Jake Stein 1925-2018

Over the course of my nine long road trips, I discovered that I had many fans, if that’s the right word to use besides “friends”.  All of them (you, if some are reading this) stood out in one way or another, all unique in their own special way.  But one stood out above the crowd, perhaps because I saw a lot of him, but probably because he had a special way of showing his interest in what I was doing and trying to accomplish, Jake Stein.  I am saddened to write today that I lost that friend last night after his brief fight with cancer.

Jake was the consummate person in everything he did, husband, father, lawyer, friend, gentleman, dog guardian and dresser. For years, most of the time we talked at a local coffee shop after his long walks on weekends.  Because of my trips, he would tell me over and over again that I was the most disciplined person he knew, without realizing that the more he told me that, the more disciplined I became.  He so often asked me to explain what it was that I got from my trips that I was forced to think about that to the point where I realized that I was getting more from them than I thought I was. 

On top of all his qualities, Jake had two qualities in particular that made him so very special: he was a thinker, and he was a questioner.  He loved to do both, but rarely -or succinctly- expressed his own thoughts because he wanted to hear what we had to say, and he never dismissed our thoughts no matter how off they were.  The two of us often talked about the fate of society in the 21^st Century, realizing that there was little most of us could do alone to affect it.  What he might not have realized was that by just knowing him and trying to emulate the good in him we would be making the world a better place.

Jake is no longer around to root for me on my road trips, or in my life, but after knowing him for almost two decades, I have enough of his friendship to carry me through many more road trips and the rest of my life.

Jake was 94 years old when he died.  Truly, he had a life well-lived.

Ed Mulrenin

List of things to do to take Defender on long road trips

Someone asked me recently how I have the confidence (courage, really) to take a rare, 24-year old, hard-to-repair-in-the-field vehicle on 14,000-mile road trips.   Excellent question. While I never made a list before, I have subconsciously been following some rules of thumb to bolster that confidence. So, I sat down and made a list of the things I am or should be doing to bolster that confidence, and below is that list.  In looking over this list,  have to say that I can give myself an A in most categories, but not all. The proof that I must be doing something right is illustrated by my continuing to take these trips and making it home, with the Defender. The proof also is in the stack of invoices I have showing all the work (and money) I have put into it over the years.

 

Guide for long-life and hassle-free road trips for Defender

At home: Find reliable mechanic who knows Defenders; believes that there is a solution for every problem; and can provide remote "help desk" assistance on the road.

At home: Maintain journal of problems and fixes for recall when needed

At home: Maintain log of when parts were replaced

At home: Maintain Pre-trip Checklist

At home: Maintain vehicle regularly: replace parts needing replacing or anticipated to fail

At home: Prepare and update Pre-trip Checklist

At home: Prepare and update Spare Parts list

At home: Treat Defender well: service regularly (oil and filter change), use best gas and oil.

Before trip: Have mechanic check out thoroughly

Before trip: Run down Pre-trip checklist

Before trip Take: Take container of spare parts, e.g, those likely to fail or difficult to get.

Before trip Take: Take Defender Workshop Manual (and Parts Manual)

Before trip Take: Take recovery equipment

Before trip Take: Take satellite phone.

Before trip Take:  Take Adequate tools and repair kit

Before trip: List worst-case scenarios and prepare logistically, financially and mentally for  them

Before trip: Prepare Daily Defender Checklist for use on the road

Before trip: Replace parts likely to fail or take them as spare parts.

Before trip: Run down Pre-trip Checklist.

Before trip:  Consider replacing hoses, belts, plugs, tires, windshield wipers, etc.

Before trip:  Get two emergency towing auto insurance companies just in case

On the Road: Be prepared for the Defender to break down in even the most remote places and have to have it towed. And then, be prepared to (A) stay until the Defender is back on the road;  (B) have to ship the Defender back home or to some distant garage, (C) leave it where it is until you can return to retrieve it, or (D) abandon (sell) it where it broke down and get home some other way.

