Toots returns to hive today with great news. After an extended break from camping, she is ready to go again!
After the winter trip to Lightning Ridge, Toots faced mechanical problems, pop-top problems and then us moving house over summer. She has not had much love over the past 6+ months.
As far back as our trip to Tassie with Toots in summer 2019/20, she was showing signs of pop-top-drop. Heavy winds on the Wild West coast of Tassie would cause the roof to fall down. Truth be told, she had a bit of a ‘lean’ since we got her in 2018 but that added to her character.
Towards the end of the Lightning Ridge trip last winter, the roof would not stay up at all. When you’re used to a camper with a pop-top roof, it’s very frustrating when you’re unable to put the roof up - it makes camping up to 50% less enjoyable (best estimate). We did take her for a brief trip to Kiama last Spring for a couple of nights but other than that she hadn’t been used for camping at all since the Ridge trip.
Kiama - about two hours south of Sydney. Popular for day-trippers and weekenders. Note - the roof is down!
The gas struts needed replacing. We ummed and ahhed about what to do about it for ages. Can we buy them from standard auto and parts stores? Do we need to go to a specialist camper/caravan place? Do we get someone to come and install them? Do we just order online? Etc etc etc. Eventually we picked a random place online that comes out and installs them. This was a very slow back-and-forth email Q&A experience that stretched out over months. We gave them the measurements they asked for and then they eventually came out to install them. Except they didn’t ... install them - because they didn’t have the right size struts ... because the woman we liaised with over email did not tell us that we needed to remove the struts to measure their length from end-to-end. So the installer guy asked ‘When would you like us to come out again?’. Well that wasn’t going to work at all because we were moving house that day. And we weren’t just moving across town, we were moving four hours away!! So we agreed that they would post them (hopefully the correct size) to us.
A couple of weeks of weeks later they arrived in the post, except this was in the middle of the school term so we decided to wait until the Easter break to attempt to install them. We took the struts to my parents’ place in the hope that my dad would help us, and he did.
Fortunately the struts were the right size but the installation process wasn’t without its dramas. We had to make a trip to the hardware store (on Easter Sunday - had to phone up to check they’d be open. Of course they were, good old Bunnings!) to buy some ratchet straps but we got the job done.
Next stop - Hill End!
Installation process
A few after shots -
Front view
Side view