The solution to the roof problem

Today, between rainshowers I climbed onto the hood of the bus and looked at where I would expect drain holes to be on my roof vent. There were two drain like raised parts of the vent but they had been completely sealed with some kind of sealant and then I'd slapped pain over it all.

Both vents are afflicted the same way. Clearly not a good thing and shame on me for not discovering this until recently, having owned the bus since November of 2014.

As an interim measure I bought a plastic box to tape over the vent and was going to make a hole for my cheap Chinese plastic solar-powered fan. That plan was scuppered when I noticed I'd failed to check to see whether the bottom of the plastic box was suitable as a top. It turned out to have a lip all the way around which would collect water. Not ideal or even anywhere near ideal.

I'm pretty sure that - given the insane amount of caulking - I'll probably end up destroying the existing roof vent when I attempt to remove it. I'm feeling that removing it so I can treat rust and fully paint where it was before reinstalling is my best option. Fortunately we are heading into summer now so it really is painting weather. As luck would have it, there's a company selling just the right kind of vent.

I thought long and hard about getting a more robust solar-powered vent before realizing two things. Well, three actually but we'll go into the third later. The first was that none of the solar powered vents are really designed to be on the rooves of moving vehicles. They all claim to be designed for it but they're not. Branches rake across rooves. I drive a school bus daily for work and my bus roof is often raked by branches. A branch would make short work of destroying a mushroom style vent. The second is that a powered vent would be pulling air from the front of the bus at the same time my existing extraction fans will be pulling it toward the back. I have a feeling those fans would be fighting each other or creating stagnant areas. Now my third thing is cost - the cheapest steel solar vent is about $75. The cheapest rotary vent is about $100. Rotary vents are popular in Europe. The standard vent like I have is $25. It is designed to be whacked by branches. It won't fight my extraction fans and installed properly will be waterproof. I'll probably order one on Monday.

Once I have the new vent in place, I'll be able to touch up all the paintwork ruined by water seepage. That latex paint really isn't up to much! I honestly wish I had used oil based paint throughout. I have had some of my oil paint wear off where it's painted on the floor but how much use does that floor get? A lot, I can tell you!

Chatting with the work mechanic, he confirmed my suspicion that the roof vent is there to make sure the insulation in the bus is dry. It give it somewhere to vent. I hear a lot about people complaining about mold but none seem to pay too much attention to ventilation. There's an emphasis on stopping drafts but no realization that doing so is unhealthy.

I certainly did not complete all that I wanted to complete over the week's break. I wired up the new battery. I moved the bus. I confirmed that using two batteries in parallel stopped the insane voltage drop on the batteries. There's a C/8 formula for discharge on batteries. According to that, my 35AH battery should have been fine at 4.375A draw. As it was not, I added a second - I put the old Harbor Freight battery back in the system. That gets me up to a theoretical 8.75A maximum draw. I think though that the 3.8A draw I had going today was probably about as much as I dare put through the batteries.

Remaining to be done...

• The horn quit working so I need to check what's got disconnected and fix it.
• Change the front solar input to Anderson.
• Add a solar charge line to the driving battery compartment.
• Put a solar input at the rear.
• Put the power line from the fuse box at the rear to the new handbasin pump.
• Move the shower fan from its current location and wire it up.
• Add a switch and USB power supply to the control panel
• At a future point, run all my installed switches through a new fuse box inside the control panel.
• Fix the leaking roof vent. I'll replace it. That seems the easiest option.

The underbus stuff is the stuff liable to give the most problems. It all involves lying on the ground under the bus. The tarpaulin does stop me from getting sick as I don't breathe as much bacteria from the soil. It didn't help last time because after I installed the battery there was nothing holding the tarpaulin down so it was flapping around and of course I had to roll off it for a while. Maybe I should try a respirator or something even though they're hot, sweaty, nasty things.

