202 On Tour

Kalgoorlie to Balladonia via Boulder, Kambalda and Norseman

Spotted on my pre breakfast walk

Lazy start, since we were doing the Kalgoorlie Town Hall tour at 10.30am

That out of the road, we hit Jesters for an early lunch and then made tracks for Boulder for a quick look around. The Boulder Town Hall was open so we had a quick look around before getting serious about the 400 kms that we had to cover today.

As we reached the Goldfields Highway and accelerated past 80 kph there was a distinct shudder that wasn’t there below 60, nor there on Saturday. Mmmmm.

First suspicion was the mud still caked on the rear left wheel. This was the hardest to reach with the power washer on Saturday, and had mud running out of it after the auto wash on Sunday.

Found a safe spot to pull off and got to work with a stick 😉👍. 20 minutes later and back on the road and the vibration was down 80 pct, but still didnt inspire confidence for the 3000 kms over the next 5 days.

Kambalda was 50 kms down the road, so onwards it was. Ideas floating around included pulling the wheel off for a better clean at Balladonia tonight, to seeing if there was a car wash at Kambalda (yeah. right).

At the Kambalda servo I had another look, and noticed that the wheel looked to be missing some balance weights

Double mmmmm, I can’t fix that. Google said there were two mechanics in Kambalda, but they both had chained gates today. I decided to ring ahead to Norseman, based on a Google search and remembering an Auto Mechanics shop  I saw when we were there 10? days ago.

Wilsons Diesel and Auto Mechanics in Norseman were great, from first call, to jumping to it on arrival., and a quick clean and re balancing of the wheel. All for $30.! Bargain of the week.

Back on the road it was like driving a different car, back to its old self. And we made it Balladonia only just after sunset.

Quick dinner, and then I had a quick chat to 3 truck repositioning drivers about my post bank career options before retiring for our early start tomorrow.