Stealership

I started out looking for a door latch for the Exploder.  The front passenger door lock has been unusable for some time now and occasionally it locks up so that we can’t open it even from the inside.  For a while it wouldn’t latch unless we messed with it for a while.  We left it sit in Buchanan, took the Lincoln back to BC and then when we got back to Buchanan in the short two days we had there I tried to lube the latch in situ.  I would have preferred to get it out of the door but that appeared to be beyond my capabilities.  Just before we left an old bodyshop guy who is now retired in town and likes to drive around in his diesel Smart showed up and told me how to get the latch out.  So knowing full well that this will turn into an ordeal I nevertheless went in search of a replacement latch today.

The search started badly at one of those auto parts discount places.  The blond bimbo behind the counter should have confined herself to stocking shelves.  I dunno what possesses places like that to put idiots who don’t know parts and don’t know their system and don’t have a personality in direct contact with customers.  If she had half a clue about how to use the computer and a pleasant personality we might have been able to work something out but as it was she was stupid, clueless and unpleasant so I moved on to Merlin Motors, the local Ford stealership.

The guy there was pleasant enough and he quickly located the part I was looking for – in Toronto.  The price was plenty high but I would have paid it if he had been able to do better than 3 day delivery.  Then I had him check on the hood trim for the Lincoln.  Bear in mind now, we’re talking about a piece of chrome plated plastic, maybe 2 feet long and 3 or 4 inches wide at it’s widest spot.  OVER TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS! Unbelievable.  Of course he didn’t have it either but that didn’t matter.  I told him I’d buy it online. 

Which is exactly what I did when I got back to the bus.  $35 for the hood trim plus $7 shipping gets it to Regina tax paid for under $45.  For the the door latch the total was $75 delivered to Regina which was a little less than half what the stealership wanted.  I don’t mind paying something for local service and it would have been nice to walk out with the part but these guys have to get real.  That hood trim will take all of 5 minutes to install and 4 of those minutes will be getting it out of the packaging – I’d hate to guess what a stealership bodyshop might think that installation was worth.

The rest of my afternoon was taken up with getting ready to touch up the paint on the Prevost.  I found a bodyshop supply place that claimed to be able to match the paint colour.  We’ll see tomorrow when I go to pick it up.  And I spent some time window shopping for a good air compressor and some air tools.  When we get back to Buchanan it will be time to retouch the very tired paint on the bus.  I’ve got some cracks in the fibreglass that I’m more than capable of patching with epoxy but I need to know that I can match the paint over top my patches.  We’ve also picked up a few scratches over the years and I’ve got some spots where the clearcoat has disappeared entirely.  I’m no bodyshop expert but I think I can do a 60/60 paint job – that’s one that looks good from 60 feet when the bus is going away at 60 MPH.  I hate to put much money into that because it is purely cosmetic and even if I paid a bodyshop the roughly $20,000 that it would take for a complete paint job, the bus would still be worth exactly what it is worth tonight, which isn’t very much.

Tonight we’re parked on the side of the street next to the Walmart on the west side of Saskatoon.  As Walmart parking lots go this is a very small one so we didn’t want to take up a bunch of valuable spots and I’m not sure we could have found room anyway.  Tomorrow we’ll move out to the 16 West campground where we’ll spend a couple of nights before we head east toward Buchanan.  I’ve got a client to see south of Lanigan but I don’t think we’ll be able to connect this trip because they are still seeding.  Its been extremely wet on the east side of the province and there is still a lot of seeding left to do.  I wouldn’t dream of asking a farmer to spend time with me while his drill is sitting (and most of them would tell me to go to hell if I did).

The road less travelled

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

We got off the beaten track a bit this week.  Travelling south down I-15 over the years we have seen the sign for “craters of the moon” but I have never paid much attention to it.  Evidently Marilyn has been more observant because she remembered it as soon as we came on the crater area a couple of days ago.  We could have stayed on I-84 into Twin Falls and then headed north up I-15 but Streets and Trips kindly pointed out that Idaho State 26, 22 and 33 would be shorter.  Now remember it wasn’t that many years ago that Streets and Trips conspired with my stubborn lunacy to get us stuck on a mountainside between Bryce Canyon and Flagstaff, so I didn’t immediately embrace the proposed shortcut.  After some further research though it appeared that the route was safe and since we weren’t in any particular hurry we meandered our way through the heart of Idaho on some very pleasant 2-lane highways.  And that’s how we came to “Craters of the Moon”.