Two batteries might be the answer

Today I finally got underneath and completed the wiring for the second battery. That was complicated by the fact I'd bought oversized 8 gauge cable for the second battery rather than the 10 gauge I had for the other. My yellow connectors were too small so I had to pull the yellow sleeve off, open the crimp a little and then I could use them. I was very glad of the self-resetting breakers I bought. They made connecting the wires very easy. All I had to do was to put ring connectors on the cables and put the ring connector over the terminal on the breaker.

I switched out the 30A breaker from the main negative connection and replaced it with two 15A breakers that each came from a negative terminal on a battery. Then I connected the live from both batteries to the 30A breaker. In between the 30A breaker and the new battery there's a 25A fuse. That fuse is there solely to protect the batteries and wiring from inadvertently putting a battery in backwards.

The next thing was to install the battery. That went in easily enough but the connecting bolts were a challenge to install. I was using my cordless drill with a deep socket and a drill to socket converter. The socket converter was for a bigger socket base than I was using so I had to use an adapter. That left very little room to maneuver. The odd reason behind this was I couldn't find the correct adapter. It was the usual story of putting a tool down and not being able to find it five minutes later. Needless to say, after I had struggled with an awkward arrangement, I found it!

The proof of the pudding being in the eating, after the battery was fully plumbed in, I turned the power on to my charge controller and then the power from my solar panels. Hey presto, the power level came up as 86%. Well, that battery had been lying idle for the best part of a year. Now I'm using a Harbor Freight battery and a Duracell battery. Neither were really capable of powering my two fans individually. Together they seem to do quite a reasonable job.

As can be seen or rather as can't be seen, there is now no tarpaulin under the back of the bus. That had been on the ground for literally months. Now I have the battery fully installed I will need it only briefly while installing a second solar input at the back and a wire for the handbasin pump. That should all be pretty brief to be honest. I don't know whether I'll get to it tomorrow or not.

I had to move the bus a bit. It was sitting very close to fallen leaves that had not been present when I'd put the tarpaulin down. See - I told you it had been there a long time.  The mud caked to the tyre is clearly visible despite I moved the bus yesterday.

Moving the bus was pretty easy. I was very much afraid of another frozen brake as I'd had before but I had no such problem. The bus does not seem to have binding brakes. I did notice that the horn does not now work and the speedo/rev counter had stopped again. This is why I have a GPS speedometer as a standby. I suspect I've accidentally unplugged the horn switch. I'll have to investigate whether the horn button in the steering wheel actually does anything and why it doesn't activate the regular horn. I suspect it could be something very simple.

I couldn't put the bracket for the top of the battery on yet. The holes were too small for the one set of chain linkers I'd bought and the smaller set was too small to fit my turnbuckles. Thus I was left with no option but to enlarge the holes. That meant a delay as I have to prime and paint the new holes. Before I can do that, the WD40 I used to lubricate the drill has to evaporate off the surface of the bracket as can be seen by the poor adherence of the primer on the right.

I had a wild hair the other day and started to install a fan in the shower. That's going to be used dry wet items hung up in the shower. I started by installing it in one of the corners away from the walkway but airflow was very poor. I'll have to move it closer to the walkway or at least give it another test beforehand. Once that is properly situated I can put the switch and the cable wrap.

Another thing remaining to be done is to install a USB charging connector and a switch so I can power my GPS speedometer and my GPS unit without having a long cable drooping. As I'm out of spare (working) connectors on the main switchboard power bus I'll put in another 6 way fuse box. This has the advantage that I won't need to use individual fuse holders. I can put one connection to the power bus and run my remaining five items.

Today, after I'd finished with the battery, the rain began to hammer down. I'm glad I pulled up the tarpaulin as it would have been very wet. It was then, of course, that my mind turned to the leaky roof vent. I realised that if I were to buy a big plastic lunch box I could dump the lid, cut a circular hole to accommodate my cheap plastic extraction fan, tape the box over the roof vent and tape the extraction fan into the box so no water could get into the bus but the fan could work and extract air and dampness. I'll try to get that box tomorrow, possibly.

