A few weeks ago, a group of local friends decided to go on a four wheel drive trip over Napoleon Hill, close to our home. James decided to do something he has been thinking about for a long time–take his tractor on the trip! It added some excitement; I’ll let Joe tell about it in a story he wrote. (The solar panel mounted on the back is to keep the battery charged, since the alternator doesn’t work anymore.)
One young lady gave my two little girls and another little girl a ride on the quad bike.
This is the Safari that Simon spent a couple of years restoring, and then sold to a friend. It’s getting quite a workout; after this particular episode, water poured out of all the doors!
Things went well, until….
They drained the water out of the engine, and it started right up again! Yay for 1960s vehicles with no electronics. James did take it to the garage for a complete oil change after they got out of this track.
And, here is the story:
THE FOUR WHEEL DRIVE TRIP
A couple of weeks ago, we went over Napoleon Hill, with a few of the V’s, the B’s, and some of our family. James, after a lot of thinking, decided to take his Pajero and his tractor. His tractor is a 1960s Fordson Super Dexta, two wheel drive, six speed manual. It’s about medium size and can attain speeds up to about 50 km an hour downhill. Since it is as old as it is, the alternator doesn’t work, so to charge it James has mounted a solar panel that keeps the battery charged, so now it is updated to the 21st century.
We headed off from our house to Napoleon Hill about 9:30 and started along the four wheel drive track. The tractor is very slow, so the vehicle I was riding in, the troop carrier, got ahead of everybody else and so we ended up doing a small side track, which was fun. Going through the first mud hole, the tractor’s bell housing filled up with water, so when he came out water was spraying out of both sides of the tractor, which was fun to see. Napoleon Hill is a very fun four wheel drive track, which if you nail it only takes about an hour, but at the rate we went it took us over half the day.
As always, we stopped at the cemetery and had a look around there, and then headed down the mountain. When we got down into the river gorge we stopped and waited for everyone else to catch up. A few minutes after everybody got there and we headed off again we got to the caves. There are three of them. The first one is just big enough that a quad can squeeze through. You can drive through the other two. It is really fun, because the last one is really long and more than twice as high as the vehicles.
After we got through the caves and got out to the bigger creek we stopped for lunch. During lunch, L wanted to have a turn on the tractor, so James took him for a drive. They were going up the creek and James wasn’t really paying attention to where they were going till the tractor started bogging down in the soft sand. He told L to hop off and then started going backwards and forwards to try to get out. He thought maybe he should get someone to pull him out because he didn’t know how deep the creek was to his left, but shrugged the thought away. Then, he tried pulling forward again and slid off an underwater shelf into an over-chest-deep part of the creek. The tractor nearly disappeared and almost instantly died.
S pulled him out. They took the injectors out and turned the engine over several times, so the pistons pushed the water out of the cylinders where the injectors usually go. It was fun to see the water spraying everywhere, and nice to hear the tractor start up again as good as new—maybe even better because of the engine wash it had just received.
As we went out, P, in the Safari, took on a heap more of the side tracks and several of them that he took in four wheel drive he went back through in two wheel drive. We had a lot of fun that day and I was glad I got to go along.
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