Moving South

We are at the James Island County Park, just across the Ashley River from Charleston, South Carolina (map), and within the city limits. It was just a seven mile scooter ride to the Harbour Club downtown for dinner last night.

This is a very nice park, but expensive, at $42 per night plus tax, bringing our total for two nights to more than $96. That said, it was better than anything we could do in Myrtle Beach once the state park booted us out. I'm sorry that we were not able to get another night or two there, but it was certainly not worth $60-$75 that the commercial parks wanted, even if some of them featured a "lazy river" pool.

Huntington Beach was also sold out, and prices are sky high this time of year all the way to Pawley's Island. Before we left the state park we called down here to see if things were a bit better, knowing we also had a club in town. I think we could have saved a few more bucks at one of the commercial parks here, but we almost always prefer a public campground.

The sites here at least have a bit of separation, although on short notice we had to take one that adjoins the site next to it, intended for parties needing more than one site. I think I've counted around a dozen people in the fiver next to us, including at least five adults, two toddlers, and children up through their teens -- I guess they are really leveraging the $48 per night investment. They've been fine neighbors, though.

In addition to the campground, this park also has a mini water park called the "Splash Zone," with a couple of slides, a lazy river, and some other splashy stuff. It's an additional charge, discounted to $9 for campers, or $7 after 3pm. I was hoping to partake this afternoon, but a thunderstorm rolled in just as we were donning our suits. Too bad, as I was hoping to cool off after another hot day in the tunnel working on the batteries.

Of course, the new terminal adapters I bought had to have just a slightly larger diameter post than the ones on the batteries, and I could not simply install them. One of the cables had enough length to pull the end into the tunnel, where I could work on it with a round file until it fit the new terminal. The cables on the other connection were all very tight, and there was no way to enlarge them without taking way more of the bay apart than I wanted to.

Fortunately, after hunting around in my miscellaneous parts kit, I found an old terminal adapter with the proper size stud, and used that instead. That was only half the battle, though, as it was very difficult to find an orientation of the post adapter where I could get all three cables onto the two studs without conflict. I ended up having to rearrange three of the battery jumpers, and I installed the adapter no fewer than three times in three different orientations before I found a position that would work. Both the adapter and the terminal post looked a bit mangled when I was done, as they are both lead, which is quite soft.

I also had some trouble getting the dress panels in place, and after studying it for a while, I discovered that the batteries were not snugged all the way into the compartment. Several more cranks of the wrench on the lower retaining bar got them in far enough for the trim to go back on. Now that all the battery connections were finished, I also reconnected the Vanner equalizer and the solar charge controller, both of which have been disconnected since the start of the project.

With the power shut down and the batteries off, I also took the opportunity to remove the battery switch, open it back up, and switch in the better parts from my original switch. Those consisted of the keyed hub and the outer case, including the lever retention spring. I think this replacement switch now ought to give us many more years of service, although I need to replace the plain nuts, now holding the case together, with Nylocks.


New stud, left is much shorter than the old one, right. Much longer item in the background is actually the tie-down.

In the course of finishing up the battery project, I came across the older battery stud that had pulled out of battery number 6. There is even still a bit of lead on it, where it oozed into the opening on the ring terminal. I set the old stud down on one of the battery posts next to the new one -- it's actually quite a bit longer. Not only do three terminals no longer fit on these new studs, I also noticed that with just two on a stud, the end of the stud is flush with the top of the nut; ideally, one would like at least one thread proud of the nut for a proper connection.

We took only two nights at this park, to get us past the heavy demand of the weekend. Now that we know what it's like along the coast in high season, I made a reservation for three nights at Edisto Beach, the next state park south of here. They had a 37' site in the beachfront campground available starting tomorrow, and I'm certain we will fit. At $27 per night it is a relative bargain, and it will give us power for the air conditioning while we relax a bit and watch what Investigation Area 91 in the Atlantic is going to do.

Photo by Adam Foster | Codefor, used under a Creative Commons license. No, we aren't going that far south.

Assault by Battery

We are at the Myrtle Beach State Park, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (map). Wow, is it ever crowded here. The last few times we've been in this area, it has been off-season. Right now we're in the middle of high tourist season, although, oddly, signage at the park does not indicate the bag limit. With things so crowded, we actually made a reservation, uncharacteristic for us. The best I could do on short notice was two nights, and so we will be checking out tomorrow, unless another space opens up.

I had some, uh, reservations about this, since the very first time we came by here, we had barely pulled into the entrance from the road when we stopped short, thinking the trees were too low. Indeed, at that time of the year, there may have been some low-hanging growth that made it look like that, but, in any case, we were too nervous about it to forge ahead, and so we backed out onto the highway and headed south to Huntington Beach, near Murrell's Inlet. We've avoided this place ever since.

In hindsight, that was our very first pass around the country and only our fourth month of living aboard, and we'd already had several problems with low trees in the generally RV-unfriendly east. We did not have nearly the experience we have today with judging tree height or the relative damage potential of low-hanging foliage, and certainly not nearly the experience I have now in backing Odyssey out of bad situations -- we did not want to get a quarter mile down the road only to be stopped in our tracks. Nowadays, backing up a thousand feet just doesn't seem like that big a deal.

I did check the park's web site, and asked around on the boards about low trees. I even called the park, and the ranger who answered said she had never heard anything about low tree problems, and that they got tractor-trailer deliveries all the time. As it turned out, we had no trouble at all, and nothing we passed even seemed low enough to cause us to break a sweat. What a difference nearly seven years makes.


Five of our old batteries out.

We pulled in rather late because we did not leave the parking lot of Carolina Energy, the battery distributor, until almost 7pm. We arrived there shortly after I posted here, between 10:30 and 11:00. I had figured it would take me an hour or so to disconnect all the cables and remove the hold-down brackets, and it would take someone from their warehouse and myself maybe half an hour to get them all out an onto a pallet. Maybe another half hour or so to load the new ones into place, and a couple hours to hook it all back up, so I had figured to be there perhaps four hours or so.

Ha. I should know better by now. For starters, the tie-downs did not come quietly. The nuts are so close to the walls that neither a socket nor even a box-end wrench would fit them, and it took forever to loosen them with an open-end, one sixth of a turn at a time. Then I discovered that two of the cables were attached to a pair of terminals that I simply could not reach with all the batteries in place, so they would have to come out in stages.


Some of the cables and tie-down hardware. Yes, that's my foot sticking out of the tunnel.

The biggest issue, though, was that two of the batteries had to be lifted in place about an inch, then rotated, in order to remove them from behind the inverter. Now, these puppies weigh 167 pounds each, and the only access is crouching in the tunnel, over the steering box and between the wheel wells, that leads from the driver compartment to the motorcycle bay. There's barely room to get your hands onto the batteries, let alone lift something that awkward and heavy from that kneeling position. Ultimately I had to lever them up using my Gorilla Bar, then cram large sockets from my socket driver set underneath them.

Eventually I was able to get all eight batteries loose, and Tony, the warehouse manager and lone employee on duty at the shop was kind enough to come out and help me four separate times to remove them. On top of the other issues, the nylon rope handles kept getting caught on the tie-down uprights. One of the handles had to be cut off to get the last battery out.


The inimitable Tony, hauling off an old battery and taking a call at the same time. Some of the trim that had to be removed is on the left.

Getting the new ones in also proved something of a challenge, although it was actually a bit easier since they redesigned the handles. However, this was the part where I really needed the help -- there is just no way one person can boost a battery that heavy up on top of the wheel well while crouched in the tunnel. It took both of us, working from opposite sides, to push each battery up onto the shelf. I sent Tony away between each pair so I could spend some time wiggling them into position, and also getting the impossible-to-reach cables on the back ones. Again, he came out at least four more times to help me get them in.


How I spent my day. Tony is kneeling in the scooter bay behind me.

