Yes. I've been pollinated.

No photographs of work under the bus because my phone had mysteriously eaten most of its fully-charged battery despite not having been used. I keep saying I'll get a different phone. Actually, I went to Walmart with the intention of getting a new phone but was totally ignored by the staff. I've tried a couple of times to get a new phone but each time I've had the same issue in Walmart. That and the fact that Walmart has the phones locked away because it doesn't trust its customers or its own anti-theft technology.

The first thing - the halogen bulbs I ordered arrived. I have a pack of ten, ten watt bulbs. They do emit heat and use four times the power but cost $5 for ten as opposed to $7 for two with the Walmart bulbs and $10 for the Home Depot bulb. In terms of cost, the halogens are way cheaper by a factor of over seven. The Home Depot bulb is exceptionally bright but I'll have to build a little globe to put over it. Thus far the LED bulbs I have tried just have not lasted very long at all. It doesn't matter how much I pay for them, what the brand is or where I buy them. They just don't last a fraction of their alleged life.

My extra mirrors eventually showed up. The postman left a note in my mailbox that there was nowhere secure to leave my parcel then gave the address of the post office in Lexington town as to where it would be available for pickup. He also left the option of ordering it to be redelivered. The webpage given refused my data. The QR code on the note also failed to function. There's plenty space that's secure here to leave a parcel. Anyway, out of curiosity on Monday I went to the post office near my work to ask for the status of my parcel since it was never redelivered on Saturday (I'd found a way of ordering redelivery). Bizarrely it was at that post office (which is not the Lexington town post office). Thus I am left wondering whether Walmart workers perhaps moonlight as Post Office workers as the standard does not seem high. But I almost forgot the guy that brought me my package - he must have been a UPS worker in his other job as he managed to drop my parcel while carrying it 10 feet. Had he been Fedex, I'm sure he'd have drop kicked it to me!

The mirrors that just arrived is the top mirror on each side. They're identical to the bottom mirror. The top mirror shows a wider view so I can come out of a branch of a Y junction and see behind me to see what's coming from the other branch. The way my bus is built I cannot lean out of the driver window.

All of the mirrors I've bought recently have been either polished aluminium or stainless steel. The trick to turn them black was to spray black electrical insulation on the stainless steel and black paint on the aluminium. The two convex mirrors (top and bottom) are heated but as the West Coast Junior (middle mirror) is unheated and as the bus has no heating circuitry  I've just trimmed the supplied cables to between 6 and 8 inches with the idea that if I eventually do put in a heating circuit they can be connected. Realistically I don't see any likelihood of my doing anything like that.

After working outside in the pollen, I was coughing and sneezing badly so I had to dash in for some antihistamines. I was very thoroughly pollinated!

Eventually I got under my bus. I thought I'd share this picture of the mudflap. It's definitely crooked. If you could see the workmanship employed by Carpenter in the construction of my bus I'm pretty sure you'd weep. The interior workmanship is quite wonky and there's even a window that's set in at a slight angle.

Anyway, under the bus I passed the wires from the battery hanger on the right to the battery hanger on the left. They're all fastened into place as is the battery connector. Just beside the battery hanger I put a fuse. Thats there just in case one day a battery is put in backwards. I have two 10A breakers to put in on the live side. One will go to each battery. That way neither battery will have more than a 10A load exerted on it. Truth be told, 5A is probably was too much for the batteries I'm using. The fuse on the cable is 25A. That should blow fairly readily and I can always down-rate to 15A if need be.

The main reason I didn't proceed further is that I am totally out of yellow ring connectors. Once I get those I can move the tarp to the other side of the bus and get under to work on the final part. I did think about slipping the battery underneath but it's still pinning the tarp down.

I treated a few spots where the gray paint is flaking. I just sanded and sprayed. While I was up there, I looked at my roof vent. It seems to be about a foot square. I didn't measure it. The problem I'm getting is that rain is seeping in, soaking the insulation and oozing over some of my interior paintwork. The problem that it's causing is it's thinning some of my latex paint to the point I can see through to the OSB behind. It's probably down to the vent which I really don't think is all that waterproof. In fact I've seen water dripping from it on the inside recently. 

