Major oops!

Today was designated as a day to work on the door lock. That never actually happened though. I'm pretty unhappy when things don't work so I went up on the roof and started work on the non working rear marker. It turned out that the cross point on the screw was very full of rust. Nothing could shift it! I tried several screwdrivers and even a Grabbit. Needless to say, the Grabbit was as useless this time as it was last time. In the end, the angle grinder did the job.

The new marker light was installed. There was a lot of fiddling involved but it's in place and more importantly, working. It looks a bit different from the original but at least it has a real bulb. There were some LED models but I'm not a huge fan of LEDs in critical or hard to reach places because they fail more often than incandescent bulbs. As an example, I bought 4 LED light bulbs for milady's bathroom on Black Friday. Two have already failed yet those bulbs are only used briefly.

I had all the internal doors of the bus open today with the extraction fan running. They worked well but pulled all the hot air from the cockpit forward. The whole of the interior of the bus was very soon over 106F. That's up from the earlier 99F. Clearly a heat screen inside the windscreen was in order. Thus I started looking for them online. The prices were horrible. Something in the order of $40.

A little later, I had to go on a mission for milady and while on that mission, I paused to buy a front marker. That was about $2.50 in Walmart but while I was there I had a brainwave. Rather than an expensive screen, I thought I'd try some 88 cent foam boards. I bought 5 but 4 covered the drivers window and the windscreen easily. Tomorrow will be the real test to see how much of a difference it makes.

I went up on the hood to switch out the dead lamp. I'd had a look and found the bulb was dead. Then I'd changed the bulb and it lit - until I put the lens back on. It turned out that the socket was worn out. I could wiggle the bulb and get the thing to light then it would go out as soon as I out the cover on. Time for a new lamp! Anyway, I removed it and immediately the wire vanished inside the bus. What a pain. It now means I have to install an access hatch on the inside. That's a job for tomorrow!

In Walmart there was an interesting device that looks like a super cap unit. There are cheaper models and I'm thinking something like this could handle all my USB power needs. Something to think about.

Today was miserably hot. It sapped my strength and made moving really hard. It was 100F outside and high humidity too.