When I was removing the old batteries, I found another stud terminal post that had pulled right out of the lead. I had this happen when we were at Choo-Choo Garage a couple weeks ago, and so it was no longer all that surprising, but this clearly happened sometime in the last year or so, and we have no idea, really, how long that battery has been "disconnected." Tony tested all the batteries for me, and this one actually tested "good" and at 77% charged, about the same as the other good ones, so the stud was probably touching enough for the battery to be helping at least a little, but with two of these terminals having been damaged, I was now very nervous about tightening the new terminals, especially after Tony told me the number one issue that leads to terminal failure like this is under-tightening the nuts.

Tony had a booklet with the torque specifications. They listed "120 lb/in" or "162 N•m". Now, I don't know what "lb/in" means in regards to torque (it turns out to be a misprint), but 162 netwon-meters is 120 foot-pounds, and I took out my torque wrench an dutifully dialed that number in. Somewhere in the middle of tightening the very first terminal I realized there was no way this could be right -- that's a lot of torque, and I remembered the stud that came right off in my hand when I overtightened it just a little. I stopped and went inside to ask Tony.

After we both scratched our heads for a while he called Trojan, and Stacy the tech rep there said the correct torque was actually 120-180 inch-pounds, which is 10-15 foot-pounds. Quite a difference. She quickly admitted that the metric numbers in the booklet were simply wrong; whoever published them did the conversion from foot-pounds instead of inch-pounds. It does not look like I damaged the terminal, as I realized it pretty early on. But if that stud pops out in the next two months, I'm going to ask Trojan to warranty the battery; I put the rep on notice when we spoke, and she agreed that, yes, Trojan had incorrectly specified the torque in their own published materials.

My torque wrench doesn't actually work at values that low, so I had to hand-tighten everything by feel. I'll be looking for a small wrench that reads in inch-pounds in the next couple weeks so I can re-torque them to spec at some point. In the meantime, I am going to inspect all the terminals every month or so for a while, until I am comfortable that none is going to pull out.

Once all the batteries were back in place, I set about putting on the rest of the cables. Two of the sixteen terminals have three cables each, while most terminals have just two and two of the terminals get only one. When I went to install the two groups of three, which are the penultimate connections to be made in the whole process, I discovered that the studs on these new batteries are just a couple millimeters shorter than the old ones. I simply could not get the flange nuts to engage even a single thread of the studs. I know on the old batteries that they not only engaged, but that the stud post was flush with the top of the nut when it was tightened.


Upside-down flange nut. I had to tighten it with channel-locks.

We could not really get under way until I had all the cables connected and the batteries back on-line, and by this time the shop was closed. That's when I realized that the very part which could help, the stud-adapter clamp for the automotive post, which I had installed during the stud failure at Choo-Choo, was still clamped to the old battery, now locked in the shop. Ultimately I was able to jury-rig the system by flipping two of the flange nuts upside down, which allowed at least a couple of threads to engage. Today I ran out to Wal-Mart and bought a pair of stud adapters, and in the morning I should be able to finish the job correctly.

We're happy to have a working set of batteries again. In addition to Larry from Carolina Energy coming through with a decent price on these, at just $450 a battery plus tax and fees, or 10% off their original quote, Tony was the star of the show. This company does not do drive-up service or installation, and Tony could have just told me to take the batteries over to Camping World or wherever to get help with them. But he went well above and beyond the bounds of good customer service to help me with these, and I could not have done it without him. Today I dropped by the office with a restaurant gift card and a bottle of his favorite beverage as a thank-you.

I mentioned that Tony tested the old batteries for me. He had to fake out the tester, as it did not really have a setting for 8D-AGM, but he found a setting that worked. The tester unsurprisingly found four batteries to be bad and need replacement, numbers 1, 3, 4, and 5. More surprisingly, it found the other four to be "good," three passing as-is and one needing charge. One of the passing batteries was number 6, the one with the broken-off negative stud. I suspect these batteries were actually marginal, but in the end it's irrelevant, because four bad ones meant the whole bank needed replacing -- you don't want to mix brand new batteries with half-used, four-year-old ones. Oddly, there was no rhyme or reason to which ones were bad and which good, although three of the four were in the lower half of the bank.


Odyssey's battery layout.

By the time I got the last cable on and the inverter fired back up, we had been at the shop around eight hours. We ran the generator for most of that time, with a jury-rig bypass in place to keep two of the air conditioners running the whole time. I crammed all the dress panels and the rest of my tools into the tunnel, we loaded up the scooter that had to come out for access, and headed off to the park, arriving here just after 7.

It was all we could do to unload the scooters and go to dinner. Louise found a nice Italian place fairly close by, Angelo's Steaks and Pasta. And then yours truly, Mr. always-up-to-the-wee-hours, fell face down in the bed at 10pm. This morning I was so sore from crouching in the tunnel all day I could hardly move. I made the one trip to Wal-Mart today and otherwise have been inside in the air conditioning licking my wounds -- those batteries kicked my butt. I'll try to finish the project in the morning when it is a bit cooler, and in a few minutes we'll ride over to the beach and jump in the ocean.

Battery day

We are at the Camping World in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (map). As last time, all the spaces with hookups are taken by rigs that look not to have moved in many months; we recognized a couple from our last visit in October. I would say that the notion there might ever be a pedestal available for customer use here is a snare and a delusion.

No matter, since an ongoing rainstorm that has not stopped since we arrived has dropped the outside temperature into the 70s. We survived fine all evening with no A/C, and we put one unit on the very lowest setting overnight so that it would not be too humid to sleep. The generator auto-started twice, and we got a bit more time between runs once I set the LBCO down to 22.2 from where we normally keep it, 22.6. No point trying to preserve the batteries now.

We were hoping to just walk next door to the Days Inn, wherein I noted a Mexican restaurant on our last visit, for dinner. However, we noticed the sign had been eliminated and concluded the restaurant was no longer in business. With it still pouring outside, we elected to drive the bus over to a nearby local establishment, Serafino's, and have a look at the battery place on the way.

We ended up parking (with permission) at the gymnastics studio next door because the lot at Serafino's was a bit tight. We had a pizza, which was excellent, and the wine was a 12 ounce (really) pour for $6. We chatted briefly with owner Dan, who was very pleasant. It is off the beaten track, so they get few tourists in there, but we can highly recommend it. It is a classic pizza-and-Italian joint, with a pool table, a couple of arcade games, and a handful of tables, and featuring a large counter window where to-go items are picked up. We'll definitely be going back whenever we stay here at CW, as it is an easy scooter ride.

This morning I emptied out the tunnel, and in a few minutes we will be heading over to Carolina Energy Distributors to get our batteries.

Photo by Matthias Rhomberg, used under a Creative Commons license.

About those batteries

I heard back from the battery dealer, and it looks like we will not be able to pick them up until Wednesday. After checking on the camping situation on the coast, which is slim pickings at this time of year, we decided to just spend another night right here at Lee State Park.

In the meantime, regular reader Rod left a comment on this morning's post that I think merits an answer here in the main text of the blog. Rod writes:

I am certain that customers requiring eight 500 amp-hour AGM batteries don't come along very often for battery vendors. Since the price of this seems to be at least a dollar an amp-hour, I am curious as to the number of cycles that can be expected with your bank. I read that discharged 80 percent, one could only expect 400 cycles. That would be $10 a cycle which seems quite high. Perhaps the trick is to never discharge below 50%. Just curious. ...

First, let me correct the numbers: the Trojans are 230 amp-hours (AH), some of the other batteries we considered were as large as 260 amp-hours (although that seems a bit optimistic for me for an 8D), and they averaged around 245 amp-hours in the 8D size. That makes our bank of eight a total of 920 amp-hours (at 24 volts; remember these are 12-volt batteries). That puts the cost per amp-hour at about $4.24 for our 24-volt system; it would be $2.12 per amp-hour for a 12-volt system.

That's about the going rate right now for AGM batteries. You might find a lower per-AH cost for batteries that are in a more common size (8D is not a very common size for traction batteries), but mostly, batteries of all types are a commodity item and the price fluctuates broadly based on supply and demand. Cost of materials does also enter into it, and lead and other components of these types of batteries, also commodities, have been rising steadily over the past few years. By way of illustration, most vendors wanted to charge me about $60 more per battery without a trade-in, so my used, fully depleted 8Ds are worth that much just in recycling value.

