So, in the bus I removed the 20A fuse that had been working my fans for the past week or so and replaced it with an appropriate 5A fuse since my box of assorted ATO/ATC blade fuses arrived a few days ago. It lacks any 0.5A fuses which the specifications call for as being dark blue. Somebody, somewhere makes them but I’m having a dreadful time trying to find who and who stocks them. I’ve reached out to friends in the amateur radio world but none have come up with solutions.
Looking under the bus was fairly exhausting. It seemed at first glance that the distance between the outer edges of the two sets of channel under the bus is 30 inches. I’ll have to get under there to measure that properly and that is something that right now, I just don’t feel like doing. My plan such as it is to build a cage from leftover steel angle from the beds that were installed by the hillbillies. Why they used such heavy steel, I don’t know and how they managed to bend one of the steel angles, again I don’t know. I had a hard job bending that angle with a sledgehammer. In fact, I gave up trying!
The plan is a simple, open cage that will support one or two of the Harbor Freight 35AH deep cycle lead acid batteries. I’ll probably install them end to end rather than sideways. The steel ribs that can’t have bolts passed through will be a particular challenge. The two sets of C section are easy to drill and bolt. The others and I have two as shown in my simple diagram below will need brackets welded to them. That will be challenging as I have never before welded on the underside of anything. I just hope the molten steel does not drip. The idea is to bolt the cross members to those brackets. That way the whole thing is removable if I want to change my mounts in order to accommodate a different battery.
Meanwhile I just checked on eBay. It seems the security camera I ordered back on September 2nd still has a few days left before I can file it as a non-arrival and get my money back. Apparently it has until November 1st so come November 1st I shall be filing. I’m pretty sure that after what must be 55 days that the seller just pocketed my money and vanished. He certainly didn’t respond to my message of a few days ago as to whether he’d actually shipped the suspiciously cheap item. Actually I’m getting a lot of that at the moment. This must be the 3rd or 4th bad transaction recently. The last guy
was from India and for an Indian, it makes a load of sense. Given the Indian guy had 265 negative ratings for items costing about $3 each then that comes to around $750 which to him must be about a year’s wages. In fact that’s not a shabby amount even in the USA. I know of many people earning far less than $750 a month! This is of course why so many will rent a $400 a month ramshackle home from a slumlord and pile several people into it, all sharing rent. In fact there was a book about the struggles of the poor and dispossessed called “Nickel and Dimed”. In fact so many have come to expect to be nickel and dimed that they just don’t believe there’s another way.
Measuring my battery, it seems to be 8 inches long by 5 inches wide by about 8 inches high. It also weighs 20LBS. I’ll try building the cage to hold just one battery in order to cut down on weight. The steel of my cage is not inconsiderable heavy and while I could go out and buy lighter and more relevant steel, it just makes sense to use what I actually have. I’ll definitely have to practice my underneath welding techniques. I’ve never done that before. And of course, there I was, thinking I wasn’t going to need to do any more welding!
Looking at my solar panel output I’m thinking that the older panels with the more modern technology that total 20W just aren’t producing quite as much as my 15W Harbor Freight panel. I could be wrong, of course. Still, until I’m feeling more like getting under the bus to do something I’m not going to find out definitively.
Thinking about the problem of needing adequate blocking of incoming air through my extraction vents and the need to keep incoming bugs out, two solutions came to mind. Reading around somebody had used the equivalent of a cloth sock. The air keeps the “sock” open and when there’s no pressure, the sock closes. That’s actually a pretty neat idea though I’d imagine the “sock” would fray where it’s attached. As far as keeping bugs out, as my internal bug screen inside my ventilation ducting is probably more reducing airflow, I’d looked at various solutions but not been overly impressed. Looking in the cookware section of one of the online places I found they make 7 inch stainless steel sieves. Those sound ideal. I could simply attach tags and screw them over my mushroom domes. Indeed, I could probably replace the mushroom domes with fixed louvered vents and just have the sieves over that. I shall have to pay a visit to Williams-Sonoma as Walmart just seems to have plastic sieves which really aren’t going to like being outside.
Those with longer memories will recall my purchase of a GPS speedometer. Those who are astute will remember that when I tested it after purchase it worked just fine. When I went to use it in earnest, it proved unreliable with the display being inaccurate, missing digit segments. It did give me a pretty good indication that the speedometer on the bus is actually correct despite having oddly sized tyres. Today though, it wouldn’t even pick up a satellite signal.
