Road Trip 2002:

Not having learned my lesson last year, I'm getting ready for another try over the Cascades to John Day for the 4th annual SolWest Renewable Energy Fair. This year, the Pusher is in fine shape, I have a newly rebuilt engine, a fully-functional three-speed automatic transmission to make passing and hill climbing a breeze, and have been experiencing no problems while using the trailer to power the EV on trips to Portland, Woodburn and points in between. The controller problem with the EV has been repaired using parts with much higher voltage ratings, and I've learned from the trip back in 2001 to not try and use regenerative braking without first starting the electric motor.

Since I would be counting on the Pusher to get me to the High Desert and back, I took some time two weeks before to install a stock VW oil-to-coolant oil cooler from a 1987 Jetta GLI that I found at the wrecking yard. I also toyed with, but did not get around to installing a dual radiator fan setup from a Porsche 944. A trip to Corvallis the weekend before allowed me to try out the oil cooler installation and check for oil or coolant leaks, and to watch for cross-contamination between the oil and coolant, a common failure of these types of coolers.

By Wednesday afternoon, the car and trailer were washed, packed, checked out and ready for the road. This year, SolWest is three days, and I wanted to get an early start so that I could arrive in plenty of time to stake out a good camping spot and rub elbows with friends from the industry.

Thursday, July 25, 2002

Uhg, the alarm clock. Must mean that it's 5AM, and time to get up, pack the last of my gear and try to be on the road by 7AM.

Not much traffic at this hour, I sailed through Springfield and started my ascent up the McKenzie Highway. After confirming that the small electric power usage on the city streets had been replenished by regenerative braking, I shut down the electric drive and coasted along on Pusher power alone until I reached Belknap Hot Springs and Resort, about 60 miles from home. Got out and stretched, walked about for a few minutes and looked into the water garden before returning to the road for the next bit of driving.

From here, the road gets steeper, beginning the climb over the Cascade mountain range. Highway 126 joins 20, highway 22 merges, and then begins the Santiam Pass. Since the Pusher has an automatic transmission, I didn't need to get out to shift into a lower gear like I did last year, and was able to power over the summit with he assistance of the electric drive in the EV. As happened last year, I recovered all of the electric power consumption on the downhill side by use of the EV's dynamic braking.

As I passed the 99 mile mark on my trip odometer, I blew a mental raspberry at last year's failure of the throttle servo alongside this part of the road.

9:30AM, Sisters, Oregon. A stop for coffee and a ginger cookie. before resuming travel, I opened the hood and checked the diesel engine on the Pusher, looking for leaks or any other signs or problems.

On the way out of town, I drove through the bike shop parking lot where I did the surgery on the throttle servo last year.

Redmond passed quietly at 10:20AM, and I headed toward Prineville. Usually, I stop at the Ochoco Overlook above the town of Prineville for a bite to eat, but as I am running ahead of my usual schedule, it's too early for lunch. There is also quite a bit of smoke in the air due to the range fires that are burning out of control in a wide area on this side of the mountains. The pusher is running great, it's early, and I saw no other reason to stop, so I drove through Prineville, out into the open foothills of the Ochoco Range.

The west side of the Ochoco Divide is a long, gradual climb. After passing a couple of slow pickup trucks and a hay truck, I settled into a 55 MPH velocity, electric drive engaged, but not consuming much power. Like my ascent of Santiam, I kept a close watch on the temperature gauges for the Pusher and EV motor, watching for any over-temperature indications.

26.3 miles east of Prineville, I drove alongside a rock outcropping beside the road and heard the pusher making an odd noise. A check of the temperature gauge showed that the engine was overheated to the max! It wasn't possible to immediately pull off the road, so I had to really hammer the electric motor to pull the car and trailer another half-mile or so before I could find a turnout in the highway. Even before I got the car stopped, I could see steam rising from the front grille of the Pusher.

Opening the hood revealed a totally overheated engine. Steam was escaping from the underside of a small hose that supplied coolant to the newly-installed oil cooler assembly. I broke out the tools and removed the hose, being careful to not get burned by the steam or scorching-hot metal engine parts. A small tear had opened just beyond where the gear clamp held it to the oil cooler inlet nipple. This looked to be damage from using a different type of clamp than the factory installation, and the hose had been pinched on the underside where I couldn't see it. Used my Leatherman tool to cut off about 1" of the hose, and reinstalled it on the cooler.