The white elastometric paint seems to be flaking in places. That's really quite surprising and not what I expected. I can get up there and wash the roof with warm, soapy water then after it has dried, put on another couple of cans of paint in the hope no more will flake and crack. Perhaps the layer was a little too thin in places?

Of the plans in hand, I want to complete my battery tie-up. If that works as I hope it will then my ventilation fans should work correctly without causing the battery to trip the charge controller into shutdown. The other plan is to modify the solar input by installing an exernal power input at the rear and to upgrade the cigarette-lighter socket solar power connectors to Anderson connectors. 

I bought some MC4 connectors and splitters, thinking it was a good idea. Now I realize they're just hard to pull apart, hard to use and generally a pain in the neck. Anderson connectors are so much easier and with the amount of power I'm using, pretty much all I need. MC4 is for heavy current. I'm using light current.

Tomorrow is going to be rainy but I have to buy connectors. As I drive daily for work, I do not plan to go anywhere I really don't have to and that includes the car parts store. I take my downtime seriously as I am on the road for work for a total of 9 hours a day. 

The mystery of the missing postman

Over the past few weeks I've been working toward adding a 3rd mirror on the side mirror clusters. There are a lot of issues, the first of which is that I needed a new mirror bracket. Those just don't seem to be readily available so I bought a strip of punched steel from Lowes (hiss, spit). The holes seem to take a 5/16 bolt readily enough. I figured that bolting them to the 1 inch diameter mirror tubes would be easy enough. Cutting and bending the strips was easy enough as the steel is very malleable. Anyway, after making a pair, using the old stair handrail as a former since it's the same diameter as the mirror tubing, I sprayed them with black Rustoleum.

The mirror tubes are big enough to carry three mirrors but only if I use a smaller mirror than my original West Coast Mirrors. Thus I have my West Coast JR mirrors. They arrived a few days ago but were aluminium backed. Some black Rustoleum cured that horrendous shininess. Moving the mirror mounts was tough because everything was well rusted. A few squirts of PB Blaster and a few minutes waiting and the nuts came off without too much of a fight.

The new mirrors look quite good from front and back. I've got them angled slightly down which I'm not 100% sure I want now that I have convex mirrors showing me the side of the bus and the ground by the back wheel.

That's what the two mirrors look like together. There's plenty space above for a wide convex mirror that'll show me what's happening in the next lane over and from joining roads on Y junctions. It'll add a lot to safety. The wide convex is what I'm waiting for.

The West Coast JR mirrors are not heated, sadly. Both sets of convex (those shown and the ones I'm waiting for) are both heated. I had ideas of putting in a heating circuit but was unhappy with the idea of poking a hole in perfectly waterproof bodywork for the cable. The lack of a heating element on the West Coast JR is a huge disappointment but no heated versions were available.

Driving schoolbusses daily I find heated mirrors are very useful. They really help when it's raining as well as when it's foggy or cold. Those are the times the mirrors are less than abundantly clear. On the other hand, driving my motorhome as a leisure vehicle, I can simply pause during inclement weather. Thus I'll probably not use the heated part of any of the mirrors but will likely trim the cables short but not so short that they're unusable for the future.

The new mirrors were ordered a few days ago. They were supposed to arrive on Thursday but did not. Instead I found a slip in my mailbox stating that they could not deliver my item because no secure location was available. There was a QR code to scan to get me to the redelivery booking thing. I scanned it and it didn't work. I went to the USPS redelivery website and typed in the item number and the system failed to recognize it. In the end I had to go via the package tracking thing. So I booked for a Saturday delivery. Well, by 9PM no parcel had arrived.

I really don't know what's going on. This is just a $28 order. It's not the crown jewels. It's not a restricted item. Nobody is going to steal it from my mailbox. Out here, nobody dares to steal anything because just about every householder here is well armed and loves to shoot. I'm just hoping it eventually arrives. I really don't want to have to reorder.

