13th February 2015 marshal free

It had been decided that Owen and I weren't to marshal today so it was straight forward sweep duties, we were to leave after 20 cars with skippy and Tony bringing up the rear, rob and Alan were marshalling miles down the road so would catch up during the day.  We left at ten to eight in the morning and had an event free day until we came across the massive Chevrolet Impala with a broken brake pipe, within fifteen minutes a new pipe had been made, all brakes bled out and they had gone, we did a little shopping and continued on the 450km leg.  A dusty section made for very difficult driving and very nearly took out a moped rider that we couldn't see because of the dust!

This is the model a that I fell in love with on Peking to Paris but with all the problems they've had so far I'm rapidly losing interest in the car sadly but the two chaos in it are full of the Dunkirk spirit so they are plodding on.  We've seen some interesting sights today with overloaded trucks both with people in them and others with crops in them, this is a completely different world here and it's good to see health and safety hasn't arrived yet!

I'm sure half these people were pissed aswell, good to see this sort of behaviour on thailands motorways.

We arrived at the hotel and set about replacing a grease nipple on an AC for once a small job, then Owen re engineered the braking system on a ford coupe, I had the enviable job of seeing why a beetle wasn't running too well, once I'd removed the spark plugs and found one of the ends damaged I did a compression test and found none, removed the rocker and found a push rod had come out and jammed the valve down subsequently hitting the piston and wrecking one cylinder, however the crew are going on push on to burma (hopefully) on three cylinders, should be ok until we get into the hills, maybe we should dig out the tow rope in anticipation!!

Once all the jobs were done some locals asked to have their photos taken with us, a nice bunch who spoke excellent English, well better than my Thai!

All seems to be settling down now, let's hope there's an early night on the horizon!