The engine needed to cool down before any water could be put into the cooling system, so I made a sandwich and ate lunch alongside the road. Several cars passed by, and one slid to a stop and backed up in the gravel. The car was a late model Cadillac, and the driver was a late model business type, who thought he was on the road to Portland. Showed him my map, turned him around to point the right direction, and sent him back the way he had come. The day was heating up a bit, but the tree I had parked under provided welcome cover from the sun.

The one gallon container of filtered water that I had brought for cooking went into the coolant reservoir, and left room for more. I made my way through the knee-high underbrush, watching as carefully as I could for snakes as I headed for the creek running alongside the road. Refilled the gallon container and went back to the car. Most of the second gallon also went into the reservoir.

I knew that I would probably need to carry more than one gallon of water with me to refill the reservoir, so I took the 5 gallon fuel container of Biodiesel that I had stowed to use on the trip home from the car, and poured it into the Pusher's fuel tank. It took all of it, and I did some quick mental calculations, realizing that the fuel economy on this trip wasn't very good, about 25 MPG. After shaking out all of the Biodiesel, I rinsed the container as best I could using the water from the one gallon jug, pouring the residue onto the gravel away from the stream. Thank goodness Biodiesel is biodegradable, I knew the small amount I was pouring out would be gone in a few weeks. Took the containers back down to the creek and filled them both with water, lugging them back up the hill to the car, and loading them in with the rest of my stuff.

Starting the engine was difficult, which is unusual, it usually fires right up with a single press of the starter button. This time it took quite a lot of cranking before it would catch and run. Going back to the trailer, I found the coolant pressure relief cap on the reservoir venting a lot of air. This could only mean a couple of things, neither of them good. A blown head gasket, or a warped or cracked cylinder head.

Sat down to roll and smoke a cigarette and consider my options, turn around and head back to Prineville, or try and make a few more miles toward John Day and see what happens.

After getting a nice nicotine buzz (the first cigarette of the day does that), I made up my mind to go forward towards SolWest, at least as far as the rest stop which I know is a few miles up the road. If the Pusher is kaput, it's downhill back to Prineville and the small added distance isn't going to matter much. If the trailer is functional, I'll be that much closer to my goal.

Pulled into the road at 12:35PM, put on some speed and kept a wary eye on the temp gauge. At the rest stop, I got out to check the engine, There was still water in the reservoir, so I decided to move forward some more and see if I could get over the Ochoco Divide.

I don't actually remember seeing the summit of the Ochoco where I stopped to take a photo last year. I do remember being relieved that I could now throttle back the Pusher and put a bit of a charge on the batteries on the downhill grade. The temp gauge was reading high, but not in to meltdown range as before when the engine was without coolant.

My next log entry says "Mitchell", so it looks like I made the 27 miles on one reservoir fill-up. I stopped at the fuel station where I loaded the EV and Pusher onto the trailer during last year's salvage operation, and looked into the engine compartment. The reservoir was still full. This is good. I decided to remove the pressure cap to see if it had been holding normal pressure. The water in the reservoir suddenly drained into the engine, where it made a huge boiling sound, with accompanying roiling and belching. The water then began to blow out the cap along with searing hot steam. The leaking head gasket was causing a vapor lock which was preventing water from reaching the cylinder head and engine. This is bad.

While I was nursing some water from my container back into the reservoir and dodging steam bursts, a rancher-looking fellow sitting in the passenger side of a pickup being filled at the station remarked "I know what that is! That trailer pushes your car!!" He got out and came over to inspect it more thoroughly. When I explained my problem, he wrote down his name and telephone number, and told me to call him if I needed a tow, he'd come along with a car trailer and tow me to John Day, or home, or wherever I wanted to go. This was just the beginning of many kindnesses I experienced this weekend. Thanks Joe.

Back on the road, I knew that the next bit would be difficult. The Mitchell Grade is long and steep, and I'd need every bit of power that the EV and Pusher could manage just to crest it.

