I had to take a day off from posting yesterday. First off, we were wiped out once we got here and set up, and, secondly, I did not want to jump right in to the problem-du-jour again after our brief success with the engine rebuild. Speaking of which, the folks at Infinity Coach, who have been following the saga here on the blog, called me yesterday to discuss the repairs, and have offered a fair and equitable settlement of the portion attributable to the dirt ingestion.

We are back in San Jose visiting family for a few days. As on our last visit, we are staying at the San Jose Elks Lodge (map), which is convenient to both light rail and CalTrain.

When we arrived here, I attempted to deploy our DataStorm internet satellite dish. It elevated, skewed, and began rotating to the correct azimuth, only to stall at about 28 degrees. Several stow-and-deploy attempts yielded the same results. When the azimuth motor stalled around 28 degrees, the degree indicator would immediately jump to 370, and the dish would stop hunting.

I suspected, based on this behavior, that something was physically halting the rotation of the dish. The way the DataStorm dish controller knows that the dish is at the travel limit at either end of any of its three axes, is that the motor current increases as the motor stalls. At some preset current, the controller stops trying to move the dish, and assumes the dish is at the pertinent travel limit. This would explain why, even though the dish had only moved 28 degrees, when the motor began to stall, the controller suddenly indicated 370, the far clockwise travel limit.

Up to the roof I went, screwdriver in hand. After removing the weather cover over the azimuth mount, I removed the azimuth drive motor. This consisted of a small electric motor with an encapsulated gear train, driving an aluminum pinion gear. The pinion travels against a ring gear the entire diameter of the mount. What I found was a bit of plastic stuck in between two teeth on the pinion gear. It was being held there by fairly viscous gear grease.

Removing the plastic allowed the pinion gear to continue its travel around the circle of the ring gear. However, the bit of plastic turned out to be one of the teeth of said ring gear, and, specifically, the tooth at zero azimuth. This makes perfect sense, of course, as the pinion gear exerts extra force on that tooth every time the dish stows, as the motor stalls out against it.

Once I removed the tooth from the pinion gear, the dish could not stow. This is because, as it attempted to return the azimuth to zero, eventually the pinion landed on the now-broken tooth, whereupon the pinion continued to rotate, clicking against the remaining bits of tooth. Since the controller is depending on the motor to stall out, drawing stall current, when the dish reaches zero azimuth, and the controller never sees the current go this high, the controller never stops rotating the azimuth motor.

Unfortunately, the dish must stow (and indicate as properly stowed) before the controller will begin another "find satellite" pass. So the broken tooth on the plastic azimuth ring gear effectively means our DataStorm can not perform its intended function of automatically deploying the dish and finding the satellite.

I was able to get us on-line last night by "manually" positioning the dish using the motor controls. Once the azimuth motor began rotating the dish clockwise, the broken tooth on the stationary ring gear was no longer involved. By using the satellite aiming parameters automatically determined by the program, I was able to point the dish at the satellite well enough for the software to recognize that the dish was approximately aimed at the right bird. Hitting "find satellite" from this point bypasses the need for the dish to stow fully before attempting a pass -- instead, the controller goes right into the "peaking" process, where it fine-tunes the aim and skew, and begins a dialog with the network operations center across the satellite to finish the alignment and go on-line.

Now that we are on-line, we're fine until it comes time to leave. At which point, the "stow dish" command will no longer work, and we will again need to use the manual controls to return the dish to travel position. We will need to stop the azimuth motor just shy of its zero point to avoid the broken tooth. Presumably, we can continue to get on-line and stow by repeating these two processes, but it is very tedious indeed.

After several frantic posts on the DataStorm users group forums, and two calls to MotoSat customer service, I learned that MotoSat will replace the azimuth ring gear at no charge. We just need to send the unit to Salt Lake City, which we will accomplish by driving there.

Some of you may already know that this is a used dish, and we are actually the third owners. It is one of the very earliest DataStorm dishes ever installed, and was initially installed as part of the beta test program. As it turns out, later dishes were fitted with an aluminum ring gear, precisely because of problems with the plastic one such as ours. I suspect our ring gear only lasted until now because neither of the previous two owners really used the dish very much. We've used it daily for six months, and the plastic ring gear just had enough.

On my first call to MotoSat, they had indicated that we would have to cover cost of repairs. After I learned of the plastic-to-aluminum ECO and called them on it, they agreed to cover the repairs. So we'll have our dish fully operational again, but it will cost us a trip to Salt Lake. We're still noodling through whether to head straight there from here, so we can have our dish working ASAP, or hold off until we are en-route from Forth Worth to Oregon and Washington at the beginning of July, when we have to go right through Salt Lake anyway. In which case, we'll have a month or so of manual fiddling with the dish every time we park.

At this point, our plans from here are very much up in the air. We may head back to PEDCO for follow-up, or we may head to Salt Lake for dish repairs, or we may head to Tucson, which is where we were headed (to visit friends) when we first diverted from Phoenix for the engine repairs.

What we know for certain is that we will be here at least until Wednesday, and we need to be in Fort Worth on June 22nd.

We're free! We're free!

Free at last from the clutches of the engine rebuild from hell...

Actually, a great deal of kudos to Virgil Cooley and his team at PEDCO, who stuck with this problem until it was resolved.

It turned out that our low power issue was, indeed, fuel starvation. We're not entirely sure which of the multiple strategies that were last applied worked, although it was probably a combination. Those included swapping the injectors out (again), this time for ones built to the high end of the tolerance for 4775 injectors, and replacing the main fuel delivery line from the bulkhead fitting to the fuel pump. This latter item was a #8, and we replaced it with a #10. Also, it had a braided steel sheath, and there is a distinct possibility it got crimped somehow inside the sheath.

In any case, when we road tested this afternoon, power delivery was much better, and we immediately saw turbo boost readings in the neighborhood of 20psi. Since everything was, at this point, back together, and we were itching to get on the road, we decided to skip the compressed-air-TBS test. It still seems like the DDEC is reading about 5psi less boost than there actually is, but we're not going to pursue that until we resolve the other ECM issues at some later date.

