One tough van

After a misshap with our van, I sent the following email to Steve at BTI. Thought that I would post it on the forum for the interest of others.

Steve,
Just thought that I would let you know how tough your vans are. A couple of weeks ago we were at Andamooka and needed to refuel, pulled into the local garage / general store trying to find the diesel pump, there is a large roof area over the pumps with plenty of height on the side that I drove in on.

The trouble came when I drove out and found out the hard way that the roof on the exit side was 1/2 metre lower. What alerted me to the fact was the crashing sound when parts of the air conditioner hit the ground. By this time I had driven all the way out so all the damage had been done, upon closer inspection, the damage was confined to the destruction of the air conditioner unit with a small hole made in the roof big enough to pass a 10 cent coin through on edge.

I am sure that if it was any other make of van, the roof would have caved in. You sure make one tough product!

We camped out in the bush as usual that night and, with the help of another Bushtracker owner that we were travelling with, managed to remove the remains of the unit off the roof and seal up the opening with a piece of rigid plastic and some silastic.

As it only involves replacing the air conditioning unit, I will have it done here in Melbourne. The local policeman was passing by when I was inspecting the damage and mentioned that I was not the first one to do this. The garage had no height signs at all.

By the way Steve, please continue to post your tips and comments as you are a wealth of information and I enjoy reading them. For one person to have all that experience and not share it would be a great shame. The world has it's fair share of idiots and I wish that we could deal with them as they would have 150 years ago, however these days ignoring them seems to be all we can do.

Keep up the good work.

Regards,

Paul Swift