Now, to answer the question, the number of cycles, as you note, depends heavily on the depth of discharge (DoD). Some reputable manufacturers actually publish a chart or graph plotting cycle life vs. DoD. For example, the chart on the last page of this document, from Trojan, shows that Trojan AGM batteries can deliver nearly 2,000 cycles at 40% DoD, dropping to 1,000 at 55%, 450 at 80%, and fewer than 300 cycles at 100% DoD. Charts from other manufacturers are similar, and one can extend the summary results of these charts really to most brands of AGM battery in the same size range.

Armed with this information, it is possible to do some optimization of discharge/charge cycles to maximize the value, rather than the lifetime, of the batteries. For example, while phenomenal cycle life is available by keeping to within only, say, 25% DoD, the fact is that putting the last 25% of energy back into the batteries takes way more power than putting the first, second, or even third 25% of the energy into them. Lead-acid batteries, like many other things in engineering, follow what we like to call the "80/20 rule," wherein putting the first 80% of charge into the battery takes 20% of the power, and getting that last 20% into it takes the other 80%. Any given battery will not be those exact percentages, but you get the idea.

For this reason, most of us put that last 20% in, a process called "topping off," only when the cost of power is very low. Typically, this is when we are on shore power, provided as a fixed part of the cost of a camp site, for example. Many of us choose to stop the charging process at about 80% state-of-charge (SoC), or in other words still at 20% DoD, when charging from a costly source such as a diesel generator, where the cost to run can be upwards of $5 per hour.

If you know the number of cycles vs. DoD, from a chart such as Trojan's, and the charge absorption profile of the battery, and the capability of your charger, and the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to supply that charger, you can completely optimize the exact DoD to be routinely using in order to minimize the "cost per stored kWh" for a given set of batteries.

That's all well and good, but for RVers in the real world it's not that simple. That's because our discharge needs, charging capabilities, and cost per recharge are highly variable. Ultimately, we end up with a different DoD for almost every cycle. Even boondocking for two weeks in the desert, where you'd have the most control over when to start and stop the charge process in each cycle, the fact that most generator auto-start systems can only work on voltage and not actual DoD will mean that you are not controlling the process precisely enough.

I'd love to tell you how many cycles we got out of this set of Trojans, but I simply can't. Most battery monitors, ours included, simply can not keep enough history. What I can tell you is that our meter counts up to 1,999 cycles, and we're well beyond that. However, it also shows that our "average" DoD is a mere 20 amp-hours. That's because 20 amp-hours is deep enough to cause the meter to start counting, and so even if we stop the bus for an hour to get a bite to eat, or go shopping, or whatever, we'll get a 20 amp-hour cycle, as the main alternator will very quickly charge that amount back up while we drive.

Even as we sit here today, connected to a 30-amp pedestal, we are racking up 20 AH cycles. We have our inverter max input dialed down to 24 amps, but when two air conditioners cycle on at the same time, we are drawing 26-28 amps, plus whatever else we are using, and the inverter supplements it from the batteries. That can draw the batteries down 20 AH before an A/C cycles off, dropping the load below 24 amps and causing the charger to start recharging the batteries, and the cycle repeats ad infinitum.

This same meter also tells me that my greatest DoD since we installed these batteries was 877 amp-hours, or a whopping 95% of capacity. (Shortly after that episode I adjusted the LBCO on the inverter to prevent this from happening again.) In practice I can tell you that when we are boondocking for multiple days, we draw the bank down to about 75% DoD and charge it back up to about 75% SoC, so we are using about 50% of the total capacity, and this happens over and over again, with a cycle time of about two days in temperate weather, or a mere half day (12 hours) if we are running an air conditioner.

When we drive every day, in temperate weather, the generator never runs, and we drop to about 20% DoD while parked, and recharge to 100% SoC while driving. Without a complete history of the last four years, I can't say with conviction how many of our cycles are the 75%/25% variety, how many are the 20%/0% variety, and how many are the 10%/0% variety that the meter likes to count.

Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, though, I can make some guesses. Completely ignoring the 10% "blips" that the meter likes so much to count, I would guess conservatively we have over 2,000 cycles on these batteries. I would further guess the average net DoD of those cycles to be in the 35% range, or right between the 20% sort when we drive and the 50% sort when we boondock. That's consistent with Trojan's life cycle prediction for these, which shows about 2,500 cycles at 35% DoD.

If my guesses are correct, and adding in some of those 10% cycles for good measure, we've gotten (and replaced) about 650,000 amp-hours, or over 15,000 kWh from this set of batteries. That works out to a cost of about $0.25 to "store" a single kWh of power. This is in addition to anything it might cost to generate that power, and might be compared to the nationwide average cost of grid power, about half that amount. So on an RV, even "free" electricity (say, from solar, or included in campsite fees), stored for later use, costs more than grid power at a typical fixed structure.

That's a very long-winded answer to your question, but it is a source of much confusion and a topic on which I often spend a good deal of time in my seminars. This is one of the reasons I often have to caution people with unrealistic expectations about "free" solar power, or installing large battery plants in preference to an appropriately-sized generator. There are many good reasons to have a large battery bank, but cost savings is not a slam-dunk; it varies widely by circumstance and you really need to do the math.

This provides a good opportunity to reflect on our current mode of travel, "power pole to power pole." As long-time readers know, we don't generally do this and it is not our preferred way to live. Mostly it is something we do when we are traveling through hot or humid environments and we need air conditioning full-time, a sort of travel we generally avoid unless we have a specific destination, such as a Red Cross deployment, or a conference someplace, where we need to be.

For many RVers, though, this is standard practice, and while it is not our own preference, it makes perfect economic sense. This is especially true for those who are not full-timers, and who use their rigs for a couple dozen nights each year. You can buy a lot of $30-$50 camp sites for what a good set of batteries will cost, and when you're done camping, that camp site investment does not require any ongoing maintenance. This, too, is something I discuss in the seminar.

When all is said and done, there is not a single one-size-fits-all answer for the right balance among batteries, inverters, generators, solar, and power-pole usage for all RVers. Our set of choices is almost the right balance for us. If I were in the market for a generator today, I would buy a 6.5 kW as opposed to the 15+ kW unit we have now (and which came with the bus). But I would definitely not trade in my large battery bank, and the flexibility it buys us, even though it costs us about a grand a year.

Photo by mikeysklar, used under a Creative Commons license.

Alone at last

We are at Lee State Park (or State Natural Area, depending upon which map you consult) near Bishopville, South Carolina (map), about a half hour west of Florence. While each site has a spigot and a 30-amp pedestal, the campground is otherwise rather rustic, in a stand of tall conifers with dirt roads and dirt parking pads. We are the only ones here.

There is one other rig a half dozen sites down, but no one is in it and it has been vacant since we arrived yesterday afternoon. There was also a large fiver here when we arrived, but they must have pulled out early this morning. A number of reservation tags on the posts suggest a few sites were occupied over the weekend. I suspect this park rarely fills up.

The park is listed as suitable for rigs up to 36', but Odyssey had no trouble making it around the loop (twice) and would fit in almost any site. Our biggest challenge was finding a site with a tiny gap through the trees in the right direction to get the satellite on line; we're far enough from anything here that our cell phones have no data access, and even voice coverage is spotty. We had no shot from the first site we tried, necessitating the second trip around the loop. Here in Site 13 we have probably the only shot there is to our bird, at 83W.

The campground has a whole separate loop for equestrian use, but signs at the park say it is closed due to an unsafe electrical issue. The barricades look permanent and old; we'd guess the loop has been closed for years. They moved some horse corrals close to this end of the main loop for equestrian use.

It's lovely here, if a bit hot, and a few bucks cheaper than some of the other parks in the system (and certainly the ones on the coast). I was thinking of staying another night if the batteries are not going to be ready, but we were just notified that our mail has arrived in Murrell's Inlet, so we will likely move along to the coast today so we can catch up with it. I have an email in to the battery distributor to see if we can nail down the delivery date.

Photo of a yellow rat snake in the Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve by Hunter-Desportes, used under a Creative Commons license.