It turns out there is a geologic flaw in the heart of Idaho that has allowed lava to flow out periodically over the last 16 or 20 millions years.  I believe that somehow this flaw is connected to what causes Old Faithful but I wasn’t paying that close attention to the multi-media presentation so I may have that wrong.  I’m sure Wikipedia will explain it better than I can if anybody really cares that much. 

As we headed east out of the moonscape we hit some miserable winds.  Fortunately they were behind us so we were likely getting exceptional mileage but they were also causing a lot of real estate to change hands.  As we got closer to the interstate I thought it would be wise to stop and let the wind die down a bit.  There were times when the visibility was seriously impaired because the local farmers seemed clueless about conservation tillage.  So we ended up having a 1-1/2 hour nap in the rest area beside the scale shack on the side of I-15.  The wind was still pretty bad when we left but it was starting to abate and by the time we got maybe a half hour up the interstate it was back more or less to normal. 

Last night we parked in Skip and Maria’s yard outside Helena and had a great visit with them, their granddaughters, their daughter and their daughter’s great dane.  I love that dog and it seemed happy to see us again too.  Its like a medium sized domesticated horse.  This morning we lounged around drinking coffee and eating Maria’s fresh cinnamon buns.  Then we headed north and crossed the border at Coutts around 3:30 this afternoon.  Tonight we’re in our favorite campground – camp Wallyworld – this time in Lethbridge.  Tomorrow we’ll take a leisurely run up to Airdrie and by Monday night we hope to be back in Saskatchewan with the Malibu in tow.

Hot and dry

Its nice to see the sun for a change.  Pacific Northwet weather gets tiresome after a while so we’re appreciating the sunshine here just outside Boise, Idaho.  I’m wrapping up a project down here – I kind of forgot to post for a couple of weeks.  We made a hurry up trip east from the Island, stopped briefly in Buchanan and then headed back to Alberta and finally south through Bonner’s Ferry into Idaho.  I guess we were busy enough that I didn’t have much time on my hands to write a post.

Marilyn has been making good use of the dry weather by repairing the varnish job that she did last winter.  Evidently the wall was so wet when she refinished it that it actually molded behind the finish.  There were several sections in the bedroom that were quite disgusting when we got back this spring.  That was a big disappointment because she put in a lot of work last winter refinishing the bedroom.

Yesterday I hooked up a new to us satellite internet system.  I decided to leave the old system on the boat but we still needed a system for the bus so I cobbled together one out of used parts.  The guy that sold me the system is still in business but he’s a bit of an asshole about returning emails.  I contacted him about buying a new system, he responded right away and then he completely ignored me for 2 weeks.  By the time he finally got around to replying I had put together a system for about half what he wanted for a new one.  So I’m money ahead and he’s out a sale plus he will get my undying scorn whenever I have a chance to mention him.  The business to avoid is Tech Mobile Communications and the particular individual to avoid is Armand Lalonde. 

I had a full afternoon of grief getting all the pieces of the new system to talk to each other & I still have one modem that I couldn’t get to work but this posting is being done over the new system so the system definitely works.  Post-boat I have become much more obsessed with having spares for all our mission critical systems.  I include internet access in that list because both of us depend on that access almost as much as we depend on phone access – perhaps more so.  The result of that obsession with spares is that I now have 4 modems.  I can only have one commissioned at any one time but I should never be without a modem.  And on the subject of mission critical systems – the genset worked flawlessly on the way down.  I’m sure its just biding its time but while its working it is very pleasant.

Tomorrow I’ll go back out  one last time to pick up my tools and check the system.  Assuming everything is OK I’ll ship the tools  and we’ll be out of here Tuesday morning.  We’ve got some friends in Helena that we haven’t seen for a year so we’ll stop there on the way to Airdrie where we’ll pick up the Malibu and head east.  By the time we get it back to Buchanan, Goodspirit Lake should be warm enough for waterskiing.  I don’t know whether my old carcass remembers how to do a deep start but I’m going to find out before another month goes by.

