It has been a few months now since my last update , but i am happy to write that goat is undergoing heavy maintenance now for a few months.
The plan is to do a complete overhaul of engine, drive train ,and give the body a nice new fresh coat of paint.
I decided to do this when i bought mine in May , Goat was a good Goat ..say 70% but i wanted it to be 100%
So i decided to plan ahead a mayor overhaul and i ended up with the guys from Tarmot in poland to do the job.
They are very skilled people and have the know how of eastern block 4x4 's.
There is a small two man operation in the Netherlands that are somewhat affiliated with tarmot in Poland , and they were so kind to put goat on a trailor and drive it to Poland, as they were picking up two buhanka's to bring back to holland.
I flew ahead because i had some things of my own to do in Poznan.
One of the things was to find the grave of a fallen family member from the sovjet army that died at the pozan citadel siege in WW-2 in february 1945.
It was a interesting journey indeed. Poznan is a very nice city Btw.
My visit to the garage of Tarmot was very nice.
Friendly people that are skilled
Some of them have polish army maintenance experience.
Some of them even worked on Gaz 69 in their army days.
The owner of the garage told me that the maintenance crew does everything more or less on their own speed.
They are not superfast but very very skilled and he was very happy with them.
He had a hard time finding new skilled youth to join his team because most youngsters that leave mechanics school do not have the skill to really go deep in to technical problems. They learn how to replace complete modules in stead of fixing what is wrong inside the module.
A well known problem in these modern times indeed. The old fashioned car mechanic is a endangered species.
Also young mechanics feel more with the modern/sporty/luxury brand cars , and not soo much with classics.
It was clear that goat had been under going some earlier repairs that i did not know of.
The good thing about overhauling is it will make hidden problems or past actions surface.
Goats crankshaft already had some modifications/repairs/tunings in the past and it needed to be replaced.
The secondary fuel tank was never connected to the fuel system
))) luckely i never used or filled it before ..simply because i did not drive as much as i would have wanted this year.So the maint.plan is as follows
Engine overhaul
Complete powertrain overhaul
Axles overhaul
complete new coat of paint
Items that i want to be installed most already bought earlier
Trailor hitch
Search light
Original blinkers
turn indicator switch on the steering wheel
Dashboard plackards
Shovel holder on the side
Jerrycan holder on the back
A new tent cover
And some more things...
All in all i want goat to be better than when it left the factory line :=) and to return it as much as possible in its original state.
My goal is to go on camping trips in europe and offcourse i want to visit the UK next year with the anul meeting you guys organize.
photo's to follow
greeting from Holland
Arjan
How did you find it? or have you not driven the GAZ that much to notice?
Is this the colour it is going to have? Or are you changing the shade of green?
in the worst ones. Somehow the problem seems to be typical of East German engines. I have never heard of it in Polish or Russian serviced GAZ-69. Given that yours is obviously DDR (or so it seems) it may be opportune to check.