Park hopping

We are at Sesqui-Centennial State Park, in Columbia, South Carolina (map). Once again we have a pedestal with both 30 and 20-amp outlets, more than enough to run two air conditioners as needed and keep us cool. Last night we rode the scooters the 12 miles into town to have dinner at the Capital City Club. With the heat index still over 100, it felt like a much longer ride.

As we have moved further into the flatlands, the heat index has increased. Our goal now is to get to the coast, where things are just a tad cooler. We could make it all the way there today, but we are always nervous arriving at a tourist area in high season on the weekend, even Sunday, as we might have difficulty finding a suitable parking spot.

Instead we are aiming for yet another state park, just west of Florence, for tonight. Tomorrow morning I will check in with the battery dealer to see when they expect the batteries to arrive in Myrtle Beach, and we'll plan our next stop from there. With any luck, they will have them on Tuesday, and we'd shoot to be on their doorstep Monday night.

On our way out of town this afternoon, we've arranged to meet up with some friends for lunch, just a mile or so from the park. With the batteries fully charged we should be able to run the A/C long enough to keep the pets cool while we eat.

Photo by ,zenera used under a Creative Commons license.

Ah, Paris ...

We are at Paris Mountain State Park, just north of Greenville, South Carolina (map). We chose this spot because it was close to our route, offered 30-amp power, and is an easy scooter ride to downtown Greenville, where we have an affiliate club. It's not possible to reserve a single night, so we had to take our chances on a site being left when we arrived, but, as it turned out, the same two 40' sites that showed on ReserveAmerica were still available when we pulled up.

It was hard to leave the relative cool of 3,500' behind. It was very pleasant and in the upper 70s when we readied Odyssey for departure from Ralph Andrews County Park. We got a relatively early start for us, leaving before lunch time, in order to snag one of the last two spaces here before the weekend crowd showed up. As it turned out, however, the road had other plans for us.

We had an uneventful, if a bit challenging, drive back out of the park and down the very steep grade back out to 107. That highway, which seemed a bit narrow and windy to us earlier, now felt positively luxurious after the park road. Indeed, after a few more miles it in fact widened and straightened as we approached Cashiers.

At Cashiers we turned east onto US-64 and encountered a steady stream of traffic heading the other direction, we assumed denizens of Greenville and environs heading into the hills for the weekend to beat the heat. We soon understood, as we passed a never-ending series of golf courses, high-end resorts, rental villas, vacation homes, and yuppie restaurants stretching all the way from Cashiers to Rosman and encompassing the very resort-intensive areas of Sapphire and Lake Toxaway. We even passed an Outdoor Resorts, the posh Class-A-only motor-coach condo, and spied several high-end Prevost conversions in residence. I suspect the transients there are paying something more than the $16 we dropped at the county park, but they do have more restaurant choices.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of Lake Toxaway we came around a corner to a line of stopped traffic. A volunteer firefighter was directing traffic around an accident scene, with single-lane traffic control. He let all the cars in front of us go and then stopped us, informing us we were too large to fit what was left of the one lane. We had to park for half an hour, along with a large fiver behind us, while they directed traffic around us. We were amused when at least a few drivers, apparently thinking we were the problem, pulled right back into the lane in front of us, only to come face to face with a fire apparatus right around the corner.

Having lived many places where traffic is heavy and law enforcement overburdened, we are accustomed to the mantra "move accident vehicles from the traffic lanes." Washington, for example, as well as some other states, even post this on signage along the freeway. This is because too many drivers, after having some minor fender-bender, believe erroneously that when law enforcement arrives they will want to see the vehicles exactly where they "came to rest" in order to determine fault. In practice, the very first thing a now-annoyed and frazzled officer will do is move the vehicles out of traffic -- using a push-bar if necessary.

So we were greatly surprised (and mildly annoyed) when we walked around the corner to see what amounted to a minor fender-bender -- a zero-injury accident involving a vehicle that transgressed over the center line clipping another vehicle "head on." Both vehicles looked to us to have been capable of moving under their own power, or at least being pushed by a half dozen beefy firefighters. They were now both mostly in one lane, with one car perhaps two feet into the other lane, which is where they were sending all the traffic. It also looked to me like we'd have no trouble getting around this, and the fact they sent at least one 40' straight truck through around us confirmed this, but it was still relatively cool out and we were in no hurry.

The firefighters steadfastly refused to move these two vehicles, claiming that they absolutely had to wait for the highway patrol to come to investigate. Sheesh. After half an hour, a tow truck showed up, but no highway patrol. The tow operator, being a paid professional with other obligations (the fire department was all-volunteer and clearly eager to be working) merely marked all eight wheel locations with fluorescent green pavement marking paint, then promptly dragged the vehicles out of the roadway. Sanity thus restored, we were again on our way.

Our planned route had us turn south onto US-178, which North Carolina did not bother to mark as such, but which was clearly marked at the other end, in South Carolina, as "not recommended for trucks -- use alternate route." Oh well. I got a good workout at the wheel, and Odyssey made it with no real trouble, but we might have gone around if we had known. From where 178 meets SC-11, we planned to take SC-288, Table Rock Road, straight across through Pumpkintown to Marietta, just a short distance north of this park.

What we did not know was that there is a 10-ton bridge about five miles east on 288. We got a little over a mile of warning about it, which was not enough to avoid having to drive almost right up to it to turn around, at a side road which would have taken us north to Table Rock Park, except it, too, had a low-limit bridge. We ended up backtracking the full five miles to SC-11, which was a superhighway compared to everything else we'd been on, and taking that all the way to US-276. It was well past 2 when we finally arrived, and we were relieved to find spaces still available.

We scheduled our dinner reservation at the Commerce Club for 8pm to avoid the worst of the heat, and the temperature had dropped to the low 90s by the time we headed off on the scooters. We had a wonderful meal on the 17th floor, overlooking both the city and the hills, and a very pleasant ride in both directions on a series of back roads recommended by the park ranger. These were not only free of traffic, but also wound their way through enough tree cover and other vegetation that the ride actually felt cool. Other than a minor snafu getting both scooters out of hock at the parking garage, it was a perfect evening.

Today we will continue on to Columbia, where we have another affiliate club. We are hoping to squeeze into the state park there for another 30-amp pedestal.

Photo by Miles Davis (Smiley), used under a Creative Commons license.

Unscheduled stopover

We are at the Ralph Andrews County Park, on Lake Glenville north of Cashiers, North Carolina (map). We are in a "full hookup" site for $16, between two trailers that have been here so long they no longer have wheels. The power-and-water only sites, $2 less, are nicer, but it would be a bit of a struggle to get into them with a couple of low trees, and we'd have to dance around to get the dish on line -- worth it if we were planning to stay a while, but not for just one night.

We had actually planned to be here last night. However, after passing through most of the National Park and finding it very pleasingly cool at the higher elevations, we decided to tough out one night without air conditioning at the Smokemont Campground, at 2,200' elevation and right off US-441, the main park road (map). Most of the campground is under tree cover, but the check-in rangers gave us a nice site in the RV loop that had enough of a clearing to get on-line.

Unlike the TVA and state parks we had just visited, where $20 bought us power and water as well as access to bathhouses with hot showers, the same $20 in the national park gets you a place to park. There are bathrooms with cold running water and flush toilets, but no hot water. There are no showers anywhere in the park, so we gave the tenters a wide berth; many looked to have been there at least a week.

It was a bit too hot and sticky in the bus when we first arrived, so we had our dinner outside on the picnic table, where it was quite pleasant. At least we could have our glass of wine there, too, something not allowed at the TVA or Tennessee state parks. Before dinner we took our chairs over to the creek and sat with our feet in the water, very refreshing. We saw several people with inner tubes, but the water was actually quite cold, and the flow was such that a straight tube shot downstream was not really possible. The RV loop actually has a number of creekside spots, but they were all taken when we arrived.

After dinner we rode our scooters 20 miles back up the hill to Clingmans Dome to catch the sunset. We both walked about halfway up the steep trail from the parking lot to the observation tower, and I did the rest on my own. (My plantar fasciitis really dislikes steep downhills, so while I can ignore my thighs complaining on the way up, my feet will ache for days after the walk down. -Louise) The view was stunning, and we both caught the last of the sunset from the parking lot. It was 20° cooler there than when we left the campground, and I needed to bundle up for the ride back down.



We stayed until the noon checkout today and then got back on the road. With less than 50 miles to this spot, we debated skipping this stop and heading in to South Carolina for tonight. The heat wave is just catching up with us, though, and here at 3,500' it is a good deal cooler than it will be when we come out of the mountains, and we opted for one more day at elevation. Tomorrow night we should be somewhere near Greenville.

Yesterday's drive into the park was about as I predicted, slogging through Pigeon Forge. We came in from a different direction when we did the park by motorcycle, and managed to avoid this world-class tourist trap. I think we were just about passing the Titanic when I announced that we were in "Cheesemageddon," which gave Louise a chuckle. We managed to escape without stopping, or hitting any wayward tourists. A similar but very much more low-key set of cheeseball attractions awaited us on this side of the hill, as we drove through the Cherokee Nation. We'd seen this side before, and some of the older attractions actually have a Route-66 sort of charm to them.

We had a nice drive through the park, but it was equally nice to get away from the endless attractions and souvenir stands on the outskirts and back to a more normal (for us) mode of back-road travel. North Carolina 107, which brought us here, is wide and well graded as far as Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee. After that it narrows considerably and becomes hilly and twisty for a good stretch, reminding me of the lyrics to C.W. McCall's "Wolf Creek Pass." There were sections where it was impossible to keep Odyssey completely between the lines.

Once we turned off 107, things got even steeper, and the coolant temperature hit 205° before we made it to the summit. Still, that seemed subjectively much better than previous performance on similar grades, and we also had nary a problem coming over Newfound Gap in the park, at 5,046'. Admittedly, the speed limit on 441 on the Tennessee side of the grade is just 35mph, which is about what we have to slow to on the steepest grades anyway.

We are still on schedule to be in Myrtle Beach by Monday night, in the hopes that the new batteries will be ready sometime Tuesday. Between now and then, we will be driving through the worst of the heat, which will give both our cooling and electrical systems quite a workout. At least I won't have to worry about damaging the batteries.

Cavorting with Some Dammed French Broad

We are at the TVA's Tailwater Campground, on the French Broad River between Kodak and Sevierville, Tennessee, just downstream of Douglas Dam (map). This is a lovely spot, with power and water for $20 per night, and we snagged a primo waterfront site when we pulled in. There is a dump station, a boat ramp, and a bait shop with snacks and sundries just upstream.

The TVA also operates a similar campground at lake level, adjacent to the dam, called, appropriately, the Headwater Campground, a bit further from the road. If we planned to stay a few days we would have chosen that one instead, so we could swim in the lake. (Tailwaters are way too cold for swimming, as the penstocks draw from deep within the lake. Also, the tailwater can be somewhat dangerous due to sudden dam releases.)

We ended up staying four nights at Norris Dam. Sunday night we rode into the town of Lake City and had dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant there. It was really the only dining option within scooter distance of the dam that was not fast food. We also spent a half hour or so in the pool at the park's west area, $4 for adults, $2 with a camping receipt, but free between 5 and 6pm.

The Investigation Area I mentioned in my last post turned into Tropical Depression 2 and thence into Tropical Storm Brett; however, it immediately made a right turn and headed straight out to sea. So when Monday morning rolled around, I turned my attention back to another of our pressing problems, our battery bank. Even before the battery switch failed, the capacity of the bank has been dropping rapidly over the last few months. The batteries are over four years old, and have more than 2,000 cycles on them, and now our nominal 920 amp-hour bank is behaving more like one with less than 200 amp-hours. Right now in the heat, when we need air conditioning full time, the problem is particularly noticeable.

I had hoped the temporary bypassing and repair of the failed battery switch would give us enough capacity back to deal with this at a more convenient time. Like, for example, after hurricane season, or when we are closer to Arizona, the epicenter of competitive battery pricing. While fixing the switch has helped a great deal, there is no escaping the fact that the batteries are just done, and so Monday I started calling every battery distributor in the southeast looking for decent pricing on replacements.

The best deal I found is on a set of Fullriver batteries, at $483 apiece (with exchange) in Miami. These are the batteries I'd really like to have, and if they had the ones with button terminals we'd be on our way to Miami. Unfortunately, Fullriver has changed over to "L" or flag-style terminals, and we'd have a lot of work to do to change our cables over, which are set up for stud terminals. They also offered me a set of Dekas for $426 each, which are alleged to have the same terminals we have now.

The next best quote is on a set of Trojans, which are what we have now, so I know absolutely that they will fit in the rack and the cables will fit the terminals. They are asking $500, but I am trying to get them to quote a lower price, considering the $600 we'd save on the Dekas would more than cover our fuel to Miami, and the Deka is a higher-capacity battery. We can pick up the Tojans in either Fort Mill or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Fort Mill is closer, but it should be a few degrees cooler on the coast, and it is just a nicer place to be, in general. So by the end of the day Monday we had made the decision to head for Myrtle Beach, and we pulled up stakes yesterday afternoon. The Trojans are not in stock, and won't be there until next week anyway, so we have plotted a very leisurely route. Even if we had a fully working set of batteries, in this weather power hookups are cheaper than the generator, so we are zig-zagging between state parks, county parks, and TVA, all with $20 (or under) power hookups.


Speaking of batteries and switches, as long as we had another day of downtime at Norris, I took the opportunity to swap out the failed battery switch for the replacement I had refurbished while at Choo-Choo. After I got it out and all our air conditioning back on-line, Louise helped me drill the rivets out and we had a look at the failure.



As I expected, the plastic ring that moves, by means of a pair of pins, the brass wiper on and off the contact pads had crumbled into pieces. This is how the switch failed in the closed position. Beyond that, however, there was also a blob of metal that had literally melted off one of the pads and welded itself to the wiper.



This meant that if the wiper was moved even so much as a millimeter from the position in which this occurred, the mating surfaces would no longer be in contact and all the current would flow through the small spot where this blob was now touching the pad.



The good news is that the keyed hub is in better shape, and the lever friction stop is undamaged, so I can swap these parts into the refurbished switch I am using now. I might even try to grind the blob off the wiper and use that, as well, if I can get it flatter than the other one. I think by making these changes, the refurbished switch should serve for the life of the bus. Disconnecting the batteries to change the switch is a pain in the butt, so we'll make the final repair when we have the batteries out for replacement.

Today we will pick our way through the tourist traps of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, then make our way south through the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It's a shame the weather is not conducive to staying there a couple days; it will be Odyssey's first visit, although we've done much of the park ourselves when we came through years ago on our big touring motorcycles.

Relaxing on the Clinch

We are at the Norris Dam State Park (map), at the eponymous dam on the Clinch River, about 20 miles or so from Knoxville, Tennessee. The dam itself is actually owned by the TVA, the very first dam in the system and one of the first projects of Roosevelt's New Deal. The state park occupies the upstream shoreline of the lake for miles on either side.

We are in the smaller East Campground, closer to the dam. Power pedestals here sport a 30-amp and 20-amp receptacle, which have been keeping us quite cool and comfortable. Yesterday we rode over to the larger West Campground, quite a ways away, where we noticed the sites had additionally a 50-amp receptacle. That area is also more wooded and we would have had more jockeying to do to get the satellite dish on-line. All sites also have water spigots and are $20 per night, which is a bargain for power in this weather.

We finally wrapped up at the Choo Choo Garage Wednesday afternoon. Tuesday we were actually able to move the bus, and we looped around the parking lot to pull it into the bay and over the pit, so the coolant could be changed and everything inspected from underneath. We discovered a power steering leak, which turned out to be a bad hose. Everything was back in place by the end of the day Tuesday, and Wednesday morning we went for a road test.

We just did a quick dozen miles or so on the freeway, climbing a moderate grade in both directions. Everything worked well, and an initial seat-of-the-pants assessment of the cooling system suggested a significant improvement. I noticed steering fluid dripping at a check stop, but that turned out to be from a small pool of it trapped on a motor mount. Another old problem was also back with us, namely that the compressor unloads every half minute or so. When we got back to the shop we pulled back over the pit.

Joel spent several hours Wednesday diagnosing the air problem, which ultimately turned out to be a combination of a bad check valve and and undersized air line. He was able to clean the valve, and the shop had the proper line in stock, so the problem was fixed for good by mid-afternoon. In the meantime, all the air dumping and filling had caused the perennial leak in the left front leveling check valve to return, a problem I had just dealt with the day we left Mississippi. No better time to deal with it than over the pit, and Joel was able to find me a used check valve lying around the shop that we were able to adapt, using bits and pieces he had in his little pile of parts, plus two fittings and some tube I bought at the hardware store down the street. With luck, that will be the end of having to crawl into the wheel well to rebuild that valve.

That took us nearly to the end of the day, so we spent Wednesday night outside the shop, in the wash rack. Louise and I spent a couple hours Thursday morning with the pressure washer trying to get the bus clean. The back was so covered with grease from the oil leak, however, that we ruined the scrub brush. Don and Joel rescued us with chemicals, products called "Dun EZ" and "Purple Power," which not only got the grease off the back, but also cleaned up the brush. The wash rack also houses the dump, in typical bus-garage style, so we were able to empty our tanks before we left.

Louise had made arrangements to meet her brother and sister-in-law and their daughter as they made their way from Roan Mountain, near Smoky Mountain park, back to Houston. Their route took them past Chattanooga, but we were eager to move on, so arranged to meet instead in Knoxville for lunch on Friday. That gave us a chance to have dinner Thursday night at our club there, but the only decent parking option was the Elks lodge a few miles away, which had no power. So we lingered at the shop, where we still had 20 amps, until we had just enough time to fuel and make a quick stop at Camping World on the way to Knoxville.

Fuel was $3.69 a gallon at the Mapco station between the shop and the freeway. The dispenser was incredibly slow, though, and would only let me buy $100 at a shot, so we quit at $200. Camping world was just across the highway, and our stop was necessitated by having to purchase a new 30-amp-to-50-amp "dogbone" adapter. The one we'd been using came with the bus, and was at least 20 years old. Still, it was working OK until we arrived at the shop.

Unfortunately, the shop had only 20-amp duplex outlets, and Mike lent us an adapter that converts a duplex receptacle into a 30-amp trailer outlet. In hindsight, I should have just used my 15-to-30 adapter, because the orientation of the duplex receptacles meant the adapter was "upside down." This meant that, instead of hanging straight down, our 30-amp adapter had to dress upwards from the outlet, then hang down to the side. We tried to secure it in that position somehow, but it ended up with the weight of the cord on the tangs. After three weeks of non-stop 20-amp draw in near-100 temperatures, the hot tangs melted through the old rubber, and the plug was not a pretty sight when I removed it. I suggested to Mike that he flip the receptacle over, and gave him the melted plug for show-and-tell.



We made it to Knoxville just in time to take the scooters out and make our dinner reservation. The Elks lodge was pleasant enough, and downtown Knoxville was very interesting -- we'd like to return in cooler weather and spend a few days. At least it was cool enough by the time we arrived that we could go off to dinner without leaving the A/C running, and we were also able to spend Friday morning as well as go off to lunch without it. It was too humid for sleeping, though, and we had to run one unit overnight on low. In better days, our batteries would have easily handled that task, but they are now so bad that the generator auto-started four times overnight, running for just an hour each time.

After saying good-bye to Louise's family, who were trying to make it back to Houston in just two days, we spent the next hour or so looking for someplace nearby with a power outlet. We knew we could be comfortable without it if we got high enough into the hills, but here in the vicinity of Great Smoky Mountain National Park, we reasoned that most of the campgrounds, even the fairly primitive ones, would be full up for the weekend now that it is high season. Louise started looking at state parks, and this one, closest to Knoxville, is far enough in the opposite direction that they seldom fill up. At just $20 per day, it is cheaper than running the generator.

We paid for two nights, last night being the second. But with no concrete plans to go anywhere else, we're going to purchase another night when the ranger rolls around. We have our eyes on Investigation Area 98 off the east coast of Florida, so we certainly don't want to go any further north or west just yet. There is a public pool over on the west side of the park, so perhaps we will go for a swim later today. In the meantime, I am still cleaning up the project bits and pieces leftover from the shop visit. Today I should have all the hatches dogged down, so we can stow the rest of our gear.

Sweet sound of a purring two-stroke

Today we started the main engine. It fired right up, and other than a minor leak in the power steering system, quickly resolved, all seems to be well. Clearly Joel is confident, since they put the tailgate back on this afternoon. The cooling system is filled with plain water, in preparation for a good flush over the pit before we put all new coolant in, per the recommendation of the radiator shop.

In the meantime, I spent most of the day in the generator bay, trying to get the enclosure and ductwork back together. Yesterday I managed to replace the old and crappy wire-type hose clamp on the leaky coolant hose with a standard worm-drive type. That seems to have cured the leak, although only a long load test will tell, something I can't do with the exhaust just millimeters from the shop door.

We did not get a chance to test the transmission today, as we did not actually move from our position, in which we have been for three weeks. And while we did not actually finish everything up today, I am hopeful that tomorrow things will be buttoned up enough for a road test. If that goes well, we should be able to leave sometime Wednesday, for parts unknown.

My last few posts here have generated a lot of comments, many expressing either sympathy or, perhaps, disbelief. I want to take a moment to address this. While, to some, these sorts of posts may seem to be nothing more than an exercise in whining, I write up all of our mechanical tribulations for two reasons. The first is that, for whatever reason, the mechanical issues and repairs posts are enormously popular with our readers -- more on this in a moment. The second is that, just like a ship's log book, this blog is the record of everything we do with, to, and on this bus, and we often find ourselves needing to go back to our own posts to verify what has or has not happened in the past. For example, while we have been here at this shop, I have gone back to several posts from the two times we had the engine rebuilt, as well as the time the power steering pump was replaced, and of course the posts about our original discovery of the end-plate gasket leak. All of those references yielded valuable information for our current circumstance.

About that popularity... I would like to think that most of the readers who are fascinated by these posts are learning something from them. In my fantasy, readers are looking at these mechanical issues, seeing how we deal with them, and that is giving them the confidence to strike out on their own, knowing that all these sorts of problems are manageable. Some, I hope, are actually gleaning a technical tidbit or two, while others are seeing that there are resources all over the country to help even those of us with weird, out-of-production, custom-converted rigs get things fixed.

Of course, I could be way off base. It's possible that the popularity of these posts is a kind of schadenfreude -- "Gosh, hon, look at all the trouble Odyssey is having. Boy am I glad we bought a Bluebird/Monaco/Newell/Marathon/YadaYada coach that has no problems whatsoever (cough, cough), and, even if it did, we can just go to the dealer and slap down our Visa card and get them fixed."

In any case, I want to assure our readers that we are fine, and we consider all that has transpired in the last three weeks to be par for the course -- part and parcel of owning a 27-year-old weird German bus. I haven't seen the bill yet, but when all is said and done here at Choo-Choo Express, it will not have cost us even as much as one year's property taxes from when we lived in a condo in California. In fact, when we are done here we will have spent the better part of a month, and we've paid nary a cent for rent and utilities, even though we have been helping ourselves to power, water, and sewer. Again, back in San Jose that would have been perhaps a $2,000 expense for the month -- a good bite out of our shop tab right there.

Sure, I'd rather not have had to do this. But in the grand scheme of our lives, it is but a minor annoyance. As you may know, we are contemplating moving from Odyssey onto a boat, and I have every reason to believe that boat ownership will be more of the same, except with higher shop rates. No way are we ready to trade this lifestyle for "the American dream," complete with property taxes, utility bills, pesky neighbors, and, of course, all the same plumbing/electrical/Internet/whatever problems that even homeowners must navigate.

One of the television programs I have taken to watching on occasion is a show called Holmes Inspection on HGTV. Perhaps that is my own form of schadenfreude. It is a good reminder that there are "conventional" homes with even bigger problems than an orphaned quarter-century-old German tour bus. In a day or two, we will be back on the road and enjoying the life of travel that we love so much, and all of the hard work of the last few weeks will fade into the background.

