Originally Posted by
Cuppa
Home away from home!
A couple of things you may want to do to your water supply to save yourself possible grief somewhere out in the never never though..... based on personal experience.
I've used those black tanks suspended by metal straps as you have & suggest that you insert a sheet of ply or similar under each tank. The tanks are fine suspended like that on bitumen, but if suspended with just the straps on corrugated roads they will leak sooner or later. The weight of the water constantly pushes the bottom of the tank up & down & eventually they develop a leak in the middle of one end - a result of the plastic fatiguing. You would be most unlikely to have this happen during your forthcoming trip, but if you do enough corrugated kilometres it will happen eventually, & the chances of it happening when it's convenient are slim. Been there done that! Putting in a ply panel adds extra support under the entire tank & solves the problem, as well as protecting against damage from flying rocks.
I would also add some sort of protection to the water hose which may be damaged by flying rocks to save the possibility of pulling up for the night & finding you have lost your water. Assuming you have the two tanks connected it would be a good idea to have a tap between them if you haven't already done so. That way if one tank loses water you wont have lost it all if the tap is shut at the time. The new tank has drinking water hose on it, but the original doesn't. IF you get unwanted 'flavour' changing to all drinking water hose will help.
And one other thing which I'm confident you will have done, but I'm mentioning it for anyone else reading who might not think of it - use high tensile bolts to do up those tank retaining straps.
We lost all the water from one of our two tanks out in the WA goldfields, caused by 'corrugation fatigue & which cut short our time there as we had to go back to Perth to get a replacement tank (after numerous attempts at repairs had failed in Kalgoorlie). When I fitted a new tank (together with ply support sheets) I used standard bolts. They lasted for about 3 years until they let go whilst we were on a weekend away. This was in the bus & I was alerted by the sound of the 'north/south' metal straps scraping on the bitumen road & managed to pull up before the tank was damaged. Roadside repair meant draining the full tank & a LOT of hassle. Luckily we were not too far fom home. In a camper trailer chances are you wouldn't notice anything amiss until you pulled up somewhere.
Paint job looks better than the original & gives the whole shebang some individuality (& suits the Patrol nicely).