I went under the bus today after having messed about with mirrors as a form of procrastination. It wasn't actually too bad. I'd put a tarp on the ground and it made a massive difference. The first thing I did was to make sure that the bolts securing the battery hanger were tight. This picture misses showing the attachment for the battery connector, sadly. It is quite hard to take photos when one is lying in awkward positions.

This is the bar that holds one part of my battery connector. I designed the system so that the battery could be plugged and unplugged easily. If you look carefully at the white angle brackets, these are my recycled spare brackets from when I was originally going to put more water barrels under the bus than I ended up putting. The rest is an aluminium bar that came from the plexiglass windows that the hillbillies had installed.

That's my tarp. It has been on the ground for a couple of months. It was so nice lying on that and not getting sand everywhere - even places where sand has no right to be! With any luck, that'll be an end to my catching bugs from breathing mold and mildew from the soil.

Having used the tarp for the first time, I can honestly say that one of my major issues with going under the bus does not now exist. I still have things I need to do. One is to do the wiring for the new battery, including installing a fuse between the batteries. I'll put in two 10A self-resetting breakers - one for each battery with my existing 30A breaker for the pair. That will keep everything safe. The fuse on the live side is just there in case I mistakenly put a battery in backwards. Rather than the wires burning out, the fuse will just blow. That'll probably be a 20A fuse.

As far as the missing postman, I really don't know what is going on. The note cited a post office from a different area which was utterly bizarre. In fact the whole "no secure location" thing was utterly bizarre too. I'll have to find out what is going on there.

Murphy's Day

Today was one of those days when nothing seemed to go quite as easily as it should have. In fact by 5PM despite there were tasks remaining to do I decided enough had been problematic that it was probably time to stop doing anything in case of more serious issues.

The broken switch from yesterday looks very sturdy and is fixable. I won't fix it though. The problem was that the black base plate to the left is secured solely by 4 pieces of folded steel. Very small lugs that aren't going to stop the black plastic base from flexing when pressure is put on a tough locking screw. That's why it popped out. I was going to replace the switch with one that takes blade connectors but since I had only three way switches with blade connectors and one identical switch that I'd taken off the control panel and replaced with a lighted switch, I reused the spare switch. Getting the old switch off was a long process as the locking nut had frozen and each piece of the thread posed a significant challenge.

I did consider using a deep socket but as my deep sockets are rounded at the very end and the lock nut was very shallow there was not much hope of success. Add to that the fact that it seemed not a standard size. I measured it at 14.4mm which is 9/16 but oddly my 9/16 wrench wouldn't work on the nut. Thus I had to spend an age with an oversized adjustable wrench, undoing the nut in fractions of a turn. Eventually I succeeded.

My next problem was that the angled screwdriver adaptor seemed to have frozen. I'm betting it was poorly made and that there's some swarf inside that's jamming the cogwheels. It will make about a 359 degree turn before stopping - in both directions. I do get tool failures from time to time. This is not as many people like to claim "because it was cheap" or "because it came from china" as my evidence thus far is that it does not matter where a broken tool originated nor how much it cost - both cheap and expensive will break.

In my installment of my first DVR a week or so back, I'd used the drill angle adapter successfully.  Today I went to close the control panel and found that the DVR I'd installed on the side of the panel was blocking my closing the lid properly. That was a problem. I needed to drill 4 new holes. When I tried to do that last time without the adapter, the drill bit kept skipping because I was at a slight angle. That was why I'd bought it.

My first issue was that the DVR had been riveted into place so I had to drill the rivets out. That wasn't too hard since they were aluminium rivets. Rather than using the drill to drill the new holes, I used a self-drilling bolt. That was what I've done elsewhere before. This time, however, when it was time to rivet, the rivets would not bite. I ended up using the self-drilling bolts instead. Needless to say it wasn't straightforward as the first time I installed the DVR it was back to front. I had to unbolt and redo it.

I'd already tested the setup. All the required lights came on which was a very positive sign and the picture displayed clearly on my dashboard monitor. Whether the DVR attached to the left of the console still works is unknown as it did get quite some vibration during my work today. 

