Awesome. I’m looking a forward to hearing more, particularly on the fuel side ie consumption consumption, amount of extra fuel carried and how you carried it.
Finally how heavy was your trailer and did you have any difficulty towing it on the track.
Cheers
Steve
Hi Steve, sorry for the delay. Just got home yesterday.
A bit more detail on the setup, fuel consumption etc. the Grenadier is a largely mechanically standard Trialmaster with most off-road options fitted. I wanted it keep it fairly standard in case I had any warranty issues. I had fitted some auxiliary exterior lighting, some drifts drawers with a CFX3 47 litre fridge, a Brown Davis aux fuel tank and some airbag man helper bags with Kevlar liners.
I had some trepidation regarding the factory duel battery system as it is different than how I have wired up my previous electrical systems but for this purpose it worked perfectly. I was travelling most days with a few 2 day stops. It charged to 96-99% after a few hours driving and after 2 days running the fridge and some lighting the lowest I saw was 84%.
Weight was an issue with a family of 4 on board and we had a patriot X1 camper. This allowed us to pack all food water and most heavy tools in the camper which weighted just under 1400kg fully loaded with a ball weight of 95kg. Even so my legality with regards to gvm depended on what I had for breakfast that day…
We carried a total of 220L diesel and my friend I was travelling with carried a further 20L for us. The southern half of the track is just over 1000km but with some side tracks we covered 1100km. Average fuel consumption was 18.2L/100 with a best day of 15.3 and worst of 19.6. Keeping in mind we were nearly 5 tonnes GCM and a lot more mud than we anticipated I was pretty happy with this. For the whole trip we averaged 17.1L/100km over 8600km with over 4000km of this on dirt/sand.
The Brown Davis tank was key to this type of remote travelling for my. It enabled us to keep the fuel weight down, utilise high flow truck pumps without an adapter and solved the issue I have had in sandy overgrown tracks of debris collecting between the muffler and the rear bash guard. it was surprisingly quieter than I thought with no drone at highway speeds. Most of the time you would have no idea the car had a muffler delete.
The airbags were added to deal with the towball mass ‘porpoise’ that can be encountered on chewed up sandy tracks and was great maintaining a factory ride comfort with the ability to manage the extra weight off-road.
My wife has been a huge grenadier sceptic but after this trip is happy to admit this is the most comfortable and capable tourer we have had. Keeping in mind we have been travelling for a couple of months a year for 16 years now with multiple different camping configurations and vehicles.
Casualties consisted of the lock for the wheel mounted bin which disassembled itself on day one of the stick route and was replaced with hay band, and a plastic cup which secured the transfer case cable and was fixed with a zip tie.
We did have a small amount of dust ingress at the rear door which has been traced to an undersized rubber seal. Otherwise we didn’t get stuck in a single dune, no warning lights or electrical gremlins, had plenty of power for climbing dunes or overtaking road trains.
I did have to field plenty of questions from interested travellers and my answer was always ‘I’ll let you know in 5 years after a few more of these trips’. It has been a very promising start though. Now I just need to book in my 30k service so I can get up to drive in some snow whist it’s still here!
Christian
