Thanksgiving with the Nerds

I made corn on the cob, homemade smashed potatoes, steamed broccoli and veggie Italian sausage cooked with onions and garlic – all pretty much smothered in HP Sauce. If you haven’t tried HP sauce you should. It’s like a tangy steak sauce but better and goes great on meats, potatoes, sandwiches and whatever you’re willing to try it on. We bought it at Fred Meyers in Portland but you can get it at World Market also.

As fun as it sounds, we didn’t just eat on Thanksgiving. It was a pretty nice day in Catalina State Park outside Tucson so we decided to take on a list of projects. Ross started with and spent most the day trying to change out the gas tank inlet that has been leaking on us since Portland. I didn’t even know they used rubber for gas tank inlets but apparently they do and as expected, it eventually corroded away. The hose we bought was pretty hardcore with a bit of metal running through it and cost about $50 for 3 feet. Unfortunately it had to be cut, so scuffed hacksaw and pliers later we had the two pieces needed to complete the project. The last people to attempt to fix it ran into the same issue as us, a metal pipe with an oblong mouth – that needs to connect to a round hose. As you can imagine, this didn’t work so well and we still leak if we overfill but at least we’re not smelling gas anymore. We plan to use some “hard as metal” epoxy” to complete the task.

While Ross was tearing his hair out trying to finish that project, I was inside hanging heavier ceiling hooks for the divider curtain, organizing our bins that sit on the bumper shelf (one of which we were able to get rid of) and putting a railing on the top of my closet so things can be put up there and stay up there while we drive.
The day before we had hung a standing oscillating fan on the ceiling above the back shelf, a necessity for circulating heat in this thing, and Ross wired up a 3 way switch so that the front stereo he worked so hard to install could be used with the house batteries, allowing us to use the stereo for movies or music while we’re not driving (so it wont drain the starting battery).We are definitely making progress on the projects, one of the only things left is to patch the manifold, patch the hole in the floor and figure out whats up with the water pump.

The day after Thanksgiving was our last day at Catalina State Park and although it was more than time to move on, I kind of wish we’de stayed long enough to avoid this winter storm that’s taking over New Mexico and Texas.

• Go Power 1000 Watt True Sine Wave Power Inverter
• Remote switch for Inverter (to monitor battery levels inside the RV and to control the inverter)
• Inverter Install Kit – battery shunt, cables etc
• Battery Charger
• 4 Stage Battery Charger Module
• Auto Isolator (to charge house batteries from alternator)

All this stuff is awesome, but it’s not going to be here until Wednesday – delaying us yet further, especially as I need to at least partially install things before we leave as we don’t know where we will be stopping.

We will get out of town..eventually.

This was a fairly minor project.  We purchased a new wiper motor online, somehow only paying $5 for shipping.  No idea how companies price shipping.  Seems to be entirely arbitrary.  Anyway, fitting the new motor involved little more than removing a grill and and 4 bolts holding the old motor in place, and replacing it.  This was all great – I could wipe the windscreen clear any time I felt like tapping a wire on one of the battery terminals, but you can probably get a ticket if you try do that kind of thing while you’re driving.

Wiring the switch into the dash was a little more complicated.  Really we needed a 4-state switch – off, low speed, high speed and washer jets.  We opted to just get a 3-state switch, and forget low-speed mode.  The resistor required for low-speed operation was missing anyway, which is why you can see the two wires twisted together in front of the wiper motor.  I wasn’t responsible for this, and it’s a minor example of the lazy hack-jobs that have been done throughout the vehicle’s wiring.  Wiring the switch took a while of staring at the circuit diagrams in the maintenance manual to work out.  And despite being absolutely, mostly, fairly..somewhat sure I wired it right, the windscreen wipers don’t park themselves when the switch is set to the off position.  I’ll have to pull the switch and fix that, but at least for now, we can drive in the rain without having to guess where we are going.

After pulling the existing stereo and looking around behind the dash, it was no surprise it didn’t turn on – wires once held together with electrical tape had long since fallen apart.  This included the positive power cable, which, for some reason, had been connected carelessly to part of the cigarette lighter wiring – despite the fact that there was an ‘accessory’ wiring connection 2 inches away.  When this cable’s electrical tape harness has fallen off, the cigarette lighter’s positive wiring had just been rattling around inside the dash, shorting out and blowing the fuse every time we replaced it.

To replace the stereo we picked up a Clarion unit at Frys – nothing fancy, but it sounds great, and, most importantly, has an aux input on the front for our mp3 players.  Installing the stereo was no work at all really, the only difficulty being slowly working through the speaker wires which ran to the dash from who knows where.  The factory stereo installed in the van back in ’73 was in fact a ‘mono’ – with a single speaker in the center of the dash.  A previous owner had installed a couple of small speakers – one on the ceiling between the seats in the cab, and one towards the back of the RV.  Somehow though, despite there being only 3 speakers I could find, enough wires for 5 speakers popped up behind the dash.  Hidden speakers in the shower?  Maybe.  And if not, I might just install some.

Given that Katya and I both like our music loud enough to cause small earthquakes, these little speakers weren’t going to be enough.  Our budget was limited though – not enough to go all out and get amps, crossovers, subs and all the rest of the usual car audio stuff.  Instead we took a trip to our usual destination for picking up cheap things we need – Goodwill.  Conveniently, there were a couple of Aiwa home-stereo speakers recently divorced from their lifelong partner, and looking for a new one.  We plugged them into a random stereo, grabbed a Poison tape from Goodwill’s excellent tape selection, and turned it up.  They sounded pretty great.

After peeling back the rubber flooring in the cab, inhaling a significant amount of whatever weird insulation material is under there, and running new wires, our speakers were installed out of the way behind the seats.  I also wired up the smaller speaker on the ceiling of the cab to provide a little fill.  For now this works.  If I was incredibly anal about it all, I’d probably be bothered by the fact that these speakers don’t really match the output impedance of the stereo’s amp, their current position means a lot of the higher frequencies a dampened by the seats…  I just realized that apparently I am incredibly anal about all of this, and it does bother me.  Silly thing about that is – it really does sound great the way it is.

My next project will be to install a power switch for the stereo so we can run it off either the starter battery, the house battery, or the converter box (the box that allows us to plug into external power sources, like at RV parks).  As well as the power switch, I’ll be running some wiring from the cab over to the living area of the RV so we can connect our laptops to the main stereo and enjoy music and movies through something other than feeble little laptop speakers.  Conveniently, the stereo came with a little remote control, so we won’t even need to get up to change the volume.

And after all that work, while I’m still back in Portland, working through selling the rest of my belongings and re-homing my cats, I’m stuck listening to music through my computer’s speakers.  Guess that’s what I get for not having sorted all this out sooner.