I thought that since the door lock had been a little difficult yesterday and today that it was probably time to charge the batteries. Thus I unclipped the battery holder and recharged the batteries. It takes 10 AA batteries. One day I would probably be well advised to rewire the door lock controller so that if the solar battery is flat, the lock will operate off 10 AA Lithium batteries. That would mean that I should never have to recharge batteries or even switch them over. 

Needless to say, when I put the batteries back in the battery holder I noticed the contact on the top of the battery holder had come off the holder and was left attached to the contact clip. Fortunately I had a spare 10AA battery holder but even so that was a major headache. I'll have to buy a spare battery holder now. 

The idea flicked across my mind of having some alternate battery setup. Perhaps 6v lantern cells. I wouldn't be able to recharge those which was my goal in using AA batteries. While rechargeable C and D batteries do exist, it's hard to source them and even harder to find a charger for them. Perhaps the way forward will be to have a 10AA holder that holds all the batteries on one side and over which I can fit some sort of bar that will stop the batteries from bouncing out of place if I hit a bump when driving.

Well, to conclude this problem day I decided not to take the trash out in a dodgy pickup truck because something might happen to the truck. It is that dodgy! Later I offered to spray a kitchen item with silver paint. I pulled out my silver paint and ended up spraying the thing bus grey. That is the problem I had before.

I'd been to Walmart and picked up some grey spray paint. When I sprayed the side of the bus I found the paint was actually silver. Thus I'd had to go back to buy grey. The two cans look absolutely identical down to the grey color of the caps. It's only some tiny text that I can't even see let alone read without glasses that differentiates the two cans.

Now you tell me you can tell the can on the right is silver and not grey with anything more than a quick glance! It really has been that kind of day.

Sore knees and hard work

A couple of weeks ago I bought a replacement pair of tennis shoes from Walmart. They looked great. Within a few days my knees were killing me and by the end of the week I was in so much pain I went and got a different pair. The improvement was instant. Now I'm still in pain but nowhere near as much. It was due, I believe, to Walmart's nasty tennis shoes. That knee pain makes getting up and down painful and climbing stairs uncomfortable too.

The plan today was to complete installing the DVR and front camera then to rewire the two back cameras and the monitor so that it all goes through my blade fuse box rather than having individual glass fuses.

The first part was to put extra cables into the cable wrap that carries solar power to the door lock. That door lock has two power sources - a solar powered digital keylock and a battery powered turnkey lock. It's entirely backwards but that's the way I wired it as the battery power came way before I ever thought of adding solar power. There's no mistaking which wire is which - the solar cables are a white twin wire and a red wire. The camera power comes from a single yellow and the DVR comes from a single white.

There you can see the DVR and at the bottom of the picture, the camera. I had interesting issues connecting it all because there were several excess wires on the camera. I tried connecting them to the power. In the end I found only one of the four extra wires was actually needed. It took some time to work that out, I can tell you!

With the front camera correctly aligned I get a great view on my backup camera monitor of the view out the front of the bus. I'm happy with that. Having got everything worked out just fine, I put the wires away and started connecting the other camera power supplies and so on to the new fuse box.

The new fuse box has screw connectors. Had I thought in time then I would have got one with spade connectors. From prior experience, removing the screw the whole way is a fine way to have a healthy session of find the screw as it'll inevitably be dropped. With my knees as sore as they are, that wasn't a good idea. Thus I wanted to use fork connectors. Sadly I didn't have any - or did I? A simple ring connector becomes a fork connector with the aid of a pair of wire cutters!

I didn't finish work because the daylight was stolen by a marauding demon. I'd got all the cameras connected, the two DVRs connected but hadn't yet wired the switch from the monitor to the fuse box. I would have had it connected if a switch hadn't disintegrated on me. I'd used the switch before but when I tried to undo the terminal screws holding the wires on, either the screws were seized or I turned the wrong way. Without much pressure, the whole switch broke into two pieces. That disappointed me as it was a good switch on the other hand it gives me a reason to replace my two remaining silver switches plus the broken one with standard blade switches.