On the Road: Go through On the Road Daily Checklist every day

On the Road: Have Defender serviced on schedule and treat it well (gas)

 

 

 

 

 

Index and summary of the trip

I am just getting around to preparing a chronological index for this OTR9 blog and then the summary of the trip. I hope to have the index finished by early next week. The index will be in chronological order starting from the first day of the trip, instead of the reverse chronological order that the blog now appears in.

I also hope to get around to writing up my six expeditions in Alaska and Russia in the 90s, and reconstructed blogs for the first three road trips in 2000, 2001, and 2002.

Finally, I hope to start some serious planning for a trip this year starting next week. My ambitious self tells me that I should do a trip that encompasses the outline of all my trips, that is, from DC to the end of the road in Labrador, across Canada to the Arctic Ocean in Canada and then in Alaska, and then back home again by way of the West Coast, the southwestern states, and finally the southeastern states, which I have not yet visited. I set out to do something like this once before in 2011, but my plans got interrupted so we had to head back home. That having been said, the rational me says that that would probably be overdoing it, and so I will probably settle for something less ambitious but more rational. Of course, what I would really like to do is to head back to Russia to take that long-postponed road trip across Siberia from Vladivostok to Saint Petersburg, but under the present circumstances, I don't think that would be a good idea. I hate torture.

Ed

Donner's Official Portrait

Click here for Donner’s Official Portrait and the backstory.

A solution for every problem - Defender 90 Warning Light Module AMR2043

Two days before I returned home, my “headlights-on” light on the warning light module (part AMR2043) on my Defender’s dashboard went dark. When I brought the vehicle into my mechanic and he looked at it, other lights on the module failed in a domino effect. The good news is that happened when it did and not during the trip. The bad news, he told me, was there is no replacement available for the module, and that their best hope would be to find one on a junked Defender in an auto-junk yard. But the problem there is that few of the 2,500 1993-1997 NAS (North American Series made for the USA) Defenders like mine make it to these auto junkyards, which is why they sell these days for $65,000 or more.  The Defender, which started production worldwide (except for the US) in 1983 or so, did not make it to the USA until 1993 when 500 Defender 110s were shipped to the USA, and then 1994, 1996 and 1997, when 2,000 Defender 90s were shipped here. (By the way, the author was the first “civilian” to drive the first NAS Defender 90 brought off the ship for display at an auto-show in October 1993, and one of the first buyers weeks later, but that’s another story.) So, with only 2,500 NAS Defenders ever made, with their unique parts, and now all 21-25 years old, some parts are becoming hard -if not impossible- to come by, or so it would seem.  Not one for wanting to abandon a problem looking for a solution to an important subject as my Defender, or abandon my Defender because of an obsolete $300 part, I went to work.

 

Not knowing when my mechanic would be able to get to my Defender, I searched the web for just about every Land Rover supply house in the USA and elsewhere in the world looking for part AMR2043, my warning light module (see below diagram).  Of course, I knew that the overseas houses would not have the part since part AMR2043 was made specifically for the USA (NAS) Defender.  As it turns out, all the US supply houses told me the part was obsolete and no longer available. Not a single one told me what options I had, despite their hyped ads that touted, “We will find the part for you if we do not have it.”  

 

Not one to get discouraged, I contacted Rovers North in Vermont and asked them what people do when they cannot locate a replacement for their warning light module, which is sure to fail at some time. Surely, people just don’t junk their Defenders because of this $300 part, I said. The rep agreed and told me that people get one of the TDI-Defender versions (see AMR 2628 in middle of photo display, below) and do a lot of rewiring. Although compatible replacement modules are plug-ins (a three-minute job to replace), which come with one port in the rear of the module for the 13 lights, that patches into a prewired ribbon in the wiring harness, if a module in not fully compatible (see the differences in the photo below), all of the lights need to be individually wired to the ribbon in the harness, and maybe even the ribbon itself, at least a four-hour job if successful.

