Photo of the Day

Page Ten

January 1, 2006: New year, more progress.

What's this? Sticks? Well, no, firring strips of 3/4" Birch plywood, something to put additional insulation between, hang paneling from, allow cabinets to be attached and a door to be hung. I'm leaning towards "furboard", AKA sound board for the outside layer of this wall on both sides. I don't really need a lot of thermal insulation, as much as accoustic insulation. It would be nice to not have to listen to the washing machine or the toilet flushing.

January 6, 2006: Well, it took a couple of days of fiddling but...

...now there's a door in the wall, complete with a frame, knob, and all. This will eventually be replaced with something a bit more elegant, but for the time being, it closes off the cab and lets me keep the heat in the back part of the bus where I'm working. The final doors for this and the one between the bath and the cab will (hopefully) be custom made doors of hardwood, something cobbled together at Roger Beck's shop, Front Door Wood Works.

January 30, 2006: I really should be sorting through all my crap in preparation for moving, but:

The glass shop finally got the custom size storm door for the bus after three months of waiting. For the last two and a half years, I've had the screen door wrapped with shrink plastic to keep the weather from beating on the side door. The plastic held up amazingly well, but last fall it finally began to disintegrate from exposure to the sun. I thought that it would take only a few weeks to get the new door made, but I guess that was wrong...

Now I have the storm door for winter and the screen door for summer. Last summer, I didn't want to take the plastic off, so I just didn't open the door. Kind of cut down on the cross ventilation, but I didn't spend all that much time in the bus anyway. Next summer is going to be different!

February 12, 2006: In the eleven years that I've owned the bus, I've never been able to keep a set of batteries alive. The bus had two new 8D truck batteries in it when I bought it, which lasted about a year. I then bought a single used-but-good-condition 8D battery, which started the engine exactly once before croaking. My friend Mark brought over two tested-good 8D batteries, which never did turn the engine over.

I'm very aware of what it takes to keep batteries from dying. I keep them disconnected when not in use, and charge them at regular intervals. Still, I always found myself digging around in my stock of deep discharge batteries from the electric car and tractor to crank the engine when I want to exercise it. A pair of Trojan T-105's will crank it right up.

Six or seven years ago a friend called me to ask if I wanted some batteries that he was charged with getting rid of by his employer. His description was confusing, so I went to look at the batteries. What he had were twenty 65 ampere-hour, high current nickle-cadmium engine starting cells that were formerly used to start the diesel generator in the basement of City Hall. Apparently, no one had bothered to put water in the cells and the generator service company that was eventually called to get the problem fixed simply disconnected the NiCd battery and installed two 8D truck batteries (suckers).

The NiCd cells had sat discharged and low on electrolyte for "a few years" as my friend put it. He simply wanted them gone. I took them and tucked them away in a corner of my yard for the next six years, still low on fluid and dead as doornails.

Last summer, I decided that these batteries either needed to be put to use or gotten rid of, so I dug them out from under a pile of leaves from the walnut tree (they were covered with plastic), cleaned them up, put distilled water in them and individually charged the cells using a multiple stage process. At the end, I had cells that appeared to have taken a charge. Load testing the cells paired up as 12 volt batteries showed that the cells retained about 60% of their first charge and delivered it to the load. Not bad, try that with lead acid cells. After a few charge-discharge cycles the batteries were delivering their rated capacity.

Apparently, what I knew that no one else did was that NiCd batteries are mostly indestructable. You can abuse them in any manner you like, discharge them, freeze them, let them sit around, everything that would destroy a regular lead-acid battery, and they just bounce back.

Now, what to do with two 12 volt battery packs? It didn't take too long to find a place for them to live:

Yesterday, I did a bit of fitting to build some plywood and 2x4 mounts to make the existing battery trays on the bus accept the NiCd cells. Connecting them up to the battery cables was a bit of an adaptation, as these cells have a 20mm stud with a threaded nut, not something that the lead clamps made for an automotive battery terminal were going to fit.

Cranking up the big Cummins 262 was no problem for this pair of old batteries. These are Alcad UHP65 cells. The UHP120's are used to start diesel locomotives! Each battery has 1850 short-circuit amperes available. Paired up in parallel, together they have 3,700 amps available!!