By the time I'd struggled and failed to remove the broken switch, finding the nut measured 14.4mm and finding none of my tools would remove it, darkness had fallen. As I don't have any spare blade switches that means a trip to an auto parts store at some point.

Meanwhile another one of my plans is to replace my existing West Coast mirrors with West Coast Junior mirrors. The junior west coast mirrors are not heated which is a disappointment. Having said that, it's only in the early hours that heated mirrors are really needed. My convex mirrors are heated though my bus has no heating circuit installed. It wouldn't be hard to put one in though.

The idea is to have a horizontal convex mirror at the top followed by a junior west coast followed by a vertical convex mirror. The reason being...

• The flat mirror (west coast/junior) shows me everything in the next lane and behind the bus.
• The vertical convex shows me everything from the front step to the back wheel so I can be sure no dogs run under the bus when I'm moving and can tell exactly where the back wheel is in relation to corners.
• The horizontal convex shows me everything in the next but one lane that might be changing lanes and also gives visibility to see other traffic approaching from the other land and behind on a Y junction. Bear in mind I can't just stick my head out of the driver's window to see because I have a control console beside me.

People keep asking where I get my electrics and electronics. The answer is very simple - eBay and local stores - Radio Shack (before they went bust), autoparts stores, DIY stores and farming supply stores. Note, I have used Amazon but since they started signing people up to their outrageously expensive delivery service I've not used them. Well, I did order one thing and they enrolled me without my permission into their expensive delivery service.They said it'd be free but it was free only for the first month after which I'd be charged. I cancelled my order and will not touch Amazon now - more so since I had to hunt how to cancel their delivery service and though I managed it, it wasn't easy. Amazon's dishonesty I can happily live without.

One of my problems of the moment is finding a source for mirror brackets such as the one above. There are plenty of 0.75" tubes but my bus has a 1" tube. I might well have to make one myself. It shouldn't be hard. If I used steel flat stock, I could heat it with a blowlamp and bend it to shape, easily. There are plenty alternatives though I'd like to find an off the shelf solution. 

A task worked on

The other day I was defeated in my completion of my installation of my front-facing video camera. Today, during my first work break I zipped down to Home Depot and Tractor Supply. There, I purchased some nuts and bolts with the aim of completing my camera installation.

If you look very carefully at the photo above, just underneath the central rivet and above the back of the driver fan it's possible to see my fully installed camera. All I needed were two 1/4" nuts and two No 6 bolts with nuts. So frustrating I could not find them. I'm pretty sure I have 1/4" nuts and bolts somewhere but where they would be located is in a building infested with rats. As rats carry nasty diseases that they leave in their stools, urine and sweat I try to stay out of that building.

This is the end result - a completely installed camera. I can adjust its angle and direction readily by connecting the video cable to my rear-view monitor and looking as I adjust it. I still need to install the power cables (for the camera and recorder) and the video recorder. The recorder won't take long. I'll have to spend quite a while running the cables through my existing cable wrap.

While I was out I also happened upon this LED light bulb. It was way more expensive than I'd normally pay but I wanted to compare it with my existing lights. There was a heck of a difference. This is 7.5W and produced (it claimed 650 lumens) plenty light. We won't go over the nonsense measurement of lumens. The only honest measure of light is candela since the specification for measuring lumens is ludicrously vague. I'll liken lumens to a bucket. A small bucket for a sandcastle is still a bucket while a bucket in a dump truck that would hold thousands of sand buckets is still a bucket.

When I got back to Castle Dracula tonight after my hard day of slaving down the salt mines for my daily bowl of festering rice I tried the new light bulb. It certainly is exceptionally bright! In order to make full use of the brightness with its upwards direction only I'd have to put a frosted globe over it. I'll have to see what I can find. My immediate thought was the bottom of a smaller pop bottle sprayed with frosting spray. Sadly the plastic of pop bottles doesn't take spray paint if I recall correctly. Thus I'll have to look further afield.