I return to work on Monday. I don't know whether I will have everything done that I planned but I got the main thing done which was the battery.

Finally, running water!

I have a very nice week off work at the moment. Those that don't know, I drive for a school district and start work at 05:30, leaving work at 17:00. During that time I'm actually working 05:30-08:15, 10:30-13:15 and 13:50-17:00. Over that time, I drive around 190 miles. It's hit or miss whether I have sufficient fuel to complete the morning run sometimes.

So, I've worked on running water today and a little on another side project. The other side project is to install a fan in the shower. That will allow me to put clothes on a folding drying rack in the shower and have a five inch CPU fan blowing air onto it. When I lived in a crummy little hovel in Lexington, South Carolina, not far from the jail (yes, a really nice neighborhood), I found a fan blowing on my clothes on a drying rack really worked and it was way cheaper than using a dryer.

One of the things I did when I installed the wiring on the shower side of the bus was to install an extra wire. I never used it but now I can. That'll power my fan. I had thought of putting in a 12v socket to use to charge my MacBook but since my MacBook bit the dust, that's not going to happen. Anyway, I replaced the $1,200 MacBook with a $150 Windows laptop that I reformatted and installed Linux. Honestly, Windows is such garbage!

I ordered a solar-powered fan which arrived yesterday. It works and works well. It's plastic and secures via just three screws. That's nice but not in my opinion durable enough to put on top of my bus. While I'm on that subject, the people that had the bus before me caulked around the vent. I'm betting they caulked the drain holes since I get water coming in through the vent. I'll have to look more thoroughly at it at a future point.

Today I was thinking of going under the bus to complete my battery wiring. That didn't happen. Instead I found myself completing the running water project and starting the fan project. Now the running water project was held up for a long time because I was thinking too conventionally about copper piping made into a fixed faucet.

The first thing that arrived was the 12v diaphragm pump that came from China. That came with a length of PVC hose. Then I realised I had to put a strainer on the input side or something might clog my nice pump. That had me foxed as I was looking for a "filter". When I punched "strainer" into the search engine, up came a lot of expensive strainers. Eventually I eneded up in Lowes (hiss, spit) where I could find no strainers despite them being listed on the website. Eventually I found something for a pesticide sprayer - it was a filter on a length of hose. Now I had the pump, two lengths of hose and a filter.

I was still thinking about copper tubing but forgot to look at it in the shop. Then I thought about brackets and remembered I'd bought a pile of brackets that I'd never used. Looking at the V in the brackets I realised that would be the ideal location to lie a hose. Thus I tested that idea and finding it worked, put up the test version in my previous blog entry.

A bit of trimming and the bracket was about right. The next thing was painting. As I didn't want to run to the store to buy one tin of paint, I hunted around and found I had a part used tin of lime green acrylic latex paint. It was horribly slow to dry so rather than spraying and getting the whole job done in a few hours, it took a couple of days. Even though I hurried it up by putting the painted bracket on the dashboard in my car where the hot sun would bake it dry, it was still slow. The wonderful thing though is that the paint matched the Valspar Lime Passion of my bathroom.

While I was out a few days ago, I popped into the car parts store and found this neat little button labelled as a horn button. Now it activates my water pump. That's the water pump at the top. That is, of course, before I completed my wiring. Actually the wiring still isn't completed as the pump hasn't really got a permanent power supply set up yet. I can run it off 8 AA cells when needed or I'll wire it to the spare position on my fuse box with luck before I go back to work.

 

That's what the final solution looks like. If you notice I got the hole through the countertop and the batton underneath slightly out of line. Given that I couldn't see what I was doing and could only guess vaguely where I was supposed to be drilling, I got that pretty good. Pressing the power button, sufficient water clearly flows. The intake hose is currently dipped into a jug of water but can easily be dipped into a jerry can. There's even the possibility later of putting a 15 gallon water barrel underneath the bus. That's not what I'd call likely though.