At the moment, we seem to be getting full power, and everything looks good. A hundred miles out from the shop, we stopped to check everything again for leaks, and we have a couple drips of either oil or fuel coming from somewhere forward of the tranny. I will look at those in the morning, when the engine has cooled down.

In the meantime, we are stopped for the night at a truck stop just north of the grape vine (map), which is sort of the ultimate real-world dyno test for heavy diesels. We pulled the hill with little drama, dropping to 40 or so on the really hard parts, but we still passed most of the trucks like they were standing still. Hooh-ahhh.

Apologies to all our loyal readers -- apparently, Blogspot had some problems today and our blog was inaccessible for some time. Other Blogspot blogs were unaffected, and we thought at first only ours had disappeared, but everything seems to be back to normal right now.

Today we had a visit from reader and fellow bus nut Chuck Newman. We chatted about a number of subjects, including our current troubleshooting conundrum. For the record, Chuck was no help at all -- but he did buy lunch, so he's OK in our book. Thanks, Chuck! Seriously, we enjoyed spending a couple hours with him and diverting our attention from the all-consuming engine repairs.

We also met John Bell, an interesting fellow with considerable marine background. He's been here helping Virgil with his boat. John will be a good guy to know if we ever decide to trade Odyssey in on a boat.

Last night, Virgil and his wife Rachel took us to dinner at one of their local favorites, a Mexican place which I think was called "Veracruz." It was quite good, and we enjoyed spending some time with them away from the shop and just being social.

We are still at PEDCO, and tonight marks a full two weeks that we have been here. Today they replaced the injectors, and we did some further troubleshooting relating to turbo boost pressure and fuel delivery. Rather than repeat it all here, since I know many readers are following in both places, I will just point you over to this discussion on the Busnut bulletin board regarding the turbo boost issue. Tomorrow morning, when the engine is back together, we will do some more testing on this. We will also install a larger fuel line. Then, whatever may happen, we will button it all up and head north.

We really need to be in San Jose in the next few days. Also, our holding tanks are full after being here for two full weeks. Lastly, we are already planning to swing back by here on our way east from San Jose. So we are looking at our departure from here as one of going on an 800-mile road test. The engine is mechanically sound, and I am convinced that, even if the power is not up to where it should be, we will not be hurting the engine by running it that far. We'll collect as much performance data as we can, and, if it still seems low on power, we will plan to bring it to Valley Detroit when we return, and run it on the dyno. This will also give us a chance to see if any other ECM gremlins (such as the throttle position problem) resurface.

I have to say that Virgil and his team have been quite determined in chasing the problems down. They have also been very accommodating, and absolutely professional. We are very happy with our experience in this shop, and will not hesitate to return should we need any additional work.

If all goes well tomorrow, my next post will be from a different location...

This morning they removed the turbo, and it looks fine. They also took off the connectors from the manifolds to the turbo, and we started it up to see if it was blowing smoke from one side or the other -- it wasn't.

Having thus ruled out aspiration as the source of the power issues (and smoke), they next removed the muffler. After putting all the intake plumbing back together, we went out for a test drive.

Now, before I get into the results, I have to say that running without the muffler sort of completes the bad-ass, Pimp-My-Ride aspect of the whole coach. You know -- to go along with the aluminum wheels and the flames. We just need some humongous bass speakers and we can run with the low riders. I'm definitely gonna have to look into straight pipes, or maybe glass packs.

In any case, the speculation was that, perhaps, the muffler was plugged up with oil goo, which would account for a lot of blue smoke on the dyno and a loss of power. Unfortunately, while removing the muffler made a small improvement, a goo half hour test run on the freeway, including a couple of good grades, revealed that our power problem is still with us. Which is actually a good thing, because I have no idea where I would get a muffler for this thing.

So now we're back to maybe it's the ECM. Monday morning, we'll swap out the ECM for a 500-horse unit from a fire truck, and see if she'll put out some more horsepower. If that clinches it, the ECM goes over to Valley to be overhauled. If not, the whole coach goes to Valley for more dyno testing.

Either way, we are here until at least Monday, and maybe longer if the ECM needs work.

Tonight we're going out for a nice dinner, to commiserate.

We've been at Pedco with the interior of the coach torn apart and tarps down for over a week. Not much to do except surf the 'net and watch TV. I stumbled upon the final 30 minutes of "102 Dalmatians," which has a lot of barking and dog action on the screen. Opal would not let me change the channel, and continued to check the TV for dogs for an hour after the movie ended. We watched a little "Animal Cops: Houston" later for her, too.

Odyssey on the dyno at Valley Detroit Diesel. At this point the coach is "going" 55mph and blowing lots of black smoke. The "road noise" was incredible and it was very nerve-wracking.

The engine cradle chained down in case something goes terribly, terribly wrong during the test.

Well, I have news to report, and it's not as good as I'd like...

The guys finished getting the engine back together this morning, including the FuelPro 380 fuel separator thingy, got it all primed and ready to go, and started it up. It took some fiddling with connectors and plugginng the ProLink into the DDEC port to get it to stay running, but after half an hour or so it started reliably, there were no codes on the DDEC, and it looked like we were ready to roll.

It was pushing noon at this point, and Virgil pointed out that, if we were to leave LA today, we'd need to be on the road by 1:00 to avoid the traffic madness. But first we needed to road test.

So we took Odyssey out onto a couple of the local freeways and put it through some moderate testing. Just pulling away from the shop, it felt sluggish, and half an hour on the freeway demonstrated a marked lack of horsepower. At one point on I-605, we dropped down to 40mph climbing a moderate hill, I'd estimate no more than 5%. Turbo boost pressure wouldn't climb past 11 or 12 psi during the testing, either.

We returned to the shop around 1:00 and reported the issue to Virgil and Armando. The first suspect was fuel delivery, given that we made changes to the fuel system by installing the FuelPro. Putting a pressure gauge on the secondary filter manifold showed good fuel delivery pressure, though, and fuel delivery rate was nominal according to the computer during the road test. While not ruling out a fuel problem completely, we started to look elsewhere.