February 14, 2006: Another "move the bus" project is to reinstall the driver's seat, which I removed last year while building the front wall. The electrical install required me to put some conduits through the floor next to the seat, and that in turn required removing the old manual parking brake hardware.

Once the seat was out the way, it made sense to install new floor covering in the driver's area, so I ripped out the old school bus rubber matting and began scraping and leveling the floor so that the new vinyl flooring would have a flat surface to be glued down on. Of course, everything turns into a "project". The floor was very uneven, and in some places where the seat belts were bolted through to the frame, had compressed as much as 1/2". I spent some time last summer using plastic body filler to build up the thickest of these areas to something close to level. Now that the worst is over, I'm using "Fix-all" filler to finish the job:

A few more applications of filler and a bit of sanding and I'll be ready to put in the new flooring, at which time the seat base can be reinstalled and the conduits (visible in the top of the frame) can be run to their associated junction boxes under the floor. This will mean that I can have more-or-less normal electrical service in the bus and get rid of the wires that droop between the car shed and the rear overhang of the bus. The local ant population has trying to use those wires as a freeway into the bus for a couple of years, and I'm tired of fighting with them trying to keep them out (or in, I'm not sure which).

February 25, 2006: Among my huge collection of cast-off and salvaged equipment was a closed-circuit observation monitor system that was used in one of the radio stations I dismantled to watch the entry door downstairs. It's really more of a commercial "stationary" unit, but it works, and I installed it on the bus as a backup camera to fill in the gap left by having 40 feet of vehicle between me and the rear window.

Here's the camera, tacked onto one of the trim pieces in the rear overhang. I already installed a run of CAT 5 wiring for this camera, and another unit that I have that uses coaxial cable and requires 12 volt power to work, so connecting is wasn't much of a job.

The other project of the day was to replace the old tattered blue tarp over the rear door and windows with a snappy new white tarp. This makes the light in the back of the bus much less, uh, 'blue', and will provide better protection from the elements than the old rotten one.

Here's the way-too-large CRT monitor on the dash. The monitor (and camera, powered through the monitor) runs on 120 volts AC, so I'll have to install a small inverter to supply it with power, but that's no issue at all.

Eventually, I will probably replace this setup with something purpose-built for an RV backup system, perhaps with a slim flat-screen monitor, but for the time being, this works and will be a big enhancement during the buses maiden voyage.

February 26, 2006: Updates! Ja, mon, I be jammin'!!!

Last Thursday, I stopped by the industrial hose and connector supply store and purchased a few feet of rubber sheeting. Although it took a few hours to lay it all out and cut the required shapes, I now have new flooring in the driver's compartment of the bus:

Of course, none of the areas were parallel or perpendicular to each other, so I had to make each cut purposefully to avoid stupid mistakes and ugly gaps. For now, the flooring is simply laying in place, but with a few more hours of applying filler and sanding, I should be ready to use some adhesive and plaster it to the floor permanently. Then, conduits, then the drivers seat, then supply wiring..... etc.

April 23, 2006:A photo from two weeks back that I haven't had time to post:

Since the bus is going to have to be taken out on the road when I move, I'll have to take it to get licensed. Although bumpers probably aren't legally required, I thought it would be a good idea to have them on for the trip.

The top outer sections needed to have some length cut off to clear the door opening. I still have to weld up some caps on the open ends where I removed the extra length to blend the bumpers into the door frame. This photo make it all look crooked and weird??

Eventually, I will need to replace the left lower curved section to get rid of the cutout in the bumper that the exhaust pipe used to exit from.

June 9, 2006: Just a tiny bit of work on the bus last weekend. The rear of the bus has turn signals, tail lights, and stop lights, but I hadn't figured out what I was going to do to mount a license plate back there. While combing through some scrap steel in the sticker bushes, I came across a bumper guard from a 1957 Nash Rambler that had a license plate frame and lamp holder. A few minutes with some scouring powder and water and I had the chrome gleaming:

The face of the bumper guards that contact the bus bumper needed some grinding to fit the contour, then I fabricated some 1" steel strap and made a pair of hangers that allow me to remove the unit from the bumper to make the access to the rear door easy and free, but allows the plate to be quickly hung and then secured with springs to the bottom of the bumper.

