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.

Working towards goals.

Today I didn’t really feel like lying on the ground under the bus doing the necessary wiring and tightening a few nuts and bolts so I worked inside instead. Because my extraction fans have such a high current draw they have been defeating my house battery. All is not lost however. 

On eBay I found this nifty little battery protecting circuit. My current thought is to power the fans directly from solar power. I can install a simple bypass relay that will route power to the fans straight from an external solar panel. The current switch is just there to prevent the fans from starting before there’s enough power to run them properly. In the event insufficient power gets to the motor, the coils could heat up and burn out.

So far all I’ve done is set the threshold voltage to 11.5V to turn the power off and 18v to turn it off again. Just in case the panels provide too much power!

I had a go also at installing my DVR for the rear camera. I tried a splitter since the video feed through doesn’t seem to work with my system. Bizarre but there you are - this is how Chinese stuff works or doesn’t work. One thing I did was to snip off the microphone connector since there’s absolutely no reason to have a microphone or an audio track. If somebody shoves their car under my back bumper all I need is a video file showing they did it and that I was not reversing.

I ran into a snag, however. It seems my power drills are too big to fit into the space available. I could drill the mount holes for the unit with no problem. The problem came when I wanted to drill the hole for the cables to go through. In the end after hunting online I found that 90 degree drill converters were available. Locally they were $20 or more. Online I could get one for $6, shipped. I ordered one.

In other news I’ve been having problems since 2014 with my 2007 MacBook. It started with the screen going dark and needing the brighter and darker buttons to be toggled. Then the battery died so I thought it was the battery. I bought a $20 battery on eBay and it worked - for two weeks then that battery died. I semi-retired my MacBook and started using tablets. I went through a huge number of Android tablets before finally, 3 years ago, finding an end of line iPad Mini. That I’ve been using ever since. It’s good but the memory is minimal and it needs regular flushing. It’s also not something I can do much with other than web consumption and blogging. Even with a keyboard it’s not that great.

Recently I had another go at my MacBook. I bought a new battery but not an actual Apple battery - I didnt want to spend $200. Then I found the hard drive wasn’t reading correctly so I got a new hard drive for it. Then I couldn’t find the operating system disk to reinstall the operating system. I bought a new disk and tried to reinstall but it didn’t go well. It needed an update and refused to update over wifi. I bought a cable to connect directly to the router. It still wouldn’t update. I downloaded the update onto a memory stick using a windows system. Then I tried updating that way. Again, no joy. It refused to update.

With a lack of ideas I put a Linux CD in and installed Linux. That kinda worked but the screen kept going dark so I could not see whaat was on the screen without shining a bright light at it. All very strange!

Ok. This is a bus blog so why am I prattling on about my laptop issues? Simply because in the beginning my updates were all done on my MacBook and because I find computers far easier to use than tablets. Now the reason I had a Mac was because I really find Windows is user unfriendly. It seems though that I’m looking now to replace my MacBook with a new computer. I know how much money I have and how much I make and how much I can afford. The problem is I really hate spending money. While at a stretch I could probably afford a MacBook (and I did see B&H with a 2017 mmodel for less than $1,000), I’m thinking more toward a $200 Windows 10 model and installing Linux instead of Windows.

I saw this one in Best Buy. It looks like it could be a good deal but only if I can be sure of ripping Windows off it and putting Linux on it. I just don’t like Windows and Windows has been bloody awful in so many of its incarnations. Let’s look at them...

1. Windows 3.1 - This was actually quite good and was before the centralized registry
2. Windows 95 - This crashed an awful lot and introduced people to losing loads of data as being ”normal”.
3. Windows 98 - Continued the same crash ridden, data losing as Windows 95.
4. Windows ME - Not quite sure what improvement this was but it still crashed and lost data.
5. Windows SE - pretty much the same as ME but with a different name.
6. Windows NT4 - pretty good actually save for a problem with bigger hard drives and no USB support.
7. Windows XP - introduced a centralized permission slip. If microsoft wanted to kale the operating system they could by simply not allowing me to use it. Big brother strikes.
8. Windows Vista - bloody slow and probably some kind of joke Microsoft played on the public.
9. Windows 7, 8 and 10 - no experience but I imagine they will show all of the truly stupendously evil traits of the previous Microsoft operating systems. 