It turns out that the pressure valves on the airbox drains were stuck open. That would account for some loss of turbo boost pressure, which should build to around 20psi or so under load. While I doubted enough air could be lost through the two little 1/4" orifices to account for the problem, the valves were changed as a matter of course.

At this point I persuaded Virgil to come with us on a second road test, since I was beginning to doubt my own subjective observations about the power availability. But it was clear to both of us in the first few blocks that something was, indeed, still wrong. Suspecting it might be the ECM, Virgil made a quick call to Valley Detroit Diesel, and we were off to their shop to put Odyssey on the rolling dyno. (PEDCO's dyno is the type which requires the engine to be out of frame.)

We had to crest a pretty good hill to get to Valley, and it became clear during the drive that turbo boost was inadequate. No power on the hill, along with black smoke, pretty much implicated the aspiration system. Boost grudgingly climbed to a high of only around 16psi. Nevertheless, we decided to go ahead with the dyno anyway.

We did one run on the dyno, with me in the driver's seat, Virgil watching the smoke, and the Valley technician running the dyno. Louise took some photos, which she will probably post here at some point. The huge amounts of black smoke and the lack of power precluded doing a full dyno run. But the one quick run showed only about 275 horsepower on the ground, and our 475 horse rated motor should put around 360 on the ground at full tilt.

Based on the smoke and the power loss, Virgil thinks that perhaps the turbo went south on us. We've all got our fingers crossed that this is, indeed, the problem, since the turbo is pretty easy to remove through the access panel in the bedroom, which I have yet to dog down. They were getting another turbo ready for us even before we left Valley Detroit, and tomorrow morning they'll get to work on swapping them out.

We've also agreed to swing back through here after our visit to San Jose. This will give PEDCO an opportunity to look over the engine and make sure everything looks good after the first thousand or so miles.

If all goes well and the new turbo fixes things, we should be on the road tomorrow.

Angel is clearly stressed by her time here at Pedco...

It's been a couple of days since I posted, so I thought I would update everyone.

The engine is mostly back together now, and they will be ready to light it off sometime tomorrow morning. They started Tuesday, putting the new cylinder kits in. The heads, blower, and turbo had magically been rebuilt (I guess sometime on Monday), and the rebuilt heads were on by the end of the day Tuesday. Yesterday they got the blower, turbo, and most of the plumbing back in place, including grinding out the part of the bedroom framing that was rubbing on the blower intake.

At some point yesterday, I threw a wrench into the works by reminding them that the exhaust pipe was crushed, something that I believe happened at the Grand Canyon Caverns when the suspension settled -- looks like there was a rock or something right under the exhaust pipe, and the whole coach came down on it. The resulting restriction in the exhaust is enough to cause back-pressure related problems, and I wanted to get it fixed before we fired up the motor all nice and rebuilt. I had tried mostly unsucessfully to bend it back out myself with a crowbar, and even Williams was not very successful. As usual, it's a custom part for this bus, a round-into-rectangular job, and, for reasons unclear to all of us, they made it out of some really heavy-gauge steel. Not heavy enough to support the bus, but not light enough to fix with normal torch-it-and-bend-it technique either.

So as long at the muffler was still uncoupled from the turbo, they dropped the whole muffler/exhaust assembly out the bottom of the bus, and their tow-truck-driver/welder guy, whose name is also Sean, spent a couple hours with it this morning. An amusing side note is that Sean spends most of his time out in the field, and he's only in the shop when he needs to weld something, or whatever, and yesterday he comes in to weld and says "hey, who took the power outlet for the welder?" Turns out the outlet Virgil had me remove was really there for whatever welder they use for aluminum, which gets very occasional use. I tried to get parts today to put the welder outlet back in along side the new RV outlet, but the required pieces are out of Home Depot's league.

The other wrench I threw into the works is that I had bought a fancy fuel/water separator filter framistat from some guy in Canada, which I had him send to our friend in Tucson, on the theory that we would pick it up when we went through there, and have some shop install it during some future engine maintenance. When we arrived here, we asked our friend to reship it to us here, and yesterday I got it and handed it to them to install. Of course, this turns out to be non-trivial, requiring brackets to be made and fuel fittings to be changed, which cost some additional time today.

Virgil is keeping separate track of the muffler and fuel separator work, along with the new injectors, and any work we end up doing on the DDEC unit, since none of those things is related to the dirt ingestion problem, and we want to have a clean invoice for just the rebuild work.

The patched-up exhaust and the fuel filter are in place now, and almost everything else is back together. They have a few more wires to reconnect, and we can fire it up. Until everything is checked out, they've asked me to keep the access hatch in the bedroom open. I ran out to Home Depot today to get a tube of firestop caulk so I can seal the hatch back up when we're all done (the same trip where I tried to get parts to reinstall the welder outlet). As for repairing the carpet, I will probably just staple it as best I can, and have the people who originally installed it fix it up for us when we get back to Washington.

With luck, everything will work tomorrow when we start it up. And if that luck holds, the DDEC issues will be resolved in a couple of hours. Which is to say, we are still hoping to be done and out of here sometime tomorrow, and on our way north to San Jose by the end of the day.

This morning somone posted comments on Saturday's post regarding shore power issues. So let me state for the record that, yes, I am aware the post was arcane -- the intended audience was other bus nuts who are grappling with how to wire their coaches. And to respond to the specific comment, I'm probably not up for writing any books just at the moment, and, besides, there are already a lot of good references out there, either in print, or here on the web. (Maybe a more realistic goal is for me to collect some links to these references and put up a links section on our main site.) That being said, I do give electrical wiring seminars at the major bus rallies, the next one being Bus'n'USA in Rickreall, Oregon, July 7-10. I am more than happy to go into great detail about shore power and/or other "electricity for beginners" subjects either in the seminar, or off-line at the rally. So come to Bus'n'USA!

I don't have anything to report today on the engine rebuilding front. The shop has other priorities today and we are not being worked on (I knew this would be the case as of the end of the day Saturday). I do still have every confidence that they will have us out of here by Friday, as promised.