My favorite thing to do

It must be – I do it often enough.  I’m talking about fixing my generator.  Nothing serious – this time – but nonetheless my hands are covered with genset grime because I have spent the last 24 hours wrastling the beast in and out of its hidey hole. 

On the way home from Texas we had a fail to start incident.  Nothing unusual in that – we’ve been having fail to start incidents as long as we’ve had a generator.  I am getting faster at diagnosing the problems – all that practice isn’t going to waste.  This time the run solenoid wasn’t pulling in.  The way both our Onans work is that the run solenoid is spring loaded to hold the governor against the fuel shutoff.  Unless the solenoid is energized the governor won’t pass any fuel.  So that was the immediate cause but figuring out why it was doing that was another matter altogether.  In the interest of getting home I simply unbolted the run solenoid and we ran the generator under close supervision and only when absolutely necessary.  The problem with that “solution” is that the genset had no way to shut itself down if it got into serious trouble.  Gensets spend a lot of their lives running unattended so they need to be able to shut themselves down if they run out of oil pressure or overheat.

These older Onans have a reputation for having a needlessly complicated run circuitry.  I spent some time trying to figure out why I had no power to my run solenoid but finally decided to do as many others have done and bypass the complicated Onan circuitry completely.  So now in the place of all the Onan ground based circuits we have one simple little cube relay.  When I start the engine that relay is powered and therefore open because it is normally closed.  That means that initially the run solenoid is unpowered but as the engine turns over and the oil pressure comes up the oil pressure switch opens, dropping the ground to the cube relay.  Only when that relay reverts to closed does the run solenoid see power and open the governor.  In a sense my system is an improvement on Onan’s system because the engine doesn’t start until it sees oil pressure.  Today I added a further refinement when I moved the run solenoid ground so that it has to pass through a normally closed thermostat mounted close to the exhaust.  I’m not sure what temperature I should be using on that shutdown but I’m starting out with 105C because that’s what I bought.  The thermostats were $7.99 shipping included from China for 10 pieces so I’m not out a lot if it doesn’t work.  My digital thermometer has a dead battery & we didn’t have a spare onboard so checking the temps will have to wait for tomorrow. 

As you may have guessed, we are back in Buchanan.  We left the Island about noon on Monday, caught the ferry to Horseshoe Bay and then drove like mad until we got back to the little house on the prairie.  Its pretty wet out here.  We didn’t see a single drill in the field all the way home.  There were a few set up in yards obviously ready to go but absolutely no sign of field work anywhere. 

Since we got back we’ve been in a mad scramble to get ready to leave again.  Aside from the already mentioned ongoing generator repairs I had some work to do on our other major piece of shit equipment, the Ford Exploder.  When we left it here in March we couldn’t use the front passenger door.  Apparently this too is a known problem.  Their door latch mechanisms rust up and you can only open the door from inside, if you are lucky.  Some owners have to resort to crawling across the console to get out whichever side is still usable.  Ours wasn’t so bad that we couldn’t use it but it was hard to open and sometimes didn’t want to close.  Yesterday I managed to get the inside panel off the door but ran up against a wall trying to get the mechanism removed.  I think you have to take out the rear window track and I’ll want a lot more time on my hands to tackle that one.  Instead I filled the latch up with weasel piss, worked it a bunch, opened and closed the door several times and I made some serious improvement on it.  I’ll keep filling it up with 3-in-one oil which is my current weasel piss of preference and hope that it doesn’t let us down on this trip. 

The last major piece of work I’d like to get to is doing a grease job on the Frenchy-bus but our neighbour says we’re getting rain tomorrow.  If he is right the grease will have to wait.  Today I pulled the plugs on the tag and steer hubs and added oil to a couple of them.  The engine fired up first turn and I either fixed our headlight problem from the winter or postponed fixing it – not sure which yet.  Tomorrow we expect to be back on the road by early afternoon and will likely get to the rest area at Maple Creek tomorrow night.  So I better get back to work now.

Don and Darlene

We met some good people over the years that we spent in Whispering Pines and we have stayed in touch with several of them.  Last weekend Don & Darlene arrived from Alberta to spend a week out here.  As we have done with other guests, we waited at the yacht club reciprocal dock and they caught a cab from the airport.  Then we hustled out of Tsehum Harbour to get out ahead of a low tide because the water in there can get really thin on a low. 

We had planned to drop the prawn traps and spend the night anchored close by but the weather was so nasty that once we got the traps down we decided to just go back to the dock at Cow Bay.  By the time we got to the dock it was calm but how do you know?  When we got to the dock Lance was loading prawn traps onto Currie’s Mermaid. 

The commercial prawn season opened out here yesterday.  Lance can haul about half the traps he is allowed to set on his boat, which is typical for the prawn boats we have seen out here.  Usually they get the boats loaded up with half of their traps the night before opening and stack the balance of the traps on the dock.  Lance wanted to fish further away from Cow Bay so he didn’t want to return to the Bay to pick up his traps and he figured the docks where he wanted to fish would be full of local traps so he hired Currie to ferry his traps out to where he would be fishing.

On Tuesday morning we went back to Saanich Inlet, pulled our traps and then anchored in Tod Inlet, just outside Butchart Gardens.  I can’t remember if I was in Butchart Gardens when I was a kid – I likely was because mom & dad like d to visit that kind of place.  They pretty well leave me cold – I appreciate how much work it must take to maintain them but I’m just not sure why anyone would bother.  This one must be a little gold mine though so that would be a strong motivation.  It cost $120 for the 4 of us to wander around inside the park for maybe 3 hours – it seemed longer. 

We spent a pleasant night anchored in Tod Inlet with Shirley and Gerry on Seagate and they joined us for the rest of our week.  On Wednesday we headed up Sansum Channel into Chemainus and across to Telegraph Harbour on Thetis Island.  That was where Lance was waiting to drop his traps which worked out well for him because Marilyn had baked a big batch of bread while we were underway.  We rafted up to the Mermaid for a visit and dropped off some cinnamon buns.  Lance’s crew was busy baiting the traps.  They use both the prawn bait pellets that we have been using and larger bait cans with anchovies inside.  The theory is that the bait attracts the prawns and the anchovies feed them to keep them around. 

After a night in Telegraph Harbour we came around through Houston Channel and Trincomali Channel to Ganges Harbour.  We’ve anchored here before but never tied up in town and never spent much time in town.  Its pretty yuppified and overrun with greenies but otherwise a very pretty place.  I’m sure we’ll be back but I really need to print up some “I heart farmed salmon” bumper stickers.  I think they’d be a big hit in this town.

Today we’ll hang out at the dock, wander around town a bit and end up back at the dock at Sidney North Saanich yacht club.  We had planned to finish up Don and Darlene’s visit with prime rib at the club but when Marilyn phoned to confirm our reservation yesterday Isobel told her that the cook had abruptly quit.  So I guess we’ll be having drinks at the club and something on the barbeque.

Michael’s RV Park / Hail in St. Louis

Those were the bookends for my week.  On Monday I had a quick visit with Michael Hargis at their new RV park in Dixon, Missouri.  He’s resurrecting a badly neglected park with a history of hosting bluegrass festivals.  Their intent is to turn it into a destination music festival location.  If it was anybody other than Michael I’d be more than skeptical.  But this is the guy who bought a seated MCI bus and turned it into an RV in 90 days so I’m not inclined to bet against him when he says he will have this park ready for a festival a month from now.

When I stopped in Michael was supervising the restoration of the restaurant, burying new water, sewer and power lines for dozens of new RV hookups, setting up a portable building for his office and store and cleaning out years of accumulated junk in the house they will eventually be living in.  So I didn’t stick around too long.  Partly because I didn’t want to hold him up but mainly because I was afraid he’d put me to work if I stood around too long.