Where I work, as a school bus driver, no electronic devices are permitted that aren’t installed. GPS is not installed. Thus I work from route descriptions which are turn by turn descriptions. Turn left on Joe Bloggs Road. Turn right on Murhey’s Law Road, Turn right on Sprogget & Sylvester Lane etc. That’s fine until you miss a turn. Thus I bought a street atlas online. None of the local bookstores seemed to stock them nor have the slightest interest in tracking one down for me. It’s all very unlike when I worked in a bookstore where I’d search the catalogs for the book the customer needed and ring other bookstores if the bookstore I worked for didn’t have it. One by one all the decent and half decent bookstores closed, leaving just the ratty stores where you have to watch they don’t clone your debit card or pick your pocket while you’re in there. Anyway, that atlast has the tiniest print I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I would have said see but it’s so tiny it can’t be read with anything other than a bloody great big magnifying glass or an electron microscope! The point is that while useful, a GPS isn’t the solution to navigation. It’s useful but I feel maps are largely better. Indeed, if I go on a journey though I’ll take a GPS, I carry a map (when I can get maps) and write out a route description for the non interstate portions (or use Mapquest to do it for me).
I’ve been idly looking at replacements for my rather scratched and worn Busboy mirrors. So far I’ve seen a lot of mirrors with L brackets but precious few with tunnel mount. Having said that I did come across today a rectangular convex mirror that had a clamp mount that would apparently fit 0.75 to 1.5 inch tubing. I dashed out and measured the tubing on the mirror mount and found it was 0.75. The irksome thing was those mirrors were $40 each. That’s too expensive. It’s something I’m going to have to get but I’m not spending that much. I really don’t like the Busboy mirrors as they show only the ground in front of the vehicle. The circular mirrors (and presumably the rectangular mirrors too) also show the top of the bus - very handy for low bridges and clearance issues. Don’t forget my bus is 11 feet tall and bridges marked at 14 feet might after a few road resurfacing be a lot less than 14 feet.
Tomorrow is a day when I normally do other stuff as well as working on the bus. Oddly enough, Sundays seem to be the day these days that I get the most achieved. I can’t say I’ve achieved an awful lot today! I’ve cut no steel, done no welding. I’ve played with my ventilation a bit but I really need to wait until my relays arrive before I can do much more with that. Having said that, it’s always possible for me to run two wires from the battery if the relay doesn’t fix the problem. The relay I ordered for the solar controller is solid state and designed to switch 250V so whether it will switch 12V remains to be seen. It’s Chinese so I expect all kinds of funky and unforeseen issues. To be candid since all the Chinese charge controller does is to switch the supply on when there’s enough power in the battery and off when there’s too little and of course to stop charging when the battery is full, it could all be achieved with simpler but more reliable separate circuitry. I have no idea how much power the Chinese relay will guzzle but I’d imagine in the region of 25ma per hour since that’s what everybody else claims on their solid state relays. We know they all come from China. Nobody in the west seems capable of making anything any more!
Nothing arrived in the mail today. No checks, bills, final demands, court summonses, stuff from Amazon or stuff from eBay not even any letters containing suspicious white powder nor letter bombs. Quite disappointing really! I’m still waiting for 3 relays and of course the mythical security camera that seems destined never to arrive. Now that’s odd because it’s the second one I ordered off eBay that just hasn’t arrived and where the seller seems to have been a scammer.
Recently somebody expressed astonishment that I’ve not set my motorhome up with a huge battery nor a huge amount of solar panels nor a generator. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I don’t see the need for all this expensive gadgetry and the second is it’d cost too much. I’ve got a 12v system almost completed that cost probably somewhere in the region of $350 that will do everything I need and then some. I have a plug-in mains system that will power just about everything my heart
could desire - mini-fridge, microwave, fan heater. I’m a simple fellow and don’t need much. There is no water pump because I’d have to mount a water tank under the bus and that’s complicated and expensive while 6 gallon jerrycans are available from Walmart for $12. There’s no hot water supply because water can be heated in a kettle fairly quickly and mixed with cold to provide washing and shower water. It can even be stored in an insulated container ready for use. Similarly I have no need for a TV nor stereo nor a cassette deck nor a radio. I don’t even own one of those Sony Walkman things. There’s no built in cooking because countertop cooking gear is cheaper. My solar system will charge my $29 phone and my $50 tablet. What more would I want? My lighting is LED lanterns though I might add built in lighting at some point. I’m just not addicted to outsourced entertainment. In fact I make almost no phone calls either. If the world ends I shall be well placed to survive!
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