Under The Hood Of The Tatra 815-2

January 9, 2012 Leave a comment

We went by the workshop today to do some cleaning and organizing of equipment in the Tatra.

We didn’t have the camera with us, but since the cabin was tilted, we took advantage of the opportunity to get a picture of the V12 T3 930-54 engine with the iPhone.

We had the engine serviced at the Tatra Service Center in Kopřivnice just before Christmas, and we asked them to check and adjust the injection system. The engine now seems to be running more smoothly and we’ve experienced a noticeable increase in power.

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The Tatra T815-2 Race Exhaust

February 11, 2011 Leave a comment

We also got something for the Tatra fans last weekend: we made a short recording of the wicked 19-liter V12 engine. Now that’s something to get revved up about (1400 revs to be exact).

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The Tatra is Back!

January 20, 2011 Leave a comment

We’re just back from Kopřivnice with the Tatra (Erg Machine RS). The maintenance and painting are finished, and we picked it up at the factory on Monday. It was a 15-hour drive back, but this time the heater was working, so it was not as brutal as when we drove there in November!

The Tatra 815 (Erg Machine RS) at the Tatra Factory in Kopřivnice

The engineers did a thorough job, and the truck is almost like new, especially with the completely new paint design. We were impressed with the attention to detail the truck received, which included changing the Clearance/Marker lights for a more aesthetic look. Read more of this post

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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

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