Photo by Godfrey DiGiorgi

Another week passes

We are still at the Choo-Choo Express Garage near Chattanooga, Tennessee. The good news is that the engine is back in place, and even the generator has been lifted back into position. If everything goes perfectly, we could be done by the end of the day Monday and back on the road Tuesday.


Power train being slid back in.

We ended up having the radiator done in Gadsden, Alabama, at Brice Thomas Radiator. I called Tuesday morning as soon as they opened, and they gave me an estimate of $1,800 for either an aluminum or copper re-core. While that was $100 more than what Waggoner and Sons was asking in Kentucky, it was offset by the $32 in fuel savings on top of what would have undoubtedly been at least one and maybe two hotel stays for the two Kentucky round-trips of over ten hours each.

The two Gadsden runs were less than four hours each, round trip. I had a rental Tuesday morning from Hertz for $40, and with the $20 in fuel it cost me an unbeatable $60 for same-day express delivery of a 200+ pound radiator. As long as we had the car for a day, when I got back, we drove up to Lookout Mountain and had dinner at the Cafe on the Corner, which was very nice. Hertz was very accommodating; this being a "Local Edition" office they offered free pick-up and drop-off service, as they are having to compete with Enterprise which has offered this service for years.

Brice Thomas offered me the choice of an aluminum core, made in-house, or a copper/brass core, which they would have to order from Texas and which would have almost certainly meant the radiator would not be finished until sometime next week. There are lots of opinions on the relative merits of these two radiator materials, and it is almost a religious debate between aficionados of each. In addition to an Internet search, I also asked for guidance on the bus forums. What it really came down to is that there is no clear-cut winner, each has its pros and cons. Ultimately, we chose aluminum for three reasons:

1. It would be ready at least a day or two sooner.
2. Modern aluminum radiators offer slightly more cooling capacity per square inch than modern copper ones.
3. The whole assembly would be somewhat lighter.

By 1pm Central Time I was back on the road and heading back to Chattanooga.

I was really hoping the radiator would be ready by Thursday afternoon, so we could have everything back together yesterday. When I called Thursday morning to check on it, that sounded possible, but by mid-day they called back to say the core needed another pass through the braze shop and it would be mid-day Friday. Mid-day is no better than end of day, given the two hour drive back, so I told them not to rush and that I would pick it up at 4:30.

Friday is the start of weekend rates for car rentals, and I got a car for just $23 through Hotwire. No pick-up service, though -- Louise dropped me at the airport on the scooter. She decided to ride with me to Gadsden, so we could catch dinner together at a reasonable hour on our way back. We picked the car up at 3pm and arrived at the shop as scheduled at 4:30.

It was a good thing we chose to arrive a good half hour before closing. When we pulled around to have them load it, I immediately noticed two sheet metal flanges, air guides for the fan assembly, had been incorrectly attached on the front side of the radiator, rather than the back where they belonged. Not trusting my own memory, I quickly checked the photos I had snapped on my phone when I dropped it off: yes, I remembered correctly. While they were fixing that issue, I also noticed they had left out a flare fitting on one of the tanks, replacing it with a pipe plug. Catching these two mistakes in the span of five minutes did not inspire confidence in the process methodology there at Brice Thomas; I hope they are better at making radiator cores than they are at reassembling customer-provided radiators.


One of the photos I snapped at the radiator shop after unloading, clearly showing the metal guides on the hose side, and two flare fittings at the tops of the tanks.

It was well past 5 by the time we left, having spent a good 45 minutes waiting for them to fix their mistakes. I wonder if I can send them a bill for those 45 minutes at their shop rate. By the time we got to Fort Payne it was well after 6, or 7 our time, and we decided to eat. DeKalb is a dry county, but there is some exemption for a part of Fort Payne and we had a decent enough meal at the Santa Fe Cattle Company right off the freeway, complete with wine. We ate in the bar to skip the half-hour wait for a table. It was 9pm by the time we pulled back up to the shop here, and we just left the radiator in the back of the car.

Today's project was getting the generator running. After sliding the engine back into place Thursday, Joel had time on Friday to start getting the generator back into position. Fortunately I had already spent Friday morning with a roll of metal repair tape getting the soundproofing squared away where the hole had been cut to access the engine bolts. It took three of us to wrestle the beast back into place using the cherry picker, and once Joel had the mounting bolts in and the cherry picker removed, I set to work reconnecting all the wiring. I had it most of the way finished, other than gauges, when we had to leave to get the radiator, and I suggested to Joel that if he got the cooling system reconnected and coolant reinstalled, I could start testing today.

Sure enough, all the cooling bits were back in place when we returned, so this morning I reconnected the gauges, installed the air cleaner, routed the two hoses that exit the bottom of the compartment (breather and oil drain), and set about priming the fuel system. With the enclosure out of the way, this last item went a bit easier than normal as I was able to take the return line off and put it in a container. That allowed me to run the fuel pump with the prime switch until I saw good flow out the return.

Even after a good five minutes of priming, it took me another half hour to get the set started. The battery was low after all that pump running, and I had to reconnect the emergency start bridge solenoid so I could get a boost from the bus batteries. And after several failed start attempts I discovered a loose connection at the first glow plug, so it was hot but the others were not. A few more cranks and she fired up, and after five minutes of no-load running I closed the main breaker to the coach. Once the genny was fully up to temp, however, I noticed coolant pooling in the bottom of the enclosure. I think it is coming from the return hose, but there is no way to reach that when the set is hot. Tomorrow or Monday I'll try to have a look at it; we need to fix it before the rest of the enclosure goes on.

I mentioned that the main engine is also back in place, and most of the accessories are hooked up. With no radiator, however, there is no way to test it, and so Monday will be our first opportunity to try to start it up. With a brand new radiator, we will be starting with all fresh coolant, even though I just had it replaced a few months ago. One of the things I did today while we still had the car was to pick up ten gallons of distilled water at Wal-Mart, so we can use the full-strength coolant and save a few bucks. It's really a shame to have to recycle so much good coolant, but the radiator shop convinced us it was the right thing to do.

In part that was by showing me the old core. Wow -- I would guess that thing was 30%-40% obstructed. No wonder we've had cooling issues. And, while I have never, ever put anything in the cooling system besides antifreeze, distilled water, and the recommended "supplemental additives" required by diesel engines, it was clear from looking at it that some previous owner had put plenty of tap water in there, and from a pretty hard source from the looks of it. We definitely made the right decision to have this done now, while it was easy to get to.


About half of our old core. Note the extensive calcification.

Tomorrow I will try to get the rest of the re-assembly projects done, so that we can be ready to go if the engine work is done Monday. That includes rewiring the trailer connector, which melted during an episode where we bent the generator exhaust a bit too close to the bumper. I replaced three feet of the wiring and the connector itself Thursday, but there is some issue with the delivery of 12 volts to the control box and I need to track it down. (The bus is 24 volts, but trailers are 12, so we have a converter box that I designed to mate the two.)

If we do get out of here Tuesday, I have no idea where we will go. Now that we are this far east, maybe we'll head to the coast, perhaps to cool off in the Atlantic.

Opening photo, taken by Louise, of George, who is clearly blase about all this, even with a dozen "adopted" cats running around the yard. Ho hum.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,

... that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, ...

Happy Independence Day, everyone, and we look forward to a day when the law of the land actually reflects the sentiments expressed in this line from the preamble. (I know, I am a day early, but per rules adopted by the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Bloggers, Tweeters, and Internet Diarists, Local 416, I get tomorrow off.)

We are, unsurprisingly, still at the Choo-Choo Express Garage near Chattanooga, Tennessee. When last I posted, I reported that we might be putting the engine back in place Friday and it was questionable whether we'd be here over the weekend; I can now report that there is no question that we are still here, and what is in question now is whether we will also be here next weekend as well.

