A long hunt

Today I decided to get on with replacing the battery holder for the door lock. Well, perhaps I should back it up a bit. In my spared box I found a 4 D cell holder and a pair of 2 D cell holders. Given that D cells are heavy it's going to be a better idea to mount my batteries flat. The AA cell holders grip the AA cells nicely so I never had to worry. 

That's the old setup. I can tidy those wires up a little though. Behind the aluminium plate is some spare AA cells and a relay. That relay controls the door lock via the keyswitch. The keyswitch is rather bizarre in that instead of being On 1, On 2, Off which would make sense it's On 1, On 1 & 2 and off. That meant I had to do some fancy wiring with a double-pole relay to make the lock open and close.

The old relay works just fine but isn't mounted in any meaningful way. It's just rattling around loose behind the aluminium plate. A new relay has been ordered that has a base. 

After having mounted the battery holders to a suitable piece of plywood and soldered the connections then hot glued the wires into place it was time to populate the holder with batteries and test the wiring. That's when I hit a huge snag - I knew I'd bought batteries at Harbor Freight some weeks ago but could not find them. I couldn't remember what else I'd bought in that shopping trip either so I didn't know what the batteries were likely to be sitting beside. I went to the bank website to try to find how much I'd spent there and when as a clue. The bank website did not cooperate and wouldn't let me in. That old trick it has of refusing a perfectly good password. It'll play that game for weeks on end then suddenly let me in using the password. If I change the password, it'll complain the new password is wrong. I learned long ago that these banking websites go through phases of silliness like that.

Having no idea where the batteries were in order to test the battery holders, that put rather an end to matters for the moment so I sat haranging politicians for their lack of morals via Twitter then suddenly realised I'd bought a big plastic ammunition box in which I should store all my socket tools and wrenches. Then I remembered I'd had the lady serving me at Harbor Freight put everything inside the ammunition box instead of in a plastic bag. Bingo - all I had to do was find the ammunition box. That was a matter of a very few seconds.

So, the battery holder was filled with batteries and tested. It worked fine. Then I realised I needed a relay that had a base that could be screwed down. I ordered one. While I was looking around the bus I even found a 4-fuse holder. The door lock has run without a fuse forever and a day. Time that had a fuse on it. Same for the LED marker lights. Those will run off AA batteries - that way if the LEDs are left on then the door lock won't be dead.

I can see another trip to Harbor Freight in the near future. I might need another 90 degree drill attachment in order to get everything screwed down correctly. I certainly need more angle brackets. I'll probably put up two LED marker lights initially to light the stairwell and cockpit. I'll have to see how it all works before I do much further.

I had hoped to go under the bus this weekend - since it's a 4-day weekend - but it's been too perishing cold. The brakelines get put off again.

I did relocate the old Harbor Freight LED light. That thing had never been up to much. It is one of the worst examples of LED lighting and the batteries are almost always dead in it so there has to be parasitic power drain.

With the current Covid strain named Omicron running wild in the USA, I might have more time to work on the bus. The big boss where I work said no closures but also that people should be prepared. Meanwhile other similar organisations in the area have split 50/50 with some closing and some not yet making that announcement. Thus my 4 day weekend might get longer or it might not. The longer it is, the more I can get done on the bus.