The other big change coming to the park is booze.  It sounds like getting a liquor license for the restaurant is a simple formality.  That’s probably related to the fact that the area looks to have been particularly hard hit by the recession.  Anybody willing to spend money developing property is likely looked on pretty favourably right now.
The park isn’t really on the way to or close to anywhere but it is on a paved highway.  Maybe some year we’ll manage a visit in the bus on the way to Florida.
After my visit with Michael I headed east across the Mississippi River into Illinois and then south to Dixon Springs Ag Center which is sort of an outstation for the University of Illinois.  They had purchased some Growsafe equipment and needed my magic to get it running.  The equipment barely arrived ahead of me – as usual – but other than that it was a pretty straightforward installation.  My accommodations were another matter.
There isn’t a town anywhere near the Ag Center but the researcher in charge had told me to stay in Vienna, Illinois.  I actually missed Vienna on the first pass which should give you an idea of the size of the place.  Since I had already gone past it I check the room situation in Metropolis – they had 8 or 10 hotels whose names I recognized.  The first one I checked was a Super 8 – she wanted over $800 for 5 nights – in a Super 8.  “Huh?  That’s like over $160 per night?”  “Well the quilt show is on.”  She didn’t actually say “how could you be so effing stupid not to know …….” but she might as well have.  I tried one other place that looked to be lower caliber than a Super 8 and they only wanted $100 per night so I passed on that too.  In hindsight I probably should have taken it. 
I ended up staying at something called Liberty Inn of Vienna.  It was the only game in town and they knew it.  It was filthy.  Evidently it had a flood at some point and nobody bothered cleaning the carpets post-flood so you could see the extent of the flood’s advance along the hallways and into my room – I assume the others were the same.  The water may have come from upstairs because the ceiling showed water stains as well.  There were rips in the carpet in my room.  The sheets didn’t fit the bed.  The shower didn’t work.  The soap was only vaguely soap-like.  Did I mention it was filthy?  I only tried eating breakfast once – stale crumbled corn flakes, stale bread, margarine that wouldn’t melt on the toast and without a word of a lie, the jelly had dried out inside the little jelly packages to the point where it was like cutting cheese when I tried to put it on my toast. 
They only cleaned my room twice out of the four nights that I ended up staying there and when I complained they more or less told me to go pound sand.  I’m posting their name – Liberty Inn of Vienna and their phone number – 618 658 6300 in the hope that some other traveller will get sent here by Google and thereby stay anywhere but in this hell hole posing as a hotel.  Sleeping in the ditch would be more comfortable and clean.  Sleeping in your car would be light years ahead of this dump.
On Friday I had my fill so I moved up the road to Marion which was a considerable drive from the Ag Center but worth it for the comfort.  And the staff at Marion seemed to actually understand the concept of customers and customer service.  It was a Super 8.  I’m hoping that by mentioning a lot of hotel names like Super 8 and the Quality Inn that I am staying in tonight that Google will figure out that this post has something to do with hotels.
The hail part came late this afternoon after I had sat in traffic for three hours on the trip up to St. Louis from Marion.  I was just getting out of the last of the traffic jams, still on the Missouri side of the border but down to exit 3 or 4 when I noticed some particularly ugly looking clouds to the northwest.  Tornados aren’t impossible around here and I really don’t ever want to see one  of them.  All of a sudden there was a gawdawful crash against the windshield and then it started to rain a bit and then some more bangs and crashes on the windshield and the roof.  I’ve never seen hail like this.  It was coming in almost horizontal.  You could see the chunks coming at you from a distance which was alarming.  And they weren’t all that big – walnut size or smaller but they were beating the everloving shit out of my little Toyota Camry.
When I finally got to the Budget car rental place I don’t think the moron checking me in would have noticed if I hadn’t pointed out the hail bruises.  They seemed pretty obvious to me and it had hailed at the lot so he should have been looking for them but I’m sure he would never have clued in if I hadn’t said something.  Fortunately I took the overpriced Budget car rental “insurance” so it was pretty straightforward.  Not sure what might have happened otherwise.  I guess I could have tried keeping my mouth shut, hard as it may be for some of you to believe that would have been possible.