My weekend was cut short by a knee injury - possibly visited on me by cheap Walmart tennis shoes. Today in my outing I bought some different tennis shoes. Again I bought from Walmart but these are a variety I've had before. The difference seems night and day. Assuming my knees recover by the weekend, there's no reason why I should not complete the video cabling and close up the control console this weekend. Heck, if it's dry I might even complete my underbus work and switch out my external cigarette socket power inputs for my two pin Anderson sockets.

Rotten photos

Today I took some bloody awful photos to show you what I've been up to. The trouble was it was dark by the time I finished for the day, which of course, was when I took my photos.

I started the day not doing much but warmed up to working on the bus having done absolutely nothing for several months. I started by moving the reversing horn switch from one end of the console to the other and replaced the existing rather bland switch with a rather fancy illuminated red switch. I figured that since I often can't hear the reversing horn over the engine noise that an illuminated switch or something similar would help me to see that it's actually on.

Now this switch was one I got in Radio Shack's bankruptcy sale when they closed all their stores. If I could travel back in time, I'd slap myself until I cleared their shelves of spade connectors, switches, wire and blade fuse holders. I did not buy enough!

I installed a second illuminated switch. A week ago I looked into completing the installation of my C-DVR but found I could not add another wire to the switch I was using. It was festooned with wires. Thus I resolved to feed all the wires to the various cameras, recorder units and monitor from a combined distribution point. About that I thought long and hard before deciding the best solution would be a small fuse box. That has the advantage each individual item could be individually fused.

The plan is to run the 3 cameras and two C-DVR units directly from the fuse panel, operated by the single switch. The monitor will come from the fuse panel but will utilize a second switch as I don't want the monitor on continually. It does have its own little power button but I have to say I dislike these minuscule buttons as much as the way they fail when they're needed.

Inside the console is a breadboard backing. That was useful because I could just screw my fuse box into place. Making the connections was interesting. I found several of the places where one would normally make connections just didn't work. It is an old bus and I expect some things not to work as they should. I'll have to go through the connectors to see where they lead as there are wires connected to dead terminal connectors.

Another thing I did was to install the mount for my front facing video camera. That needed more 1/4 nuts than I had so I'll probably have to head to Tractor Supply at some point to get some more. The mount was advertised on eBay as a camera ball&socket tripod head. I pity any photographer that wanted to use that. It's too small to be anything more than a holder for a small security camera such as mine or a very lightweight camera flash.

I would have got more done today but I ended up chatting for way longer than I really needed. I've also taken it way slower than normal too.

A few days ago I bought some stuff to mount my spare battery under the bus. I've accidentally bought some things that probably won't help that much but I'll do my best - whenever I get back underneath the bus. That probably won't be this weekend. It was supposed to be 30% chance of rain but it rained most of the day and all the previous night. The ground under the bus is soaked.

I tried one of the stick-on convex mirrors on my West Coast mirror. I only bought a cheap stick-on because I wanted to see whether a West Coast combination mirror might be advantageous. It turned out that the stick-on was too small in all dimensions and that I need one on a separate mount. It needs to swivel further away from the bus in order not to show as much bus bodywork. I suspect the answer might be to replace my 16 inch West Coast mirror with a shorter flat mirror. Finding one is challenging - particularly since I'd like it to be heated. 

In other news, at work I was surprised to find I had a flat tyre on the work bus. While I was chatting to the mechanic I found that the rear wheels of most dual tyre vehicles are not actually composed to two separate wheels bolted together. It's actually a wider wheel with two tyres mounted as can be seen by examining the edge of the inside of my rear wheel.

There has been a move lately to use single tyres on the backs of trucks. Those are called "super" tyres as they're wider than standard tyres. The downside is that a puncture means you can't go anywhere. With the puncture I had on my work bus, I was able to continue driving my route (with the approval of the mechanic).

Anyway... A rundown of whats planned with the bus...

1. Complete installing my C-DVR units.

2. Complete installing my battery under the bus.

3. Seek out my perfect mirror system.