date for all of our charging needs:

This is the TV cupboard:

Looking into the cupboard (the TV is on a slide-out arm), at the very back of the cupboard is the 12v socket:

I searched my gallery for a view of Bertie’s lounge as seen from the cab and almost drew a blank. I’ve photos looking forward, but almost none looking back. This one isn't great, but does illustrates the issue with using this socket – it requires the bottom of the cupboard to be left open, which in turn puts it exactly behind one’s head when sitting on the sofa. I can’t tell you how many times head and door have come into sharp contact.

In case you’re wondering, the wifi booster's plugged in in this snap, hence the trailing wire. 

As for progress on the task of adding the new sockets: well, it’s turning out to be a greater learning experience than I’d anticipated, with associated delays!

I’m no stranger to mains power wiring, but I’m a novice on 12v. It was only yesterday, whilst crimping connectors onto wires, that I realised that my wiring diagram, whilst technically correct, wasn’t as simple to implement as I’d thought. Or rather, I’d just not thought enough about it.

“I’ve got a wire going into A, coming back out of A and going to B, coming out of B and going to C.”

It sounds so simple until I got to the point of ‘wire coming back out of B'*** and realised I had no means of achieving that junction. More research has been carried out and more parts have been ordered.

Given that I’m anticipating more 12v wiring tasks in my future, it’s a learning curve I’m happy to be scaling. Hopefully for the next task, it’ll take less time and fewer iterations to get the shopping list spot-on, with fewer delays as a result.

^{(*And for the preceding 6 years in Colin, who also only had one 12v socket, also in the back of his TV cupboard.
**Bertie also has a 12v socket and a USB point in the cab, but they both run off the engine battery and are only live when the engine is running.
***I think this is a meaningful statement without me wittering on further, but in case anyone’s after more: ‘A’ in this statement is the switch. It has two connection points ‘+ve in' and ‘+ve out’, so that’s no problem. ‘C’ is the second USB socket and again is no problem, as it only requires a to be connected via the two corresponding posts on its rear. ‘B’ is the first USB is where I’d not applied enough thought to the practicalities, in that it requires a +ve feed in from the switch and a - ve in from the Electroblock whilst also needing both a +ve and a - ve going out to the second USB. Research confirmed that shoving two wires into a single crimp is not good practice, so having considered the options to achieve the necessary junction, I’ve got some piggy back spade connectors on their way.)}