New Truck and Rally Pages

January 31, 2013 Leave a comment

The specs of our Tatra and Scania are consistently among the most viewed pages on ergracing.com. We’ve just added the specs of the Erg Racing Iveco service truck and replaced the separate pages for each truck with a single page that now lists the specs for all of them.

Likewise, one of the most popular post categories here is rally. To make it easier to find posts relating to individual events, we’ve made a new Rally Index page. The page contains a list of rallies we’ve been to along with an index of links to related posts.

In addition to the post category tabs on the second menu bar at the top of the page and the search bar at the top right of the header, we hope these changes will make it even easier to navigate through the site.

Filed under Blog Notes

Delayed Posts From Tuareg Rally 2012

April 3, 2012 Leave a comment

Welcome to everyone coming to look for new posts about the Tuareg Rally!

It’s been a few days since we’ve been able to add anything new. There are two more posts on the way to reach the end of our story. We’ve also got lots of unpublished photos and some video, which we’ll try to get up as soon as possible too.

Unfortunately, since our return we’ve had a few distractions as well as a nasty flu that makes it hard to feel like writing or curating photos.

We’re sorry about that. With luck, we’ll be able to get everything up in the next week or two, so please check back in a few days.

Don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or send a question.

Filed under Blog Notes, Rally, Service Team Tagged with , ,

Starting The Year Off Right

January 2, 2012 Leave a comment

Happy New Year to all our readers and visitors!

To start the year off, we’ve done a little housekeeping, updating the About Page and adding a new page with the Technical Specs for our Tatra 815-2 Dakar.

Since we didn’t get a chance to visit North Africa again last year, things have been rather slow and this update is long overdue. As we work on plans for the coming year, we’re also hoping to finish some of our unpublished posts with photos and videos from last year.

We’re closely following the Africa Eco Race and the Dakar 2012, which is great for motivation!

Filed under Blog Notes

Spring Cleaning

April 17, 2011 Leave a comment

We’ve been slow finishing up the next post in the series describing last September’s trip to Tunisia. We’re sorry about that, but we’ll be picking up where we left off over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, as you can see we’ve been doing a little spring cleaning. Check back soon for updates.

Filed under Blog Notes

Holiday update

December 24, 2010 Leave a comment

It’s busy here for the holidays, and things always seem to take more time than you think they will. We’ll be taking some time off before getting back to work in January to prepare the Erg Machine for another trip to the Sahara! If all goes well, we’re planning to go back in April, but we have a little maintenance to perform in addition to finishing the new microcontroller for the transmission.

We got some good news from the Tatra Factory just in time for Christmas: they’ve completed maintenance on the EM-2, and everything has been put back together! We’ll be going to the Czech Republic in a few weeks to pick it up once they’ve finished repainting it. We’re also putting together a series of posts describing the trip to Tunisia last September.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of the EM-1 and the EM-2 side-by-side in our workshop hangar not long before we took the EM-2 to Kopřivnice. The perspective is a little misleading, the dimensions of both trucks are almost identical.

Wishing everyone a happy holiday!

Filed under Blog Notes, Scania SBA 111, Tatra 815

Delicate Souls Abstain

December 2, 2010 Leave a comment

Welcome to the new Erg Machine blog on WordPress! We hope it will be easier to navigate the archive and find posts on a variety of topics ranging from preparation and maintenance to travel logs describing our trip. To start things off before launching into a description of our recent Tunisia trip, here is the very latest news about our new Tatra 815.

We drove the Erg Machine 2 to Kopřivnice just over a week ago for servicing at the Tatra factory. The work has started, and the staff sent us some impressive pictures.

As you can see, they’ve removed the engine!! It’s a V12 that weights approximately 1.2 tons!

Removal of the engine makes it easier to perform a complete inspection of the engine bay and carry out some maintenance that was already identified: The hoses that make up the lubrification and cooling system will be changed. The two starter motors were removed and will be checked to identify and repair an intermittent failure. The engine valve covers have been removed to perform an adjustment and check of the injection nozzles.

The drum brakes were also removed for rectification, which will eliminate all the irregularities induced by wear from the brake pads.

More work is planned in addition to that described here. We’ll post updates and provide more details as it progresses.

Filed under Blog Notes, Maintenance, Tatra 815

Good Things On The Way

November 26, 2010 Leave a comment

After a long hiatus, work has resumed on the blog! With luck, we’ll be back up and running again by next week with photos from Tunisia, a description of the trip and some long overdue information on the gearbox monitoring device. We’ll have more news ready in a few days.

We’ve also started a new project: Erg Machine 2.

It’s a Tatra 815 4×4 that participated in the Paris-Dakar several times. It is homologated FIA T4, which is the competition category, but the truck was primarily used for rapid assistance. It is currently at the Tatra factory in Kopřivnice where it is undergoing specialized maintenance.

We’ll be writing more about that too once the blog is up and running again.

Originally published on Tumblr

Filed under Blog Notes, Tatra 815

Blog Notes

September 23, 2010 Leave a comment

It’s been just over a week since we returned from Tunisia. What a fantastic trip it was!

A few people expressed disappointment that we weren’t able to update the Tumblr during the trip. To be honest, it was ambitious to even hope for that. Surprisingly we had mobile data access in most cities and camps, including the oasis paradise of Ksar Ghilane, but in between the only link with the outside world would have been by communication satellites. Even so, there simply wasn’t time to do more than send a few Twitter updates while on the ground.

We arrived home on Monday, having spent a few extra days vacation elsewhere in Europe, and started transferring photos to the computer on Tuesday. There are going to be some changes, but the blog should resume next week, with news from the trip, as well as a description of the gear box LED monitoring device that was discussed on the Terrangbil forum after someone found our as yet undocumented YouTube video.

As usual, for up to the minute news, follow us on Twitter.

Originally published on Tumblr

Filed under Blog Notes, Scania SBA 111, Travel Log