The top of the DIY faucet is a piece of Perspex/Plexiglas glued down. Those with long memories will remember I took two plastic windows out of the bus and replaced them with aluminum panels. I kept the plastic windows. That's right - nothing ever gets thrown out unless it's really, truly unusable. So, 5 years on and I get to use more of the plastic. Actually it has come in for a couple of little projects - some of which have gone onto the bus and some of which have ended up either not going on or coming off after a trial.

When I was out the other day I bought another strip of aluminum. I've cut, drilled and bent it to shape. All that it needs now is for the paint to dry. Then I'll probably have to touch up the paint. The idea with this one is I'll screw it to the ceiling together with the mounted fan but I'll use self-drilling screws since there's no real weight or vibration involved with my CPU fan. I'm sure I've got some leftover aluminum strip somewhere but at $3.99 for a 3 foot length, it's not going to break the bank.

Getting underneath is something I'm definitely putting off. The leaves are too close to the side of the bus I'll need to work under. That means I'll probably have to move the bus away from the leaves. Why so worried about leaves I hear you ask. The answer is simple - baby cottonmouth snakes love leaves and are more deadly than the older snakes by virtue of the fact they don't regulate their venom output when they bite. It's all or nothing.

When I installed the button on the front of the cabinet, I installed it in such a position that I can press it with my knee. I can even press it with my knee while seated on the toilet if I so wish, thus giving me the ability to moisten a wet wipe or rinse my hands before answering the phone.

As far as the fan is concerned, I need to run a cable up the wall, put the fan up and install a switch. I found my spare switch today and my spare CPU fan as well as some spare wire. I even located my free wire so now I can install my fan very shortly after the paint dries.

After the fan, I'd better move the bus to a leaf and ant free area before completing the battery wiring and installing the second battery. Following that I'll probably run the cables for a rear solar input and the handbasin pump wire. No point now in running extra wires as I have only 8 positions on each fuse box and this will be my 16th circuit. While I was out I did get extra cable wrap. Only Harbor Freight sells the 1/4" wrap and that's all I need for a single cable. I have plenty small cable anchors too. I probably don't need to run off to buy more. \

Once that lot is done I want to switch the solar input on the side of the bus from a cigarette lighter socket to an Anderson socket. I tried to separate some of my MC4 connectors the other day and they wouldn't separate. That tells me I was right in going for Anderson. The other thing will be to put a connector in the battery compartment so that I can charge the driving batteries from a single panel in the front window. That'll stop them from going dead. I already have a charge controller installed in the cockpit with just this idea in mind.

Not much left to complete but as I'm still pretty exhausted from 3 months of 12-13 hour work days I'm not rushing. This does not mean I'm lazy! I know my body limits.

Almost running water

As I'm feeling quite yucky from a kiddie bug (my day job is kiddie transport), I didn't get too adventurous with the bus. Actually on some projects I'm on stop unless I go underneath and others I'm on stop until the bits arrive while others I have to seek out the bits locally.

Over the week some bits arrived and I've also decided to ditch the MR4 connectors for solar and go with a straightforward Anderson 2 pole connector. This is because the Anderson is the easiest to separate and because I could only get inlets for Anderson connectors - not for MR4 connectors. Interestingly, I tried separating some of my MR4 connectors and they wouldn't come apart. That's not too promising!

I ordered a 12v waterpump from China via eBay out of interest. It arrived with a piece of 1/4' hose and was a massive $8 or thereabouts. Having played with it, it shifts a decent quantity of water just plugged up to 12v of AA batteries. It even seems to work well off an exhausted 9V battery.

There are two things I need for the water pump. The first is some kind of filtration unit to stop the pump from getting jammed with gunk. Looking around I see plenty online and they seem to be called sprayer/pump strainers. The trick seems to be finding one with a 1/4" barb that doesn't cost the earth or simply getting a bigger one and a barb adaptor. The second is a push-button switch to operate the thing. I spent ages on eBay looking at various different things using a variety of keywords before the ideal switch came to mind - the humble doorbell pusher. I'm pretty sure I can find all that in Lowes (hiss, spit). I looked yesterday but didn't see anything and - as normal - the staff were so discrete they were nowhere to be seen. I bet I could have walked out with half the store under my arm and nobody would have noticed.