I will, though, report on some changes in our plans. First of all, you may recall that I wrote we would be taking in some of the local attractions during our down-time here. However, Louise came down with some kind of cold/flu thing on Friday and has been down for the count ever since. So we've pretty much kept to the coach since arriving. I've been out on errands, and we made it out this weekend to do laundry (PEDCO generously lent us a truck for the weekend), but we haven't been anyplace else. If we're both feeling better later this week, perhaps we will still make it to Disneyland.

I also wrote that Louise was going to fly up to San Jose tomorrow for a family visit, returning next Saturday. While there is a very slim chance that may still happen, it probably won't, because she's still recovering from the aforementioned cold, and the last thing we want to do is send a virus to her family (not to mention 200+ people on an airplane). It's too bad, really, because we cashed in miles for the ticket (and, can you believe, they now charge $75 for the privilege of doing this?), and neither the miles nor the fees are refundable. That being said, the family visit still needs to happen. So, at least as of this writing, it looks like we will be heading to San Jose from here as soon as the engine work is done.

It's another beautiful sunny day here in southern California.

Which is great, except the beautiful sunny days have also been quite warm, which has presented something of a problem. I know a lot of bus conversion folks are reading the blog, and this situation may be of interest to some of you.

As you know, our main engine is down for maintenance, and we are parked out in the yard at PEDCO. Daytime temperatures the last few days have been running in the high 80's to low 90's, and we are parked in full sun, so we've been trying to keep cool with our air conditioners.

Now, normally when we are boondocking, we simply start the generator if we need to run air conditioners for more than a few minutes (we can run one AC on batteries for a few hours without too much trouble), and certainly if we need to run more than one at a time. As I mentioned here yesterday, that's not an option right now, because guys have been working under and behind our coach, and the genny would either smoke them out or cook them.

Virgil offered us power from an outlet in the shop, and he showed me an outlet that he had installed for the purpose. Unfortunately, the electrician that put it in for him misunderstood what was asked for, and the outlet was not really suitable. It turned out to be a 208-volt outlet daisy-chained off an unused 30-amp, 208-volt three-phase receptacle that was in the building before PEDCO took it over. To make matters worse, the new outlet was a 50-amp style with no neutral.

In an effort to make use of what was there, I ran down to Home Depot and bought a plug to mate with this receptacle, a receptacle to mate with our shore cord, and 15' of 10/3 SOOW cord to make myself an adapter. Of course, the outlet had two hots and a ground, with no neutral, and the hot-to-hot voltage was 208, not 240. Suffice it to say, once I got this all wired up, and tried to run one AC per leg, I kept tripping the 30-amp three-phase breaker on the panel. The breaker was warm to the touch -- it was clearly tripping thermally.

I gave up on trying to make use of the hokey jury-rigged three-phase receptacle, and plugged into a standard 15-amp job elsewhere in the shop. At which point, Virgil and I had a brief discussion about how the outlet he thought was going to be for visiting coaches would neither fit any standard shore cord, nor provide enough juice to even a modest coach.

After a few minutes of discussion, I agreed to re-wire the circuit in the shop to something more standard in the RV industry. We agreed that, since the wire in the conduit was only rated for 30 amps, and the phase-to-phase voltage was not in the 220-240 range, that I would just put in a single-phase, three-wire 30-amp "RV" receptacle.

Putting in the correct circuit was straightforward -- I taped off one of the three phase wires at both ends, re-tasked one of the others as a new neutral wire (wrapping both ends in white tape) and connected it to the neutral bus in the panel, and pulled out the three-phase breaker and substituted a single-pole 30-amp breaker. It was a Square-D "QO" panel, which are easy to work hot.

After getting the new circuit and receptacle in and tested, I dragged out my trusty 30-amp adapter and plugged Odyssey in. Within minutes of cranking the AC's up, the incoming voltage dropped to a bit over 100, and the inverter dropped sync. Harumph.

Well, now I was certain I had the right kind of circuit, and it was good all the way from the panel to the receptacle, and, furthermore, everyone had already left for the day so no equipment was running in the shop to drag down the voltage. At which point it occurred to me to pace the circuit out...

Turns out the circuit in question runs about 110' from the shop panel to the receptacle. The original circuit that I re-tasked had been run with #10 wire. Add another 35' for my shore cord and adapter, a few feet here and there inside the coach, and then throw 30 amps of load at it, and, voila -- 11 volts of voltage drop across the circuit between the shop panel and my inverter. (Try this handy voltage drop calculator.) Shop voltage was around 117-118, which meant 106-107 volts aboard Odyssey. Of course, AC's draw a fixed amount of power, so if the voltage drops, current increases.

There's really no way to fix this -- I'm stuck with the 110' of #10 from the panel. I'm using a #6 shore cord and 15' of #10 adpator/extension to reach the outlet from the coach. I could beef up my 15' extension to #8 or #6, but the improvement would be minimal.

Fortunately, the SW4024 inverter allows us to set the amount of current we draw from the mains. As I type, I've got the input set at 25 amps, even though the two running air conditioners are drawing 28amps combined. That seems to be keeping the 30-amp breaker in the shop panel happy, and has the input voltage at the inverter at around 108-109 volts. The ACs are struggling at that voltage, but at least we're somewhat cool. When the ambient temperature drops, we'll drop one of the ACs and then the inverter can begin replenishing what it is now using from the batteries.

So there are some lessons learned here that I will pass along to other bus and RV folk:

1. Carry the heaviest gauge shore cords and adaptors you can.
2. Two short lengths can be better than one long one.
3. Having a variety of plugs on hand, along with a receptacle to mate with your shore cord and some wire to connect them, can get you out of a jam.
4. (Drum roll) Don't underestimate the usefulness of a load-supporting inverter. I don't think we'd be getting any cooling at all without it.

On the plus side, Virgil is happy with his new outlet, and the next coach that stays here will at least have a 30-amp outlet they can use.

We're looking forward to sleeping in past 0700 tomorrow -- there won't be anyone running air tools under our bedroom at that hour on Sunday.

OK, I know all the diesel junkies out there are waiting for the daily update, so here it is.

We are most of the way through the disassembly phase of the in-frame. The liners and pistons are all out, and we have a good assesment of the condition of the engine.

As we originally suspected, the liners and rings are done -- fully dusted. The tattle-tales on the rings are completely gone, and the liners are polished nearly smooth inside.