I did a stupid thing

Today I changed the lift pump on the port Lehman because it was slowly pissing fuel into the pan under the engine.  As I mentioned in my last post, the red stuff in the pan has been bugging me for some time.  My white rag tied around the hose confirmed that there was fuel coming from the lift pump.  I couldn’t tell exactly where on the pump but it wasn’t a fitting so the pump needed to be changed and of course I had a spare.  As it turns out, I think it was one of George’s famous “I saved the old one just in case” kind of spares but I didn’t know that going into the project.

After I got the spare mounted and everything tightened back up I ran the engine for a while and determined that the leak was diminished but not completely banished.  Further investigation revealed that there is a goofy nylon nut arrangement on the bottom of the fuel filters that is also weeping a bit of fuel and as I hinted above, the pump I just replaced is likely one that George removed and saved but didn’t rebuild.  Whatever the situation I have a new one on order from Florida and two rebuild kits coming from Great Britain.  We’ll be well stocked once all that arrives.  In the meantime the leak is greatly reduced and I’ll keep some boat diapers tied around the two locations to sop up whatever does manage to escape.  None of this is the stupid thing I did.

While I was trying to stop the weeping fuel leak at the bottom of the fuel filters I shut off the fuel at the tanks.  Anybody wanna guess where this is headed?  I’d had it shut off when I changed the pump but that time I remembered to turn it back on. 

I ended up taking the nylon nut right off the filter housing so I could see what it was which meant that I had to shut the fuel off at the tanks.  I’d already figured out that shutting the fuel off at the port tank didn’t cut it – I’ve got a crossover that needs to be shut off too.  I messed around with the nut for a while trying to figure out how I could boogie up a cure for the completely stripped threads and finally decided that I couldn’t.  Fortunately I called American Diesel before they closed their doors for the week – they’re way over in Virginia.  We’ve got 5 of those nuts in the mail now – I like to have real spares.  I ended up putting the old nut back on and tying it up as well as I could with several nylon zip ties.  I think I actually got it stopped leaking, hard as that is to believe.  There’s not a whole lot of pressure against it but it could be 8 or 10 psi.  It just occurred to me that if it gets worse I can likely wrap some of my rescue tape around it for a temporary fix.  I may even go back and do that tonight.

Once I got everything cleaned up and put back together I started up the engine and came upstairs to take a break.  It started easily and ran fine …………. for about 10 minutes.  I was just about to shut it down and go back down below when it shut itself down.  Not good.  Seriously not good.  It almost immediately occurred to me what I had done but I’ve been around enough diesels that were ran out of fuel to know that it can either be really easy to get them going again or a real bitch.  Generally if you know the procedure its not that bad but sometimes its bad despite (or even because of) the procedure.  The first time I was around a fuel shutdown was at the University feedlot, in the silage pit which is open to the north onto the South Saskatchewan River and it was December.  It was somewhere south of 30 below and there was a wicked wind blowing up the pit off the river.  We had a medium size Massey with a Perkins diesel and we just barely got it going again before it froze up completely. 

Today I didn’t have to worry about freezing up but the process wasn’t dead simple either.  Of course I didn’t bother consulting a manual – how hard could it be?  Mechanical diesels – as I am fond of pontificating – are at their heart fundamentally simple machines.  If they turn over and have fuel they will run barring some catastrophic internal disaster which I had no reason to suspect.  As I pointed out much later to Marilyn, ours was rolling over and it clearly wasn’t running, therefore it was not getting fuel.  The question was why.  And to answer that question I am ashamed to admit I finally had to resort to reading the manual.  Father taught me that when all else fails you can read the manual so today I did.  It turns out that those two cap screws on the side of the fuel injection pump that I have looked at and wondered about their purpose, are in fact the bleed screws for the pump.  If you loosen them, pump the primer pump until they run fuel and tighten them back up the engine will start.  If you don’t do that it really doesn’t matter how many fittings you loosen – it won’t start.  I know this because I loosened pretty well every other fitting before I consulted the manual.

On balance though it could have been much worse.  Don and Darlene are scheduled to arrive here next week after I get back from Illinois.  If I had somehow managed to run us out of fuel with them onboard I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had decided to travel by bus instead.  Put me onboard a strange boat that backs away from the dock and then dies and I think I’d say “its been fun but we’ll be at the Holiday Inn for the rest of the visit.  Hope it all works out for you.”