In my toolbox I found two battery holders that take four AA batteries each. I screwed them into the bulkhead, ready to use. If you remember, my 8AA battery holder died when the contact broke off the top last week. I am in the process of tidying the cables - even if it doesn't look like it. I'm on pause there as the liquid insulation I painted on the newly soldered connections needs some time to set.

It was very fortunate that I happened to find a pair of four AA battery holders in that toolbox as I'd accidentally ordered a 10AA battery holder. That'd be 15V not 12V. I could have wired the switch into the solar battery but honestly I like having the solar side separated so I have three totally independent ways of entering the bus.

I bought some ring connectors in Walmart. These are needed to complete the underbus battery installation. I thought it looked like the holes in the rings were oversized. This must have been a purchasing error by Walmart as well as by me. I'll have to head to the car parts store to get some. I might also find my hose barb filter there as well as some more 1/4" hose.

Speaking of quarter inch hose, I'll probably put up a faucet spout on my handbasin now. Looking around though, there doesn't seem to be anything truly good for such a small water flow. I could thus get a piece of quarter inch copper tube and bend it. Bending copper tube is easy. There's either a bending tool or you can fill the tube with sand and do it by hand. I'll probably do the latter. The next issue is the base of the tube. It might be possible to solder the tube into a threaded collar and tighten the collar into place with nuts above and below where the tube and collar passes through a hole in the handbasin surround.

I did have a look at replacing the existing cigarette-lighter socket under the bus but didn't really feel a whole lot like crawling under there. I suspect I can do it without crawling under but the way these things seem to work out, I'll end up under there anyway. I passed on that today. As I said I have a kiddie bug so I'm doing as little as possible this weekend.

My work week is quite busy and quite exhausting. I have to drive from 5:30am til 8:15am taking special needs children to two elementary schools and one high school. Then I have a 10:30am-12:00pm taking a single child from their home to yet another elementary school. I return to the bus yard where my partner tucks and rolls before speeding onwards to a highschool where I pick up a single child and take them to their home, returning to the bus yard at 1:15pm. That gives me 30 minutes for lunch. Then I'm off on the afternoon run from 1:45pm until 5:00pm. During a typical day I drive around 180 miles. That's 9 1/4 hours of driving a day and driving is exhausting. Thus not only is my body tired from fighting this kiddie bug but fatigued from driving close to 1,000 miles a week. Much of that driving is on roads in poor condition and choked with traffic. Worse than that even - drivers that got their driving license from the back of a cereal packet!

The water pump will probably initially be powered by batteries. Given that it's intended use is for rinsing my hands, a PP3 battery would probably be sufficient though I'd love for everything to run from AA batteries or even D cells. I might even hook it up to the 12v solar supply. That would be pretty good. I did run a spare line to the other side of the bathroom, intending to put in a fan that
could blow on clothes hanging from a drying rack in the shower. Without too much difficulty I could tap into that line though I hate tapping in and putting two devices off one circuit. The alternative would be putting another cable into a secured cable-wrap or even adding an extra cable wrap running from the fuse box to the shower. Thinking about that though - the ideal time would be when I put the rear solar input in place. Then I'll be running a cable wrap so it wouldn't be that much extra work.

Meanwhile, I mentioned my brief time for a work lunch. I don't have much time for anything so it's either a quick run to Walmart for a stale sub or an equally stale salad. I swear Walmart must import its salads and subs from Australia judging from their sorry-looking state or to one of the fast food joints for a tasteless burger and tasteless fries all dripping with grease. The alternative is a can of beans or whatever. I choose the latter as it's healthier by far. I have been ill after Walmart's stale subs. The bonus - cans of beans last forever.

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.