The temperature gauge of the pusher was climbing fast, and I had my foot in the EV's electric drive hard, trying to make things easier on my overheating engine in back. About 3/4 of the way out the hill, I saw the red temperature warning light for the electric motor illuminate. In 3? years of driving the EV in all kinds of conditions, I've never seen this light come on. I pulled the the side of the road immediately, shutting down the drive motor and Pusher, but leaving the electric motor's cooling blower running to bring down the temperature. Went back to the Pusher to check out the cooling system and again found the water backed up into the reservoir, and a steam explosion lurking when I loosened the cap.

After getting water back into the engine, I had the idea that perhaps leaving the coolant pressure cap loose might help prevent this backup of water in the system. I used some masking tape to secure the cap so it wouldn't rattle completely off, then went to the car to start the engine. Big mistake. Boosh! All of the water in the engine hit the pavement at once. Alright, back to plan "A". The electric drive cooled down after 10 minutes or so, and I got back to the road.

Finally, I made the top of the hill, pulled over and put the Pusher into neutral. I then coasted down the six miles from the top, charging the batteries as hard as I could with the regen.

Things were beginning to look pretty bleak. I still had a long way to go, and the distance between water stops was getting shorter each time. I was now using the water in the 5 gallon container, and I had only three gallons left.

Another push forward, and down the long and winding decent from Table Mountain. I could see the creek bed in the gulch to the right of the road, but it was very far down in most places, so I gritted my teeth and focused on getting to Picture Gorge, where I knew that the John Day River was just a few steps down from the road. Although the temp gauge on the pusher was only indicating "hot", I now knew that there was no water in the cylinder head to make the gauge read properly, and that I was probably causing serious damage to the engine. During my last few stops, I had noticed that the oil pressure light was flickering when the engine was idling. This is not a good sign of engine health.

At Picture Gorge, I breathed a sigh of relief, the last of the hills was behind me, but also felt a growing discouragement, John Day was still 38 miles away, and the valley through which I was about to pass was almost completely developed with ranches. There would be few opportunities to access the river to refill my containers without climbing over stock fences and trespassing deeply onto private property. Added to this was the mounting damage that I felt that the Pusher engine was being subjected to by attempting to press it further without adequate cooling.

The first turnout on my side of the road was occupied by a truck, so I continued another quarter mile to the next wide apron, stopped the car and crawled down a steep rock slide to refill the containers from the river.

After filling the containers and returning to the car, I saw the truck in the first turnout pull onto the highway. As it approached, I saw that it was a freaking car carrier semi truck. There was one car on the front, one in the back and one-and-a-half car lengths of empty space in the middle!!! Not knowing what else to do, I stuck out my thumb as if to hitch a ride. Damned if this rig didn't pull right over next to me and stop!!!!

Turns out that this truck was delivering a new Mercedes Benz SUV to Idaho, and the driver had stopped to pick up a SAAB that had overheated on the road. I asked if I could get a tow into John Day. Jim (the driver) said "no problem", but that the SAAB would need to be dropped off in Mt Vernon, about 30 miles ahead, and that we should take it off and put my car and trailer in the middle. He also mentioned that if he had some tools, he could remove the defective thermostat from the SAAB and let the woman who was driving it resume her trip, and not have to reload her car after mine was loaded. Since I had a full set of metric tools and 6 gallons of water from the river, this is exactly what we did. The SAAB's owner (dang, forgot her name) had left San Francisco the previous day and had two cats in the car which were not benefiting from the heat. The first thing she did after we got her car running was to turn on the air conditioning. After giving both Jim and myself a big hug each, she drove off, not to be seen for the rest of the trip.

I drove the EV and Pusher onto the middle of the car trailer and Jim secured it with chains and binders. The cab of the truck was air conditioned, which was quite welcome. The day had become hot, and I had expended a lot of stress and effort making it this far. Jim and I exchanged introductions, and I learned that he worked for a large regional car dealership which operated the truck he was driving.

Not long after we got under way, the skies darkened, and rain fell intermittently. A low-hanging dark cloud bank hovered over the Strawberry Mountain Range, punctuated by streaks of lightning. Although the rain took the edge off of the desert heat, I knew that the lightning was likely to cause additional range fires, and make the firefighter's work that much harder.