When Vista came out in 2007 I upgraded to a Mac. Now my Mac is probably beyond redemption and since its creator is now in the next world, it’s probably time to try Linux again. I did use Linux quite seriously a few years ago. I used it as a server and I used it as desktop computer. It worked really quite well. I gather the Asus was designed to be used with Linux but hasn’r Been sold with Linux installed. Given the price of $200 as opposed to $1,000 or more, you can see why I’m looking at Linux and this little Asus!

Remaining to do are little things like a solar input at the back, wiring up the new battery holder and installing the recorder for the back camera. While I’m at it, I’ll install a recorder for a yet-to-be-installed front camera. I did have an idea of using a camera that I took out of my car afte it blew a fuse. That needed a new USB connector to be soldered on. That connector arrived in the post today and I duly soldered it on. Whoops! It was the wrong gender!

Somewhere I have a gender changer plug but I’m pretty sure that is also the wrong gender. 

Today seems to have been a day when nothing really went to plan. I’m hoping tomorrow is better. It was almost warm enough to go under the bus. I just didn’t feel like it though.

Dumbass things that bus converters do!

Over the years I have seen some crazy things that bus converters do.
1. Covering over or welding shut emergency exits. The word emergency is important. If you cover over or weld shut emergency exits then you run the very real risk of dying in your bus should an emergency occur. They’re put there for a reason! In a real Bus evacuation, the aim is to have the bus evacuated in under two minutes and that’s as a school bus with hardly any flammable materials inside. A motorhome conversion is a tinderbox on wheels!
2. Removing the bifold door from the front and replacing it with one of the rather useless RV doors or even worse a house door. The bifold door has many advanatages including durability and having glass panels the while length. House doors with glass have not got the right kind of glass and could be very dangerous.
3. Raising the roof. If you need to raise the roof then you’ve bought a bus that’s too short. That’s a buyer’s error. In any case, how much standing will you be doing in a bus? I’m six feet tall and my head does not touch the ceiling of any known school bus. I should know - I drive the blessed things for work.
4. Removing interior ceiling and wall panels in the vain hope of making the bus warmer inside by replacing them with wood. It’s a bus - it’ll leak heat through every oriface and every surface. There’s just no way of doing it economically.
5. Believing their busses will last forever. They’ve been sold by a school district. They’ve been hammered by bad drivers and have had accidents poorly repaired by underpaid and overworked bus mechanics. They’ve had their oil changed once a year instead of every 10,000 miles. That’s three times over the recommended changes. They’re not going to last forever!
6. Whining about insurance. Nobody is going to insure a self-built bus conversion. Nobody is going to inspect a self-built bus conversion. The best you’re going to get is a standard collision only policy.
7. Not knowing how to drive a bus. That’s one of the craziest ever things. A bus is twice the width, twice the length (or more) and three times the height (or more) of an average car. It’s also ten times the weight. The braking system is different - powerful air brakes as opposed to the pathetic hydraulic brakes of a car. Driving it is a very different experience.
8. Not performing a pre-trip inspection before driving their bus. Tyres, lights, fluid, belts, brakes, horn, wipers etc all have to be inspected before each trip.
9. Not doing annual or mileage maintainance.
10. Believing internet baloney about it being possible to get highway speeds out of a school bus designed to spend 90% of its life on back roads and dirt tracks. Sure - it might be “possible” to get more than 55mph from a school bus by tinkering with the engine, it is not prudent as it shortens the life of the engine.
11. Repeating internet baloney. There is no such thing as a bad engine or a bad transmission. The problems reported by bus conversion owners are almost always down to bad driving, bad maintainance or bad modifications.
12. Whining about the costs of running a bus. Tyres are costly $250 - $500 each or $1,500 - $3,000 for all six. Servicing is costly at about $1,000 a go.
13. Buying a school bus with no idea about parking regulations where you want to park it.
14. Believing a bus conversion will be cheaper to live in than renting the cheapest mobile home. Sure - it might be possible but it’s debatable. The cheapest parking will be a lot of land in the countryside outside zoning regulations.

I see those as the most common whines online. There are more. I see so much craziness online. One of the craziest is that people pay redneck bus converters to convert their busses for them when it would be so much cheaper just to buy a used motorhome.

