Skip to main content

How did we get here...?

Day_One_Delica_side

So the deed has been done…. We have brought a 1995 Mitsubishi Delica L400 Space Gear, in the 2.8 Litre Turbo Diesel Long Wheel Base version, (PF8W), with the express intent of building a global overland adventure vehicle…. How the hell did that happen….?

Fiona & I have been thinking about our eventual retirement options for a couple of years now. Both she and I are born travellers and instead of sitting around waiting for Mr De’ath, we figured that we would most like to spend our sunset years doing what we love most, which would be travelling the globe to ensure that we have not missed anything worth seeing.  Our outline plan was to start with a couple of years in Australia, then transition to Southern Africa for a year or so, then to Canada & North America for another couple of years, and so on into South America, and finally to Europe to finish things off.

We think that this is a lofty goal indeed…..  Committing to selling all our worldly goods and buy some sort of mobile home on wheels, and then spend upward of 10-12 years travelling the globe, was a wild dream even for us. Even accounting for our joint wanderlust, this would be a big step that would take some planning and hard-core saving to put in place, so it was lucky we had about 9 years before I reached retirement age, even longer for Fiona.


When we started looking at the logistics of travelling the world in a 4-wheeled vehicle, we started at the top, looking at the luxury end of the market, Earthcruisers, All-Terrain Warriors (ATW), Action Mobil and other such high-end adventure trucks. We could continue working until 2026 and then liquidate all of our assets to come up with the half-million dollars that one of these high-end behemoths would cost, and then set off with our pension money safely stored in our back pockets….

So what gives…..? How did we get from cruising around the world in a custom-made luxury box-on-wheels to a 23-year-old second-hand Japanese People Carrier…??

I don’t know about you, but the more I think about doing something like this, the more excited I have become by the idea, seduced almost, and quite honestly the thought of having to wait until 2026 before heading off into the wild-blue yonder starts to wear a bit thin when you have been thinking about it for 2 years. Even though I am not at retirement age yet, I am no spring chicken, even now I am far from fighting fit and cannot imagine I’m going to become any fitter or healthy before the planned departure date.

If I am completely honest, I am also at a bit of a crossroads in my working career right now, with the skill set I possess becoming less & less relevant to the industry I have found myself in after 30 years of work. These little nagging points and the general dissatisfaction of having to wait so long led me to start looking at ways that Fiona & I could shorten the time it would take to save up enough to get this dream underway.


One option was to reduce the cost of the initial outlay and thereby reduce the time it would take to save up enough money, so we started looking at a more modest overland vehicle options. We also did not want to tie up a large amount of capital into a single vehicle that we would be very distraught about should it be stolen, lost or destroyed. I don’t know about you, but the idea of having a truck that costs the same as a house, stolen in a 3rd world country, just became a bit too stressful to consider. Additionally, the costs of a bond associated with the Carnet de Passage are generally worked out on the value of your vehicle so it would be a lot easier to afford to lodge up to 100% of the value of a $5,000 truck, than a $400,000 vehicle…..

So that’s how we ended up with a 1995 Mitsubishi Delica L400 Space Gear sitting on our driveway, instead of a half-million-dollar dedicated overland rig.

Now the plan is to upgrade the Delica, which we have playfully named “Digby”, both mechanically and internally to become a cost-effective overland adventure camper over the course of the next few years, while we continue to scrimp and save for a multi-year trip. This blog will be that journey to get ready, get equipped and get going……



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Captain’s Chair Mod

I have spent about 9 months looking through various Delica forums and websites to find some information and guidance on how to move one of my middle-row Captain’s Chairs forward to the front passenger side location in Digby. This is a pretty popular mod for your Delica if you can have a Captain’s Chair or can buy one cheap, and I have found a good resource for this mod, ( here ), that show how the mod can be done with a degree of involvement and complexity.   Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much research you do in advance, something you didn’t expect comes along to throw you off…… When I removed the front passenger seat and lifted the carpet it became apparent pretty quickly that my simple idea of just lining up the rails and drilling some holes was not going to be as simple as I had hoped. Firstly, the bolt holes for the rear mounting on the front passenger seat were significantly wider than either the seat holes at the front of the passenger’s seat or the width of the Captain’s Chair
1 comment
Read more

New Glow Plugs

Like many Delica owners, morning start-ups on cold days could be a nervous experience that came with a number of attempts and huge clouds of grey smoke, so it was time to investigate. After reading the forums the general advice was to take a look at the glow plus as a first step, and if that didn’t work, there might be a more serious issue.  So I got hold of some Bosch 5.0mm glow plus (Bosch part: F005X12917) which took no more than 10 minutes to install, including giving the Bus Bar a good clean, and the Delica fired up immediately and with much less smoke. I can report that the glow plugs have been in Digby for a while and it still starts up first time every time.  I strongly recommend that any Delica owner that is struggling with cold starts change the glow plugs immediately…. Note: I have had the new Glow Plugs installed for over a year now and the Delica is still starting strongly on the first attempt, and almost no smoke at all. 
Post a Comment
Read more

“Second Fix” and finishing the Interior

It’s been a while since my last blog post so I thought I would update you on where we are up to in terms of the fit-out of our beloved Delica; Digby I’m calling this phase the “Second Fix” not because it’s the next step in the build process, but a lot of what I have been doing recently is redoing stuff a second time…! After building the rear wardrobe unit I realised that I had positioned the bottom openings far too low to allow for the 15cm mattress we were planning on, and that the openings were a bit larger than we needed so I re-designed and re-built the front of the wardrobe to fit the new plan I had also built the carcass of the right-hand side unit as part of the “First-Fix” but again realised that it was both too long and would be difficult to access, so I completely re-designed the unit with an integrated wine rack, (yeah, I did that..!), some open storage space, and closed-in storage on top with a lockable side opening for access. Whilst this was a much better use of space, or
Post a Comment
Read more