We pulled into John Day and Jim looked for a good place to offload the car. He ended up finding six parallel parking places right on Main Street, and so we filled them up with the truck and put down the ramps.

Once the car and trailer were back on the pavement, I asked Jim what I owed him for the trailer service, and he replied "nothing". I pressed him again and he replied that he was paid my the mile, the SUV he was delivering wasn't due in Idaho until Saturday, and that he like helping out people who had car troubles on the highway. While he was busy putting away the chains and loading up the ramps, I folded a $20 bill behind one of my "business cards", and handed it to him, telling him to check into my web site when he got the chance. Of course, he felt the bill under the card right away. "Keep it" I told him, "you just saved my butt back there, and I do appreciate it." Jim fired up the truck to continue his journey across Oregon, and I drove the three blocks to the Grant County Fairgrounds, arriving finally at 5PM, after 10 hours on (and off) the road.

I checked into the SolWest office at the fairgrounds, and gave Jennifer, the fair's organizer the short version of my day's tale, then went out to the Orchard to set up my tent. I wasn't sure how frequent or lengthy the rain showers would be, and wanted to have my ground cover down and rain fly up in case of more precipitation. Actually, I had thought before arriving at the site that I might just go ahead and pitch the tent inside the arena building like I did last year when it began to rain, but once I had arrived, I found this to be impossible, as the old building had been demolished, and a new, bigger building was in the process of being built.

At any rate, when I went back to the Orchard to set up camp, I found quite a few tents already occupying the space under the trees where I'd camped the previous two years. After checking in with several nearby campers, I selected a spot nearly exactly where I pitched the tent last year. Unloaded the car and trailer, put up the portable dwelling, and filled it with the contents of the car, organizing things along the back wall, opposite the entry flap.

With the camping area secured, I drove the car and trailer up to the exhibition area to charge for a while. The batteries had taken a bit of a beating going over the two final passes, and were about 50% depleted. I plugged into one of the 15 ampere outlets provided on a utility pole in the middle of the grounds, and then wandered over to the open-air classroom to attend Energy Outfitters' unveiling of Outback Solar's new sine wave inverter series. Pleasantly enough, a free buffet-style dinner was provided, so I had one less chore to be concerned about, and filled the empty pit that substituted for my stomach. The last meal was on the Ochoco grade, and I had not stopped to snack since.

While we were eating, Andy came up to me and mentioned that he had heard that I had some car trouble, and there and then, he called his brother-in-law to alert him that he might need to haul the car trailer over from Sweet Home so that I could be towed home if necessary. I hadn't been on site two hours, and already the help was beginning to come pouring in!

Nicked back to the tent with some ice stolen from the lemonade punchbowl, mixed up and knocked back a bourbon and soda to calm my nerves. Also took a few minutes to inflate the ThermaRest mattress and make a bed while it was still light, and while I still had some energy.

After eating (and thanking our hosts), I packed up my backpack and headed over to Darren's motel room over at the Dreamer's Inn to catch a shower and re-freeze one of my ice packs for the cooler. Darren was busy watching the Discovery Channel, some docu-drama about a Russian nuke submarine that had a core melt down or some such. I provided live dialog to accompany the video, substituting my experiences of the day. "Captain, all of the reactor coolant has escaped, we're in danger of a warp core breach! Ahooga! Ahooga! All hands on deck! Locate the nearest auto parts store." Etc. (Guess you had to be there!!)

After washing off the day's sweat and dirt, we headed down the balcony to the Home Power suite and hung around talking with Richard and the HP crew, enjoying a dark brew and smoking the occasional had-rolled (tobacco) cigarette. Things started to wind down about 10:30PM, so I rode my bike the three blocks back to the fairgrounds, unplugged the car (which was still about 25% discharged), and returned to the tent.

Since this was unfamiliar territory, with unfamiliar sounds, I screwed in a set of ear plugs to keep the decibels at bay, and collapsed into bed. Since I had no reason to awake early, and wanted to catch up on some of what I had lost the previous night, I expected to be able to stay in the sack until the sun was high enough to warm the tent tomorrow morning. The night was quite warm, enough to not need covers, and I eventually drifted off to fitful sleep.