By Thursday afternoon it was clear that the alternator shop would not be done with the alternator and starter until sometime Friday, which meant for sure we'd be here through Saturday. As it turns out, I was able to pick up the items from the alternator shop just as they were closing Friday afternoon, with our powertrain, mostly assembled and ready to go, still sitting forlornly in the shop.


End plate removed, and all cleaned up.

In the meantime, we discovered that a temperature sender on the side of the transmission retarder was damaged during the removal, and we need to track one of those down. That observation led to a side discussion about temperatures and overheating on Friday morning, and Joel decided to take a look at the radiator. I'm not sure why it did not occur to us to have a better look at it right after we pulled the engine, but it didn't.

Not terribly surprisingly, the radiator was in lousy shape. Lots of fin rot towards the very bottom, where moisture and debris collect, and when we peered in to the tanks, we could see lots of stalagmites, a bad sign. After fifteen minutes of head-scratching and consultation, we told Joel to go ahead and remove it. Once it was out (a two-hour project, even with the engine out), a bunch of coolant came out of it, which must have been trapped by some number of clogged tubes, affirming our decision.


Corroded fins.

We did not come to this shop to have our perennially marginal cooling dealt with. But the radiator on Odyssey, like many things crammed into the engine bay during the Detroit repower back in 1989, is extremely difficult to get to. I am betting that, if push came to shove, it could be removed with the engine still in place. That said, it was undoubtedly installed with the engine out, and it was certainly much easier to get to it that way. I'm sure the radiator, even at 22 years old, could go another few years and thousands of miles, but we had an unprecedented (and hopefully not to be repeated) opportunity to do it with that pesky engine out of the way.


Radiator out; what a chore.

So, at this writing, the radiator, too, is lying on the shop floor. I spent most of Friday on the Internet and the telephone trying to find a shop to re-core it this week. As it stands now, I have a commitment from a shop in Mayfield, Kentucky, about a five hour drive, to start on Tuesday, and I have a rental car booked with Hertz for Tuesday morning so I can get it there. With luck they could have it done Thursday and I could have it back here in time to get us all put back together Friday.

I have a lead on exactly one other shop that might be able to do the work, in Gadsden, Alabama, which is much closer. So I will be calling them first thing Tuesday morning, before I pick up the rental car. We'll see how it goes. No one can turn this around in a day, as our odd core size of 24" by 54" is not generally stocked.

That, at least, gives us all week to find the replacement sensor for the transmission, get the alternator and starter back on, and clean up the engine and generator bays. I will consult with Joel on Tuesday or Wednesday about whether it makes sense to stuff the engine back in so we can at least test it, and put the radiator in afterward. (Our engine, being electronically controlled, can not be "bench tested" outside of the bus without a fancy electronic test rig that Choo-Choo does not have.) That would also let us get the generator back into position, and it may be worth the extra hassle in replacing the radiator to have all this done before Friday.

I did finish the repairs on the generator, and my hokey copper-tube-with-JB-Weld fix for the alternator pivot bolt seems to have gotten the alternator back to mostly in plane with the other two pulleys.



The finger-guard with its captive nuts now serves its purpose in making adjustment a one-wrench affair, as opposed to a wrench on each end without it (and a third hand to put tension on the belt).



I also got the remote dipstick fully secured into position.


New dipstick tube. I used to have to reach around the engine to pull the tiny dipstick from the hole in the lower block.

Yesterday's project was dealing with the battery switch. You may remember that we tracked many of our recent battery problems back to a failing switch, which is bypassed at the moment. I posted for help in finding a replacement on the bus board and a very gracious fellow bus enthusiast offered to send me a used one he had lying around for free. Had we known at the time that we would be here at Choo-Choo, where they have two used ones sitting on the shelf, we might have simply had them provide us one.

Take-outs are always a gamble, and while I am certain that the gentleman who sent this to me had no way to know, the switch was in pretty bad shape. As soon as I picked it up I could feel excess play in the handle, something was rattling inside, and I could see the handle tension springs were broken. I was not comfortable installing it without first checking out the innards and fixing what I could, and I wanted to do it while we were still here, so I could have one of the ones on the shelf here if it did not work out. (Those, too, looked to be a little rough around the edges.)

Of course, the Underwriters Safety Device Co. of Chicago, who made these switches, had no interest in anyone ever opening one up ("no user-serviceable parts inside," as they say); after all, their interest is in selling you a new one. Ironically, they now appear to be out of business. In any case, the enclosure is secured with four sturdy rivets. The rivets are recessed on both ends, quite deeply on the peen side and just a smidge on the head side.

As anyone who has ever had to drill out a bunch of rivets can tell you, metal rivets in Bakelite will spin uselessly once the drill bit bites into the metal. I had to painstakingly machine a screwdriver slot into the head of each rivet using my Dremel, then hold the rivet in place with a screwdriver while Louise drilled it out from the other side. Eventually I managed to get the case open to reveal the guts. This switch was likely mounted in a dirty battery bay, and plenty of dirt had ingressed into the casing and embedded itself in the grease.



It turns out that the switch consists mainly of a bow-tie shaped wiper that rotates into place on a pair of trapezoidal contacts. Spring steel clamps above the contacts hold the wiper firmly against them -- once it is rotated into position. After I got all the old grease and grime cleaned out, two problems immediately became apparent.

The first and most obvious is that the switch was, apparently, routinely operated under load, a real no-no with this type of disconnect switch. The result is that some of the contact area on one of the trapezoidal pads is literally melted away; there's even a bulbous protrusion of melted brass sticking out sideways from the pad. Unfortunately, this creates a gap under the wiper that significantly reduces the amount of contact area, making the switch marginal for its intended load.


Melted area on contact pad, just under the right edge of the spring clip.

Making matters worse is the other, less obvious problem. When the handle is mated to the operating key, it becomes clear that the switch has been operated for hundreds if not thousands of cycles, and the brass key has been worn down from a clean rectangle into an oblong, rounded on all four corners. Ultimately, this means that the lever hits its travel stop long before the bow-tie wiper is fully into position on the pads. These combined problems reduce the contact area to half of the original design.


Rounded-off key. Note the slice of wiper still protruding from under the clip, to the left of my thumb. This was as far as the switch would operate before hitting the stop.

This switch will definitely not be the solution for us long-term. I am hoping it will work well enough and long enough to get the old switch out, open it up, and see if the components therein are in any better shape. Perhaps one good switch can be made from parts of both the bad ones. To this end, I did some surgery.

First, I cleaned up the wiper and mating pads with a combination of sandpaper and files to get clean, smooth, and complete contact where possible. I used the Dremel to grind off some of the melted brass and smooth it out to reduce operational interference and arcing.

I couldn't do much about the rounded key, but I did grind off part of the lever handle where it hits the stop. This gives the lever another few degrees of travel in the "on" direction and moves the wiper that much further into contact with the pads.


Hard to see, but the bottom left of this lever has been ground away to provide more travel.

The tension springs were a lost cause. One is now so short as to be useless, so I moved that to the "on" side where the internal spring steel holds the wiper anyway. The other was just long enough to bend to provide a bit of tension in the "off" position; I also replaced the coil spring that holds them in place. All three of these items are underneath of, and kept in place by, the manufacturer's nameplate, which is fastened by, you guessed it, rivets.


What's left of the tensioning springs.

I lubricated the mechanism with some dielectric grease and put the whole thing back together with bolts, nuts, and washers. I estimate I am getting 80% or so of the design contact area, which should be plenty for our maximum of 400 amps through the switch (the switches are designed for starting current, perhaps twice that amount). I'll probably need to disconnect the batteries one more time while we are here, for some additional welding, and that will be a great time to swap this in for our bad one.

We've now been here so long that I had to dump the tanks today. Not actually being able to move the bus, I had to stretch the macerator hose out to the wash bay where the dump is located. It fit with just inches to spare, and seldom have I been more thankful that we have a macerator pump. We made an effort to see the local fireworks display from our roof tonight, but the view was blocked by trees. It was just too stinking hot to try to actually go anywhere for them, but tomorrow is supposed to be a few degrees cooler. Now that project mania has slowed down a bit, I am going to try to clean up some of the mess downstairs, to be ready to start putting things back together.