The bearings are in really good shape, so there is no evidence of other problems, such as the dirt or wear metals in the oil doing damage elsewhere. We'll replace all the bearings as a matter of course.

So what we need for certain, at this point, are new cylinder kits (which include liners, rings, and pistons), rod and main bearings, the turbocharger rebuilt, the heads rebuilt, and possibly the blower rebuilt. Since we're this far into the tear-down anyway, I have also made the decision to put new injectors in, which will be entirely at my expense irrespective of where we come out with Infinity on the dirt ingestion issue. There's probably nothing at all wrong with the injectors, but they are 16 years old with 55,000 miles on them, and there will be zero additional labor to swap them now, versus another tear-down if one ever needs to be replaced later.

Since the heads are being rebuilt, Virgil asked me if I wanted to add Jakes for about another $2k, but I passed on this since we already have an output retarder on the tranny, making Jakes mostly redundant.

I am impressed with how quickly the mechnics here have torn down the engine. At this rate, we will be done mid-week sometime. Nevertheless, Odyssey will be here until next Saturday, since Louise will be flying to San Jose for a brief family visit on Tuesday, and she won't be back until then. So I'll be baching it for a few days.

Today we are struggling with keeping cool. We can't run the genny, since that would smoke out the technicians who are working under and behind the coach. I've got a power cord running to an outlet in the shop, but the voltage is very low, and our air conditioners are struggling with it, to the point that it gets even lower, eventually causing the inverter to disconnect from the mains. I've got one roof unit running, supplementing 12 amps of mains power with juice from the batteries. That seems to be working OK for now, but the unit is running at reduced capacity, and a single unit would be marginal in this weather even if it were running full tilt.

Breaking news (cue sounds of Teletype terminals in the background, and newsy-type music)...

Two updates is one day is unusual for me, but I want to bring you the news as it happens (or was that "fair and balanced?" I always forget...).

The turbo and blower and their plumbing are out. It does not look as if the aftercooler is plugged, but we'll know better once it's out.

What we found, though, is a hole in the duct from the turbo to the blower. Apparently, the duct has been rubbing on some steel framing that was installed in the bedroom over the turbo assembly. Part of the duct is metal, and the only consequence of the rubbing there is that it is worn smooth. However, the part where the duct attaches to the turbo is rubber, and this item wore all the way through, creating a hole about an inch long and a quarter inch wide. The duct will need to be replaced, and when we do so, we will grind away 1/2" to 3/4" of the tubing that it was rubbing against to create some headroom.

So now Virgil's theory is that the black smoke and low power has been coming from the fact that a bunch of our turbo boost pressure has been blowing through this hole. Which tells us nothing about the condition of the cylinders.

The turbo is, indeed, shot, and they will rebuild it. The blower has a lot of dirt in it, but the bearings do not seem to be leaking oil -- further inspection is required.

The good news in all of this is that, now that the turbo and blower are out of the way, it appears that they can fit new liners and rings with the engine in place. Since we are already in it this far, and removing the aspiration system is half the battle, I've instructed them to go ahead and kit it regardless. For the price of eight cylinder kits and a minimal amount of additional labor, it makes no sense to put the engine back together without doing the cylinders.

Of course, the situation here changes hourly, so I'm not banking on anything.

Stay tuned for further updates. We now return you to your regularly scheduled internet viewing.

Duct between turbo and blower, showing hole rubbed clear through.

Rub marks on the metal framing

So much for the good news... today we are back to crying in our milk.

They spotted us in the yard today, and, thusly secured, we set to work removing part of the wardrobe, ripping out part of the carpet, and removing the access cover over the turbo.

The first problem we discovered is that the back of the carpet was covered with soot -- a sign that 1. the access cover was not well sealed and 2. exhaust is finding its way upwards in the engine bay. Number 1 was not entirely unexpected, and number 2 may or may not represent a problem. The turbo needs to be rebuilt anyway, so I am not going to worry about whether the exhaust was coming from the turbo housing.

The much bigger issue is that, surprise, the other end of the air intake duct, the end that attaches to the turbo, was also disconnected. There is evidence of a band clamp, but the clamp itself is long gone, and the metal duct is completely pulled out from the rubber elbow.

While the air-cleaner end of the duct was unmistakably misattached at the shop (the band clamp could only have been tightened as much as it was with the duct not fully engaged), this end is more of a mystery. One of the pipes installed for the hydronic system is pressing hard against the intake duct, exerting pressure away from the elbow, and it's possible that, over time, vibration and this pressure worked the duct out of the elbow.

The bad news here, of course, is that we only thought we fixed the dirt ingestion problem when we re-attached the other end of the duct 2,000 miles ago. In fact, we have continued to run the coach with a wide-open air intake system right up until today. And it was simply impossible to know this without removing the aforementioned access cover.

So Armando, the shop supervisor (who has been out the last two days, and thus not privy to the aftercooler discussion I had with Virgil) takes one look at this, turns to Virgil and says "You know, Virgil, this engine is gonna be dirted out." So there you have it -- two independent expert opinions.

Even as I type, guys are dismantling the engine from two different directions. With any luck, the turbo will be out this afternoon, and maybe even the blower. Which is good, because I'd like to put the cover back on tonight, so we can release the cats from their current imprisonment in their carriers. Dirt ingestion is one thing; cat ingestion is a whole other matter.

Intake duct separated from turbo intake elbow

Detroit Diesel Episode IV -- A New Hope

When last we saw our intrepid galactic explorer 8V92TA and his robotic sidekick, DDEC-II, they had fallen into the clutches of the evil Lord Filter Evader...

Seriously, nothing much happened today, on account of the fact that the service manager was out, as he was yesterday, due to a death in the family. So we spent the day relaxing in the parking lot and catching up on a few things.

However, at some point this morning, Virgil stopped by to chat, and asked us to fire the big Detroit up so he could have a look at the smoke. Nothing unusual was noted, which is to say that it sputtered some white smoke on startup, which went away almost immediately (it's in the low 80s here).