Nice touch, it reminds me strongly of a late 1940's/early 1950's Buick!

July 23, 2006: Normally, I wouldn't be inside posting photos and updates when I could be out working on something or other, but right now, it's 104 degrees and I'm not showing much interest in being out in that!

Yesterday, it was "only" 99 degrees, so, not knowing any better because I didn't keep an eye on the thermometer, I worked on the bus most of the day.

I've been trying to get the bus ready to move when the time comes, so I'm doing things like glueing the flooring material down in the driver's compartment, putting in the seat base, which I cleaned thoroughly and painted a couple of months ago, installing rigid insulation in the wall between the bath and the driver's seat, and covering that with lath for the final wall covering.

One of the troubling little things that I've had nagging me since the beginning of this project was how I was going to integrate the original interior of the bus to the new construction up front in the driver's area. The original header over the windows is now on the inside of the new walls, and the whole thing promised to be awkward to trim in and make look neat.

As usual, I somehow managed to anticipate my future needs when I was removing the original roof and kept most of the materials I'd need and left plenty of the original framing materials sticking out in all the right places. It was not a lot of fun working around large sharp-edged metal structural materials from the cab of the bus for all those years, but leaving them "running wild" allowed me to trim them to useable lengths as the new construction revealed the proper sizes and shapes needed to make it all work.

So, yesterday's sweaty project was to reinstall a modified portion of the original aluminum headliner from the bus, covering the driver's seat and joining the cab of the bus to the new front wall inside:

The square cutout you see is the opening for the door to the bath.

Also visible in the end of the wall are the three grey nonmetallic conduits that carry all of the wiring from the house portion of the bus to junction boxes under the driver's floor. The conduits sweep through the step behind the driver's seat, then go into "ell" boxes to make the sharp transition through the floor. Here's what's under the driver's seat on the road side of the bus:

The left box (without the wire, it's all coiled up on the driver's floor still) will be all of the shore power and inverter supplies that run the AC powered devices onboard the bus. The right hand box is everything else, Category-5 network and telephone cables (5 of them), RG-6 video cables (3), audio (4 stereo pairs), alarm trap loops (2) and keypad, a 25 conductor low current control cable for ? whatever, and four runs of #6 wire for battery and lighting supplies for DC appliances. It's all quite a mess right now, but everything is contained in one place, and I won't have to drill holes in the floor or try to snake cables through window or door frames to get signals or power inside the bus.

The other ongoing project is the installation of my Velvac mirrors. This was a project from the first year of the bus, but they've been in storage until I needed them:

Ick, this photo shows how badly the bus needs washing and paint scraping!

That's it for now, the heat may be getting near to slacking a bit, and the papers from the top of my desk sticking to the bottoms of my arms is driving me nuts. Guess I should be thankful that it's only 90 degrees inside the Housetruck. Uhg, I had hoped that I'd be moved out of the Valley by now. The whole reason for buying property on the coast was to avoid this type of ugly weather.

August 3, 2006: No interesting photos for this update, but the weather has been much nicer! As such, I've been putting some time into the bus doing more preparation for moving.

First, I got the cables for the shore power put through the floor and into the junction box. Then I put in barrier strips to terminate the wiring, and finished up by installing the shore power inlet and several 120 and 240 volt outlets under the bus.

What this means is that I have now heated up the load center in the bus and am feeding power directly to (some) of the bus' internal wiring. Gone are the extension cords and multiple plug strips that have been the routine for the last 11 years.

I've also done some temporary connections with the internal network cabling to allow the telephone connection to use bus wiring, so at last, the entire coach is "plug n' play", that is, I can simply unplug a few connections and be on the road. No more extension cords draping from the utility pole next to the car shed and entering through a hole in the framing somewhere up under the rear overhang.

Today, I installed furring strips and insulation in front of the shower enclosure, and made some wooden retaining blocks to keep the enclosure from moving around while the bus is being moved. Progress in moving ~and~ progress on the bus that will be useful towards getting it finished in the end.

Another pending project is getting some replacement rear tires for the bus. $90 each for good used take-offs at the truck tire dealer, tires much better than the moth-eaten skins I have on it now. Gives me the shivers to think about even driving across town to get them changed....