I have converted my bus and done everything myself. I have not paid anybody to do anything. I made my own cabinets - did all my own carpentry and after teaching myself to weld, did my own welding. I attended no welding classes nor did I watch any welding videos. I used the cheapest welder I could get and was told soundly by online groups that I could not weld, could not weld using that welder etc. Well, my welds hold strongly and are in use. That should tell you everything you need to know about internet advise!

Latest news

I decided a while back to put a second battery in place for my solar system. Thus a while ago I welded one together and later bolted it into place. That was where things stayed for a long time since work at 12+ hours a day is pretty exhausting.

The other day I tried to install my new DVR unit thinking it would be easy. Indeed it is supposed to be easy. In fact though, it is anything but easy.

Needless to say it’s probably Chinese. There are two video connectors and two audio connectors. One is for audio/video in and the other for audio/video out. It’s supposed to sit between the camera and monitor. Try as I might though and I could get it to record video nicely. I could not get it to output the video to the monitor. Thus after thinking for a while I decided to put a Y connector (which has been ordered but has yet to arrive) so that I can read the video signal and show it on the screen without having to process it through the unit (which seems to lose the signal).  More testing will be needed so I’ve been unable to install it yet. In anticipation I ordered a pair of microphones (I needed one but they came in pairs) thinking this would be my front video camera controller. I will probably buy another to do my front recording if it works just fine for recording my rear view camera.

Today though as it was wet there was no hope of working under the bus. Thus I worked inside. As many of you know when I last moved hours I did what I normally do and emptied whole drawers into plastic totes to go through later. I’ve done that 3 times in a row now! Thus I have plastic totes filled with goodness knows what. So I spent the day going through totes.

I didn’t find the key to the gold vault or a signed confession by the real assassin of JFK. I didn’t find the lost ark either. I did, however, find that I had an awful ot of just plain trash. Most of what was in those totes was old court documents, old pay stubs, old bank statements from banks I no longer use and thousands of receipts - most of which were too faded to read.

The amount that passed through the first sifting reduced the quantity from 5 boxes to 4 and I’m sure I can reduce it yet further. I have yet more boxes to go through. Most of the stuff in those boxes I have not seen for upto nine years. It all has to be gone through though. Some of it is inspiring letters and cards from my late mother. Those are definitely keepers since she won’t be sending more.

One thing I found is my surveillance clock. It’s a neat little clock that looks worthless but records anything that moves in front of it. I’d used that years ago to record somebody that kept breaking into a place I used to stay at. Now though I’m afraid it has seen better days. Despite being quite expensive, the plastic was cheap and has just become sticky. It’s not that it has got sticky it’s that the plastic has begun to break down. I’ve heard of this happening before with some of the Panasonic cameras. I’m sure I have encountered it before too.

You can probably see the oily sheen on the surface of the plastic. There’s nothing as far as I know that can be done when plastic breaks down other than to throw it away and buy another. I’m sad because this is a $50 surveillance device but on the other hand it had served its purpose and I have better devices now.

I looked out of the bus window and saw what appears to have been a buzzard that was dragging a wing on the ground. When it saw me, it hopped away, dragging its wing. Figuring it was badly injured I went to grab my rifle so that I could put the thing out if its misery without it having all the pain and fear as some other animal tore it apart alive. By the time I’d loaded my rifle and put the magazine in, the thing had vanished. I just hope it has a quick and painless end with no fear.

One of the things I kept finding was old second generation phones. I have so many defunct Virgin flip phones that it’s not even funny! I’ll have to try charging them and copying down any numbers etc. Then I’m not sure what on earth I can do with phones that are on networks that no longer exist short of using them as rifle targets or fishing weights.

Blanket on the ground

Come and look out through the window 

That big old moon is shinin' down 

Tell me now don't it remind you 

Of a blanket on the ground

Finally after almost 4 years of working on and under my bus I figured out a way of staying somewhat cleaner. I threw a $2.99 Harbor Freight tarpaulin on the ground. It makes such a difference. Now I can slide more easily and I don’t lose things like nuts and washers in the sand under the bus. I can even throw it on wet ground and stay dry. I wish I’d thought of this years ago.

What with my day job I’m pretty busy. I leave for work at 5AM and don’t actually return until something after 5PM. Though I’m actually at work from 5:25AM to 4:45PM I don’t actually get paid for 11 hours despite the fact that I should be. I drive a school bus from 5:30 (5:25 if you count my morning checks) until 8:30 then I have to sit around until 10:15 when my next run starts. There’s no way I can go to do anything for two hours or less that would make money. Essentially it’s dead, wasted time. My next run returns at 12:PM and again I have to sit around until 1:45PM which is when I start my afternoon run and that ends at 4:45PM. Again, I have around two unproductive hours. So my day isn’t actually as long as it sounds. I get about 8:45 of paid work and the rest should be paid because I can’t do anything with it and don’t even leave the premises.

So, I don’t generally have very much time during the week in fact let’s say no time to do anything. Saturday is usually a recuperation day and Sunday a catch up laundry day. I have however managed to squeeze some time in over the last few weeks to do something.

About a month ago I decided to make another battery hanger. Not to replace my existing hanger but to complement it. I’d found that using my brand new Duracell battery from Batteries Plus Bulbs I was getting the same poor results that I was achieving with my old Harbor Freight battery. That led me to suspect that the problem is that the battery does not like putting out more than about 2amps. The symptoms are the same. If I have both extraction fans on then between them and my door unlocker (which is constantly powered) I’m using around 3.92A. Under that load, the battery voltage drops rapidly. Turning the load off, the voltage recovers rapidly. Thus I suspect that while the battery will hold 35AH, it does not like to disgorge that at a rate fast enough for me.

My solution to the battery problem was to build another battery hanger so I can put my Harbor Freight battery back in place but in parallel with my Duracell battery. Now I’d been convinced to use a brand name battery by people that had decried everything from Harbor Freight as being cheap trash.  Some Harbor Freight stuff does not last that long but then some stuff I bough elsewhere did not last too long either. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what brand is on it - it’s all made by the Yellow Peril and arrives in American in a shipping container. It is (I hope) unlikely that my battery solution will not be the correct solution.

Today I threw the tarpaulin on the ground and went under the bus to install my new battery hanger. Using two power drills - one with a nut spinner and one with the drill bit - I got the task completed in under an hour. The next stage will be to install the wiring but before I can do that, I have to wait for parts to arrive.

I had to put the new hanger a bit closer to the side of the skirt than I did with the previous hanger due to the proximity of the exhaust. I don’t expect heat from the exhaust will hurt the battery but I wanted to keep as great separation as I could. It’s secured by 8 bolts of 5/16 inch diameter. Those should hold  3,900lbs each for a grand total of 31,200lbs or to put it in perspective they’ll hold the weight of my bus. The weight they will be holding is the 10lbs or so of my battery hanger and the 20lbs of my battery. That’s a grand total of 30lbs and the safety margin is something like 1,000%.

In this picture you can see both battery hangers - the new one in silver at the top of the photo and the old one in white at the bottom of the photo. They’re slightly different in size - I had only a Harbor Freight battery when I built the first one and while it holds the Harbor Freight battery nicely, it’s a bit tight on the Duracell. Though they’re both allegedly a U1 size, the sizing isn’t exact. When I put the wiring in, I’ll switch the batteries around.

I have almost all the bits needed for the wiring. I’m missing the fuse holder. I was going to put a breaker in place under the bus but I decided a fuse would be way better. I have some self-resetting breakers I will be using. The manual reset breaker would have been a problem in that I’d have had to go under to reset it and in the event it tripped from the motion and vibration of the bus, it would have been annoying. A fuse solves that problem as it won’t vibrate into an off position.

If the extra battery does not solve the problem (though it will use up my spare battery), my next solution will be to modify the solar input at the back of the bus. I’d been planning a solar input at the back but that was to charge the solar batteries. What I think I’ll do is route it, using a relay and a resistor through to the fans. That way when there’s sufficient voltage to run the fans, they’ll run directly from solar panels. The resistor will just make sure the relay doesn’t trip and switch the fans on until there’s sufficient power in order to prevent overheating the fan motors. Relays are way cheaper and easier to replace!

The major headache is the ventilation system. That uses by far the most power. This is the only reason I have my two portable 30W panels. The rest of the bus systems will work very happily on my existing 35W of solar array.

As those of you who are familiar with my bus know, I have a penchant for humorous yet sinister destination signs at the front of the bus. I quite like my first sign that said “Fort Leavenworth Death Row Express” and I have one now that says “Fort Leavenworth Prison Choir”. I am on the lookout for other interesting signs to put in the window. I did like the idea of putting “Marine Transgender Football Team” but I kinda like the Fort Leavenworth connection. Suggestions? The comments are always available for suggestions!