Based on this observation, and years of experience, Virgil has ventured a guess that we may not need liners or rings after all. His theory is that a lot of the dirt we sucked in past the air cleaner is actually packed up in the aftercooler. He showed me an aftercooler, and, after seeing it, I can understand his point. Symptomatically, he believes that if the cylinders were dirted out, we would be seeing lots of smoke at idle, and it wouldn't clear up at all, or maybe only when the engine was hot. Further, the black smoke we are seeing under load is more commonly a symptom of air starvation than blow-by.

The aftercooler is a device found only on turbocharged models. It sits in the valley of the engine, below the blower, and consists of fins and tubes, just like a radiator, to a depth of about five inches. The air passages are very small. This device transfers some of the heat from the charge air, which has been superheated by the turbine compression process, to engine coolant flowing through the tubes. This provides a cooler charge to the cylinders. (Similar devices commonly found on turbocharged automobile engines are sometimes called intercoolers, and often are air-to-air, rather than air-to-coolant, units.)

Virgil's theory is that, often, there exists a thin film of motor oil on the aftercooler, due to normal seepage around the blower gaskets. The combination of the oil film and the small air passages in the aftercooler can trap dirt, and the aftercooler can become plugged up with the resulting gunk.

While starving the engine for charge air doesn't do it any good, this is certainly better than having the dirt proceed all the way to the cylinders, causing excessive ring and liner wear.

Now you may remember that, when we were at Williams, I had a look for myself into the cylinders, and saw what looked like excessive scoring of the liners. So I grilled Virgil on this. His opinion is that vertical score lines are absolutely commonplace on these Detroits. He told me that if I could still see the cross-hatch (I could) then the cylinders were probably normal. Furthermore, he contends that a dusted engine would have the liners polished smooth, with neither scoring nor cross-hatch visible. I confess that, while I've had a lot of experience with big Detroits (mostly 149s) and looked at a lot of liners, I saw them mostly new or at end-of-life, and I don't have a lot of experience looking at liners at this stage of wear, andI have to bow to Virgil's experience here.

So, while some dirt certainly must have actually gotten into the cylinders, and the cylinder wear is probably higher than it should be, they may not actually need to be replaced. We will need to look at the tattle-tale grooves on the rings to know for certain.

I did mention that turbo boost pressures look normal, and asked if they wouldn't be higher if the aftercooler was, indeed, plugged, but Virgil reminded me that the turbo is almost certainly shot (being the first thing the dirt hit after the intake hose), which would tend to lower boost pressures. Sort of two abnormal circumstances adding up to one normal gauge reading.

So the plan now is to pull the turbo and the blower, and have a look at the aftercooler. And we'll all cross our fingers until then. And, of course, we'll have a look at the rings, at least on the left side where they are easy to reach.

Tomorrow they will be backing us in to our assigned spot in the yard. Work will probably not start until Friday or maybe Monday. In the meantime, we have our work cut out for us, dissassembling the wardrobe and pulling up the carpet to remove the access panel over the turbo.

The remainder of our trip today was uneventful, and we are now in the parking lot at PEDCO in Santa Fe Springs (map).

We spent about an hour just shooting the breeze with Virgil Cooley, the proprietor. I had met Virgil at a few rallies, and I knew he had a couple dozen people working for him, but I was unprepared for the scale of the shop. It's quite large, with several service bays, and an enormous warehouse of engines and parts.

Tomorrow morning the service manager will have a look at our engine bay and decide when to schedule the work. Once they open things up, Odyssey can't move again until they are done, so they want to schedule things so they can have us in a good position before they start.

Virgil is confident he can have us done by next Friday.

Once they get us parked, and we see how much work we have to do in the bedroom to provide them with access, we will probably pull out the bikes, and head off to some of the local attractions. Disneyland is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and, even though we just had our fill of its Florida counterpart, we'd like to stop in while the festivities are in progress. We also have a local club we can patronize, and we've never seen the Getty Museum. Since LA is never on the top of our list of places to visit, we'll take advantage of this forced downtime to see those things that are here.

I am hoping that we will still be able to get on-line wherever they park us. The spot we are in now has a clear view of the sky, but we are right on the edge of the footprint, and getting the bird to sync up was a challenge. In any case, we're not going to challenge any propsed parking spot based on satellite access, so if this is my last post in a while, you'll know why...

Our home for 24 hours, site 400 at Outdoor Resort Indio. Behind is one hole of the golf course and a nice fountain. This park is much, much nicer than Newport Dunes, where we stayed about a month ago, and less expensive, too.

Way in the distance you can see a Monaco coach in Nascar paint scheme. It is even more lurid in person.

Our neighbor's site. Note custom covers on fancy patio lights and granite-topped BBQ/wet bar/refrigerator counter. Many sites have even more elaborate "outdoor living" setups, including fountains, statuary, furniture and golf cart parking gazebos.

We are en route to PEDCO, in Santa Fe Springs, California.

I received quite a few suggestions and recommendations for where to have our engine rebuilt, and I would like to thank everyone who wrote in or posted on the subject. From the dozen or so shops that we identified either ourselves or from the suggestions we received, we distilled the choices down to three or four places that could do the work, would agree to do the work, could start right away, and were within reasonable driving distance from where we were.

Of these few shops, PEDCO was the most willing to commit to the project, and had quite a few proponents. They quoted us a good price, and can start right away. Also, they are willing to allow us to stay aboard during the project.

We left Scottsdale early this afternoon, and have been staying on I-10 for the duration. We normally eschew the interstates in favor of less traveled routes, but we wanted to minimize the miles, and keep the engine at a steady hum. We've had the cruise control dialed in at 55-60mph, which made us nearly the slowest thing on the highway.

Nevertheless, we were pulled over by the CHP, much to our amazement. Turns out he saw us passing and thought we were not wearing seat belts, which is a primary citable offense in California. Of course, we did have our belts on, but Odyssey lacks shoulder belts, so he couldn't see that from his vantage point. We'd love to have shoulder belts, and when we had the drivers' seats reupholstered, we researched them. Due to the design of these spring-ride seats, they can not be retrofitted with shoulder belts. So we have only the retractable lap belts that were on the seats when we got the bus.

He thanked us for stopping, bid us a good day, and took off. Of course, he had stopped us in the middle of a very long 7% up grade, so I spent the next few minutes in the slow lane with my four-ways on, pedaling as hard as I could to get back up to 55 without over-stressing our poor worn-out motor. Harumph.

As long as we were going right by it on I-10, something we rarely expect to do, we decided to stop for the night at the very tony Outdoor Resorts Motorcoach Resort in Indio (map). As I have written many times here, commercial campgrounds, of any description, are not really our thing. But we've seen this place on one of those Travel Channel specials, sort of the "Campgrounds of the Rich and Famous." It has been featured on a number of shows and in several magazine articles as the epitome of high-end campgrounds, and it is the sort of place where folks own their lots, condominium style. Owners can then enter their lots into a pool of lots to be rented to overnight visitors such as ourselves when they are not in residence.

In any case, we've had a hankering to see the place, and marvel at how the high-end motorhome community travels, and we thought this might be our only opportunity in the foreseeable future. The grounds are actually quite pleasant, with many ammenities. We've also seen quite a few lots that owners have developed extensively, adding outdoor barbecues, shade ramadas, fountains, gas fireplaces, and the like, up to and including entire outdoor kitchens. The extensive lot improvements and the money spent on them is what has garnered all the national attention for this property.

So we've come, and we've seen for ourselves, and we still have to say: it's not for us. I will say, though, that I've seen more bus conversions here than any place other than a rally -- Odyssey fits right in. And even in this land of many high-zoot Prevost conversions, our coach still turns heads.

Happy Mothers' Day, everyone.

A lot of people have been writing in regarding our current situation, to offer advice, cheer, or condolences. I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who has sent email, posted comments here, or posted responses to my bulletin-board posts asking for recommendations.

Based on some of what I have received, I need to clear a few things up.

First, let me say that we are quite familiar with many aspects of bus and engine maintenance, and what "normal" procedure is for removing engines, in-frame rebuilds, etc.. For example, some folks have read my descriptions of how our engine is squeezed in and have tried to reassure me that all bus engines are pretty much a tight fit. One shop I've spoken to thinks it's no big deal because they have worked on several Neoplans...

Let me clarify the situation for anyone who has not waded through the dozens of pages of Odyssey's history on our web site:

Our bus was not built by Neoplan USA, the US licensee of the Neoplan name and coach designs. If it had been, it would have been made to US specs, with an engine bay and cradle designed for a Detroit engine. Instead, our bus was built by the Gotlob Auwaerter Company, in Germany (the original owner of the Neoplan brand, now owned by MAN). As such, it was built with an engine room and cradle system for either an air-cooled Deutz, or a Mercedes. Both of these motors are significantly smaller than the 8V92 we have now.

Sometime early in its US life, our coach was sent to Neoplan USA in Lamar, Colorado to be re-powered with a brand new 8V92TA coupled to an Allison HTB748 transmission. To fit the new engine, parts of the floor were cut away, and a good part of the rear bodywork was removed, including several tubes. One of the cradles that Neoplan USA normally uses for Detroit motors in US-built coaches was modified to fit our frame rails. The new engine was slid into place, and then the radiators, fans, and other beefed-up components were installed. New framing was added in the rear of the coach to extend the engine room into the passenger area to accommodate the bigger engine. The rear tubes were welded back in after the motor was in place, and new bodywork was added, including a new engine bay door.

Naturally, having just done a great deal of bodywork and spent a small fortune on a paint job, we have no intention of cutting away sheet metal and frame tubes to slide the engine back out. Therefore, in order to slide the engine out at all, we first need to dissassemble most of the wardrobe, rip up part of the upholstered-in carpet, and remove the decking above the turbocharger.

Next, with the help of some very skinny technicians squeezing in from below, the exhaust wrap blankets will need to be carefully removed from the turbo assembly, and the intake plumbing disassembled. The turbocharger will need to be completely removed from the engine through the bedroom. All of this is necessary because the entirety of the turbo protrudes above the top of the rear engine bay opening. The cradle can not be slid rearward even four inches without removing the turbocharger.

Once the turbo and all the intake plumbing are off, and the blower if need be, then several items will need to be removed before the cradle can slide back. These include the power steering reservoir, the Webasto unit and various hydronic parts, the oil reservoir, and several wiring harnesses.

Access to front-side components that will need to be disconnected, including the alternator, air compressor, and the top of the tranny, is through a small access hatch under the bed -- cramped quarters to be sure.

More than one shop has looked at our coach and flatly refused to work on it.

I'm not trying to be all doom and gloom here -- it's not impossible, just more work. And we knew this about the coach when we bought it, though with only 25,000 miles on the ticker, we thought it would be a long time before we needed to pull the motor.

Thus the reason why I have been asking around for multiple shop recommendations. We are not ruling out the possibility that any given shop may turn us away once they see the magnitude of the job, and how much finished bedroom they will have to work through to access the motor. The Detroit dealer here in Phoenix, being an authorized service outlet, does not have the luxury of refusing work, but their outrageous 130-hour removal/replacement estimate speaks volumes about how eager they are to do it.

I am continuing to solicit recommendations for shops until sometime Monday afternoon. I will be spending most of the morning calling around to get time and cost estimates, and we plan to have selected a shop by the end of the day so we can be on the road to that shop by Tuesday morning.

In more mundane news, we are still parked at Casino Arizona. Ironically, neither one of us has wagered even a nickle in the casino. However, last night we availed ourselves of the prime rib buffet, and we have to say, it is one of the best buffet restaurants we have ever seen. At $16.50 it is pricey by casino standards, but the quality of the food and the selection was far above that of any casino buffet we have sampled.

After dinner, we took in the Vegas-style show in the comfortable show lounge. The casino handed out tickets for this particular show at no charge, though one needed to get them in advance as the shows were "sold out." They did require a two-drink minimum, though. We thought the show would be pretty cheesy, but we had nothing else to do. It turned out that we were quite plesantly surprised. The show was entitled Showstoppers Live and featured impersonators of various musical celebrities, including Elvis, Donna Summer, the Blues Brothers, Tina Turner, and The Temptations. There was also a comedian and four leggy show girls who appeared throughout all the acts. Musical accompaniment was provided by a four-piece band. All the performers were quite good musically, and appearance and mannerism impersonation was close enough to be amusing. The comedian was also quite good, and the band was hot. Even the showgirls did a good job, though they kept their tops on all night... All in all, not bad for a free show.

We were hoping to have breakfast in one of the restaurants this morning, but our plans were disrupted by Mothers' Day. All the sit-down places were booked to overflowing for brunch, and we thought dinner might be a zoo as well. We ended up getting a lunch-time sandwich at the little snack bar/grill and making spaghetti in Odyssey for dinner. I never thought Hallmark could have this much effect on my life.

We plan to be out of here sometime tomorrow, although our parking pass is good through Tuesday if we need it.

Yesterday was a rough day.

W.W. Williams finally got us into the shop around 9:30 or so, and we headed up to their pleasant customer lounge to wait.

The whole right side of the engine is pretty much inaccessible in the frame. However, they were able to get the inspection ports open on all four of the left side cylinders. The news was bad -- the rings and liners are completely shot. They took us into the shop so we could see for ourselves. Looking through the intake ports, it's easy to see the deep vertical score lines.

Their assessment was that the engine was already critical and would not last much longer without a rebuild.

On the TPS/ECM front, the news was a little better. Our ECM apparently lacks a vibration-resisting kit that came out as a change order sometime after our ECM was made. The vibration of the PROM in its socket apparently causes many symptoms, including the TPS anomaly that we have observed.

We can have the kit installed, or put a new ECM on. The decision, naturally, was to do nothing until we know what we will do about the mechanical damage.

Our choices on that front are to rebuild the existing motor, which would involve new liners, rings, valve guides, main bearings, and a rebuilt turbocharger, or to swap it out for a remanufactured engine. The former means we get to keep our existing low-mileage block, but there is essentially no warranty on anything except the actual parts involved. The latter comes with a one-year, 100,000-mile warranty, extendable beyond that. Also, a remanufactured engine would come with a good ECM, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Williams gave me an estimate to put in a reman. It's around $30K, which includes $18,000 for the motor, and 130 hours of labor to pull the old motor, swap accessories, and install the new one.

They estimated the kit cost for the rebuild kits to be $8k-$10k, plus the same 130 hours to remove and reinstall the engine, PLUS the labor to do the rebuild (I would guess around another 20 hours minimum). In their opinion, the motor has to come out to be rebuilt. If that's true, then it makes little sense not to go with the remanufactured engine, even though we might have to wait three weeks for one.

On the other hand, I spoke today with PEDCO, a diesel engine shop in the LA area. PEDCO is well-known and respected in the bus conversion community, coming to many of the major rallies and offering their advice and expertise freely. Their opinion was that the engine could be "in-framed," meaning that it would only need to be slid out far enough to access the heads and cylinders. Their estimate on the entire job was $10,000 complete, plus or minus 20%. That was even after I spent many minutes trying to persuade them that our engine was so tight in the bay that it had to be greased and slid in there with the help of obstetrician's forceps. On top of all this, they told me they can have us out by next Friday if we are in by this Wednesday.

On Monday, we will make some more calls to some other shops, trying to get a consensus of opinion about the job. By the end of the day Monday we will make a decision. If we end up going with PEDCO, which is the front runner at this instant, we will make a 400-mile detour back to the LA area, arriving sometime Wednesday evening.

In the meantime, we are parked at the Casino Arizona on the Salt River Indian Reservation (map), adjacent to Scottsdale. We came straight here from Williams after picking up our pets at the kennel. The tribe permits parking for up to three days with no charge (and will grant another three days if one racks up 1500 points on their casino privilege card), and they have five restaurants here. As much as we dislike the metro Phoenix area, we did not want to rack up too many more miles on the engine until we knew what we were doing, and, besides, we didn't even know what direction to head. This is as good a spot as any to rest and lick our wounds while we wait for Monday morning to roll around.

The restaurants here, by the way, are quite good, at least the two we've already tried. Tonight is prime rib night in the buffet, so we'll try that.

We are at W.W. Williams, the Detroit Diesel/Allison dealer in Phoenix (map).

We arrived here late last night, after returning from Cancun and dining with our good friend Jack, who was kind enough to pick us up at the airport. We decided to overnight here in their parking lot so we would be first in line for drive-in service this morning at 7:00. We were, indeed, first in line, but it's after 9 now and we are still in the parking lot. Drive-ins are apparently squeezed in as available on the day's schedule. We could not do a scheduled appointment because that involves leaving the coach with them for some indeterminate time period.

The pets are still at the kennel, which is just as well, since we would not be able to be with them in the coach while it is being serviced. With any luck, we will be done and out of here before the kennel closes this afternoon.

Louise has already posted some photos from our resort in Cancun. We had a great time -- very relaxing, and we didn't think about the bus even once (other than to describe it to people). We did have a brief moment of panic on our way to the airport last week: in preparation for our departure, I very carefully powered down all but the most essential electric items on the coach, these latter being the fridge, one vent fan on automatic, and the air compressor. I also carefully set up the autostart sequencer and limits on the genny, in case these three items drew the batteries down too much in the Arizona heat. Just before the cab arrived to pick us up at 5:30am, I shut the generator off (it had been running since 4 just to top the batteries off) and forgot to set it to "Auto" and set it to "Off" instead. I spent the flight to Dallas mulling over the battery drain rates and math, and decided we could probably go for a week without the genny. Turns out we did fine, using only 400 amp-hours for the week.

I'd post a bunch of stuff about what we did in Cancun, but the rule is that what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico :-) We do have a nice photo of Louise and three girlfriends dancing on the bar at Senor Frogs, but we need to get it scanned in before we can post it.

Photos from our Cancun trip! We stayed at a lovely resort on the "Mayan Riviera," far from the huge touristy hotel district. This is the view from our room, which opened right out onto the beach.

The lobby pool and lounge area beyond. This was the best place to sit in the deep shade and sip a cold drink. Everything is sparkling clean.

Beach palapas. Every morning the staff raked away the seaweed.

The main pool with the Caribbean Sea beyond