An excruciatingly hot day

Summer has arrived with a bang! I had to break off doing things quite frequently, driven indoors by the relentless heat. The humidity was choking and the sun was beating down.

The first thing done since the extra wide headed rivets had arrived was to fill in the 4 holes that secured the old front solar panel. Sadly though wide headed rivets had arrived, they were 3/16. That was too narrow. There were some 1/4 inch rivets that had arrived but they were narrow head and overly long. Rooting around in my toolkit I found some 1/4" narrow head short rivets that been supplied with my riveter when I bought that some years ago.

Getting all the tools together I hopped up on the hood of the bus and put a rivet in the first hole. Then the riveter jammed again. Clambering down I grabbed the other riveter and found that it wouldn't take the rivet mandrel as it was too thick. The rotary riveter that arrived a few days ago wouldn't have been of help as my battery drill is too feeble to operate it. Mind, that battery drill is coming to the end of its life. The chuck makes an awful noise now as though there are bearings dying. I'll use it til the end and then consider carefully the next option.

So after a bit more up and down onto and off the hood, I got the four rivnut holes filled with the biggest rivets I could find. That led to filling the unGodly hole made for the solar panel cable. Instead of thinking "yeah, I might have to take this down one day" I'd drilled a hole then expanded it with a file so it would take an SAE plug. Had I just snipped the plug off the cable and resoldered it on when the cable got inside the bus then I could have just had a nice, small, round hole that could have been filled by a single rivet. In the end I took one of the aluminium feet that the hillbillies had put as feet on their God-foresaken bunk beds and cut out a piece of aluminium. That, I riveted over the hole. It looks like a patch, it is a patch but can only be seen up close. Having done all that, I sprayed over everything and it all looks peachy now.

When I put the new wiper pivot in some years ago, I didn't get it quite centered so the wiper is at an angle. Looking through the scrap bucket a few weeks ago I found the old pivot. Today I cut the remains of the pivot off its bracket. With a little ingenuity I'm sure I can punch the center pivot out of the bracket then use this together with my current wiper pivot to reengineer things in order that my wiper is not canted at an angle. The first thing to be done with this as this is not an urgent project is to derust it. I'll probably soak it in vinegar for a couple of weeks then spray it with paint.

The heat and humidity were such that after standing with the angle grinder for 20 minutes, cutting the welded pivot off the bracket I was exhausted again. Carpenter had a really strange way of building their wiper pivots! It made sense from a replacement point of view as they're really easy to replace, if you can get the original Carpenter part. When I wanted to replace it, there was a genuine Carpenter pivot available but it was $150 so I paid $40 for another pivot and made a block to hold it. I got the block slightly wrong. This, if I knock the swiveling core out then I can enlarge the hole to fit the new pivot perfectly.

With the problems I'm facing from the rather poor if not fraudulent Renogy MPPT charge controller, I realised I'm probably going to be better off using a relay to handle the load. Thus, since I have a relay I dug it out from my storage and put it on my watt meter to see just how much power it used. Thus far it seems to use less than a watt. That's pretty good. I have no idea how much power it uses and an online search for a YLD2450A solid state relay yields no information on the power consumption.

The aim is to run the relay off the charge controller then use the relay to control power to the house circuits. That should take care of the charge controller's complaint that my 3.92A load is overloading a 30A charge controller. It'll make a nonsense of the stats the charge controller compiles. On the other hand, the Renogy stats read like strange fiction anyway. I have to say that for something that cost me $80 and which has gone up since then to $125, the Renogy acts like a $9.95 cheap Chinese junk charge controller.

The next step with the bus will be to replace the roof vent. Now I have clear access to the roof vent since there's no no solar panel in the way. Once that's done I can wash the roof and put more elastometric paint on top. That stuff seems to work but has flaked off in a couple of places. It probably needs a thicker coating where it peeled off.

There is some small internal electrical work that needs doing but the internal stuff can wait for a rainy day. I'll concentrate on external work for the moment. That's so far is...

• Replace the rusty roof vent
• Replace both backup cameras
• Seal around the digital keypad (that's been waiting to be done for a long time)
• Remove the steel I welded over the bottom back window of the rear door and weld steel on in the right place and weld it better, theoretically straightening the bent back door in the process.

Aside from that, there's replacing windows on the rest of the back of the bus with steel sheets. Putting security mesh over the windows along the side of the bus and replacing the crusty old tyres.

In addition to all that, part of what needs to be done to enable that is tidying up and sorting out tools and supplies inside the bus.