Blogs

Earlier this week I was approached by Kent Griswold of the Tiny House Blog asking permission to republish my review of Some Turtles Have Nice Shells on his site. This was after another blog post featuring excerpts from both Rolling Homes and Turtles appeared.

Earlier this week I got a call from Roger Beck, reporting on one of the housetrucking communities earliest and in some respects, most prominent members. I'm relating this from memory, so I may have some of the details wrong, and may have to edit others in later, but I wanted to get something posted.

As popular as Roger's own book is, there can be no argument that the best known housetruck book is Rolling Homes. The housetruck on the cover of Jane Lidz's book was constructed by Al, and was his home for a great many miles as he traveled with the Northwest Trading Company, doing the crafts fair circuit.

It's no secret to those who frequent the forum that my life has had challenges for the last four or five years. No need to go into that again. Lately, it seems like the heavy times are beginning to lighten up a bit. Although it's difficult to think that complete recovery will ever be a possibility, at least some of the troubles are coming to some finality, resolutions seem eminent.

Sometimes life, or fate or karma, or whatever you want to call it puts what you need in front of you in a way that you can't ignore. For the last week, I've been experiencing that kind of calling.

Tried the charger on a partially discharged ElecTrak battery today. The capacitors have helped a lot, the cables hardly got warm at all at 20 amperes of charge current. Before they'd be all melty after a few minutes at that level.

[edit] In the afternoon I put an Anderson connector and some #8 wiring on the tractor so that I can charge the batteries at a higher rate with the Lester. After running the tractor down the hill to retrieve some firewood, I used the charger at 40 amperes to fast charge the tractor batteries. The wiring got warm, as expected, but not flaming hot. I might still put the #6 wiring on the charger's output pigtail, but things are much better with the new filtering. [/edit]

The End (for now)

Still an ongoing project.

Today Lester got "C".

Capacitance that is...

After posting that the AC component of the charge current seemed to be a problem, TMAX sent me a box with four 740 mfd, 250 volt electrolytic capacitors to smooth out the fluctuations. Over the last couple of weeks, I've dabbled at getting them installed, and this afternoon connected them using a cut-out square plate of copper for superior current handling capability. The caps are connected to the charger output using #8 wire.

Not shown is the 30,000 ohm, 5 Watt wire wound resistor that I have to install to act as a safety bleeder to insure that the capacitors don't hold a charge when the charger is turned off and disconnected from the battery pack. 2960 mfd of caps charged up to 130+ volts would be enough to throw you to the ground if you got hold of it accidentially.

Looking at the output on the oscilloscope without the capacitors, I see a nasty 78 volt alternating current ripple riding on top of the DC charging current. With the caps in the circuit, and powering a 100 watt light bulb, there is only a .745 volt ripple. Of course, this will worsen when the charger is being required to supply more current into a battery, but I'm hopeful that the caps will help lessen the heating of the conductors when charging vehicles.

If there is still an issue with the wiring heating up, TMAX also sent me a long hank of #6 twisted pair wire that I can substitute for the #8 that is on the output of the charger now.

Part 11

I mentioned at the end of the Lester thread that the charger for my Electrak tractor had turned itself into an improvised incendiary device, leaving me with fewer options for charging the tractor's battery pack.

Two weeks ago during some nice weather, I decided that it was time to take the EV Rabbit out for a spin to loosen up the brake calipers and get some lubricant on the axle bearings. I dug the Pusher out from under it's winter wraps, put a charge on the engine starting battery and fired it up.

Took the car and Pusher down to the road where I disconnected the trailer and left it at the end of the driveway. Put seven miles on the car in electric-only mode, not much of a trip, but enough for a test, and about as much as the batteries were up to without some exercising discharge/charge cycles to wake them up.

Got a few more photos of this truck in it's natural environment:

Who says I never finish projects?

Well, everybody, basically.

Got some email the other day from a fellow in the UK, "hillbilly dreaming" who has bult a small cabin in the bed of an old pickup truck. When the photos arrived today, I thought that folks here in the US might appreciate them, so here they are: