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.