2021 - The Overview

I was very lucky to be told I will be the owner of Trixy if i can drive or tow her out of Walsall. I accepted this challenge and started to identify the faults. I quickly established there was a lot more wrong than what met the eye and gathered help. We identified that there were fuel, electrical, oil, engine and gearbox problems causing the vehicle to not respond.

Our first step was to sort the vehicle’s electrics. We installed the dash loom, dashboard and relevant dash controls and switches. To our surprise this worked first time. This enlightened us to the engine management problems and the gearbox issues a bit more. We quickly established at this stage that there was no CAN communication either. This was rectified using a multi-meter and time.

Engine wise we had to setup the head as this had been majorly tampered with. We found loose bolts and a lot that was not how it should be. This was one of the more time consuming things to repair and by far one of the more tedious jobs.

Gearbox wise we figured that she had some loom problems. We rarely could engage gears especially if it was raining for some bizarre reason. These are issues that haunted us for about 2 years and still occasionally play up. We found at this stage the speedometer was inoperative and that the gearbox was heavily slipping.

She had a small amount of fuel problems, we found these rather quickly due to the fairly large fuel leak as there were pipes missing around the fuel pump. These were fitted and tested.

Minor oil leaks were discovered and were from where pipes had been loosened and needed re-securing. This sounds like a fairly simple task, the biggest thing for us was observing where they came from.

As a whole this is a brief overview of her problems. This is not limited to and can re-assure that there were many more tedious problems.

2022

This year we mainly focused on replacing the parts that had been most effected by the corrosion. I replaced parts such as the air bag pedestals, air bellows, air bag top plates, levelling valves, air dryer and cartridge, drag link and much more. We have also had to do work on the engine to find out problems with the oil system and the cooling system. We were lucky enough that we were able to take her to Showbus 50, the last ever show of its kind in the original format. This was a big test for her as the mileage was huge for a bus that had barely done this many miles in a very long time.