POTD 2006 (Progress on the Crown)

[Sharkey]

<table border="0" width="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFC0"><tr><td>Link to the first page of POTD on the forum.

Link to the POTD archives on the web site.

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New year, more progress.

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

More as time permits.
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[Willy]

How 'bout an aerobic composting toilet? I've always wanted one... no holding tank to dump & super high grade fertilizer the result. They are a bit pricey, but probably worth it. ..Willy.

[Thunder Coach]

I have been waching your work in Progess...I have a 81 crown that I repower to a 855 cummins...did the Inside too...will be going that way in Mid-Feb...would like to stop by and talk and see that Bus!...I retired last year and Sold the farm....built the Coach and starting to go more...looking to see your Bus...I am North of Seattle...Ron

[Sharkey]

<table border="0" width="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFC0"><tr><td>Well, it took a couple of days of fiddling but...

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

are you eventually going to have a seperate heater for the bathroom/cab area, since its seperated from the rest by the wall???

[Sharkey]

Yes, there will be a "toe kick" electric heater under the lavatory cabinet. If/when I am not connected to utility power, I'll leave the door open to heat the room before showering and then use a small radiant propane heater for comfort while the door is closed. The 100,000BTU instantaneous propane water heater will be in the bath also, even though it's vented, I assume that some heat will be transferred to the room during use.

[dadeo]

oh! Incedently, are you going to have a wood stove??

[Sharkey]

Is there any other way to heat?

Actually, the bus will have three heat sources, the Vermont Castings Intrepid wood stove for main, electric units throughout for auxiliary heat and to keep the place from freezing solid when I'm not there to stoke the stove, and a non-electric, vented propane wall unit for on-the-road and backwoods heat maintenance.

The original mega-BTU bus heater is still installed in the dash of the cab, although trying to heat the entire bus using it would make driving a roasting experience. If I get on the road a lot in winter, I might consider doing some ducting under the bus to take some of the heat to the living area.

[dadeo]

mine had a seperate heater for the back, that had a thick (1.25"??) rubber hose to it from the radiator. The valve was closed and I took it all out. Did yours have something like this??

[Sharkey]

Yeah, I pulled that out almost first thing. It's under the shop building, stored with a bunch of other stuff I'll need to go through when I move. If I had a lot of extra space somewhere inside or under the bus, I might reinstall it with some ducting into the living space. Maybe between the frame rails under the floor with registers in the hardwood flooring?

Fact is that the bus is going to be more of a portable house than an RV, I don't expect to do all that much travelling in it, so dedicating any additional space to something I may never use isn't high on the list of priorities.

[Sharkey]

<table border="0" width="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFC0"><tr><td>I really should be sorting through all my crap in preparation for moving, but --->

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

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

<table border="0" width="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFC0"><tr><td>"Getting ready to move" implies having someplace to move to (not yet), and also means having the Crown in condition to be driven, so I'm turning my attention to that while the weather is holding out warm and sunny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow, I'm headed to the metal recycling yard to see if the 4-0 welding cable that I found there on Friday is still around and for sale. If so, I think I'm going to create some custom, ~very~ heavy duty battery cables for this setup.
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[Sharkey]

<table border="0" width="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFC0"><tr><td>Another "move the bus" project is to reinstall the driver's seat, which I removed last year while building the front wall. The electrical install required me to put some conduits through the floor next to the seat, and that in turn required removing the old manual parking brake hardware.

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

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

<table border="0" width="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFC0"><tr><td>OK, I actually spent yesterday looking for a new place to live, so today I can put some work in on the bus without feeling like I'm ignoring more important stuff (No, I didn't find a suitable property - yet).

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

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

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


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

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

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[dadeo]

looks good! I was wondering, is the fuel the same thats been the tank all this time? I know diesel dosnt go bad like gas, but it might be a little thick??
Might look like a forest fire when you start it up!!