Motorhome Tour - The Drivers Seat

 

The driving position in the motorhome is well designed and quite functional. All the information needed is clearly displayed and it is quite comfortable to drive the bus for hours at a time.

The drivers seat itself is from an old town bus (we bought it from a wrecker in Adelaide). It is sprung and pneumatically dampered and is much more comfortable than the passengers seat (especially on corrugated roads).

The instrument cluster contains gauges for: oil pressure, air pressure, water temperature, fuel tank level, rev counter and speed. In 2008 I built a microprocessor controlled engine monitoring system that controls the error and warning lights and displays information on a large LCD display mounted above the speedometer. This device is attached to all of the sensors (oil pressure, water temperature, air pressure etc) and has a number of sensors of its own. Because it has access to this information as well as speed and RPM details, it is able to closely monitor the engine and report on any errors or anomalies. It also has a logging function that compares values (maximum, minimum and average) from a single drive with the average over the life if the device (or since I last reset it). This provides valuable information about the engine, the condition of the oil etc.

There is also a voltage and current LCD display that I can switch between the crank battery, the house battery and the winch battery (used to pull the Moke into the back of the bus). From the driving position I can therefore monitor the state of charge and control the charging current into each battery bank as we drive.

The alternator fitted to the bus engine is huge (140A 24volt) - it therefore has the capacity to rapidly charge any or all of the battery systems as we drive.

There is of course a UHF radio, GPS navigation and a reversing camera (that also has a side-view camera).

 

 

Hobohome Tour

 

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