 

After talking with Rovers North, I searched the web for AMR2628 and found a number of sites that offer this version. Although they said they have it, I was suspect.  So, I started searching for sites that not only supply parts, but actually rebuild Defenders, thinking they either must have some used ones they remove from Defenders they are rebuilding or have secret sources for getting new ones.  As good luck would have it, my first contact produced success.  My email to XXXX (name to be provided later at their request) returned me with the good news that in their own rebuilding work, they need to have a guaranteed source  new warning light modules if they cannot salvage used ones, and so they just finished getting an outsourced production run of a number of AMR2043s and were just about to publish that information on NAS-ROW and Defender-Source. In fact, Joe, the parts rep, just happened to have one on his desk at the time (see bottom photo) of my call.  Needless to say, I placed an order immediately for one and awarded Joe a coveted OTR patch for his good work.

 

The even better news about this whole exercise for me is knowing that I will be able to keep my Defender up and running indefinitely as long as shops like XXXX and my own mechanic stay in business.

 

ED

 

“There is a solution for every problem, and don’t give up until a solution is found, if the problem is worth solving.” Me.

 

Top: AMR2043; Middle: AMR 2628 (and three alternative manufacturers); Bottom: New AMR2043 from XXXX

 

 

 

Day 19 update

As I expected would happen, once I got home, the long list of Post-Trip To-Do’s (For grammar buffs, Do’s is an acceptable form for stating the plural of To-do) got stalled almost out of the gate, as the chores of living back home started to accumulate and bury me.  I cannot tell you how many times I said to myself, I should have stayed on the road longer, but that would have been procrastinating and postponing the inevitable. Here is an update on several things.

 

First, Donner is completely cured of his on-the-road aliment, the severe colitis. And after a visit to his dermatologist, he also seems to be cured of a pesky bacterial infection that plagued his skin the entire trip, and made sitting next to him for hours a day for 49 days a nuisance for me.

 

Second, Donner’s official portrait arrived and I am waiting for the chance to take it to a framer.  I hope to do that tomorrow. When I get it back, I will post it on the page accessible from the button on the right column.

 

Third, I am also still waiting for the chance to get a haircut, not that there is much there to cut in the first place. Had I gone to Vancouver Island, I would have driven 300 miles out of my way to stop off at Henry’s Barber Shop in Port Hardy, which I visited twice before, but I never got there this trip.  This is probably the longest I have gone without a haircut in my life (three months).

 

Fourth, one of the items on my punch list for my the Defender’s mechanic was to replace the warning light module on the dashboard, which started to fail two days two days (lucky me, huh?) before I got home when the “headlights-on” icon would not light up.  My mechanic told me that when he went to check it out, the entire module failed.  This affected no functionalities, but it would be unwise to drive without those warning lights going off, 13 of them.  He also told me that the part is now obsolete and the only hope would be to find one from a junked Defender. As people know, I do not like to hear that there is no solution to a problem, so I went to work immediately. I will provide details about these two problems and my solution in a posting to follow so those with a similar problem can access it quickly.

 

ED

Status of Defender

It seems that the Defender’s engine skipping, not starting and red check engine light problems were all connected and a simple fix.  The relays controlling the fuel pump went bad, which happens.  Fortunately, I had spares with me so that if this had been diagnosed on the road, I would have been on my way in a matter of minutes. I was 100 percent right in my diagnosis that the problem had something to do with the fuel pump, which itself was brand new. Perhaps new relays should have been installed when the new fuel pump was installed.  I am beginning to think that this has been my problem all along over the last year, and it came and went intermittently until it finally gave out.  Hmmm. In the future, if I install a new device, I will insist on new relays. This should be standard operating procedure on all installations.  If I am correct, that means not only did I spend a ton of money over the last two years dealing with this, and not having the use of my vehicle in the meantime, but this was a time bomb waiting to go off during this entire trip of 10,200 miles.  Lucky me that it happened the day after I got home.  And perhaps this problem was the reason I had to have the Defender shipped back from Utah in 2016, at a cost of more than $5000 for me. Just a thought.

 

But a larger problem was with the indicator light for the headlights. That panel (see #1 in below left illustration) holds several warning lights – handbrake on, lights on, oil, and check engine. When the mechanic took a look at why the “lights on” light was not coming on, the rest of the panel fell apart.  Not surprising for a 24-year old vehicle.  Fortunately, no functionalities were affected, just the indicator lights, but they are needed.  Now the problem comes on finding one to replace mine.

 

“There is a solution for every problem.”