Send your worries away

 Monday nights are the meeting of the "one loop, two pints group". Basically a bunch of 50ish Dads that want to get out and hit the mountain bike trails, be active and have a group of guys that you're held accountable to if you try and bail.  We will go out for an hour or two and then have a pint at the local pub. This summer has been a great one for wildlife on the rides. A month or two ago we came across a grizzly , last week we saw a momma moose.....I wonder what the future will bring??

As summer turned to fall and in the foothills of the Rockies winter is a short time from that, the thought of winter tires played on my mind. What also played on my mind is where I store my winter tires (on the roof of my shop) and how I get them up there(I hoof them up on my shoulder one by one up the ladder. Being that my teenage workhorse has left the proverbial nest, and I'm not getting any younger. I decided to work smarter not harder. So I fashioned a swing arm tire lift(crane) 

This is just another example of the fact that I weld, but I am not so bold as to say I am a welder

My welds aren't pretty but they do the job!

I still need to do a little electrical work to extend my control module for the lift but, in time.....in time.

Now back to my battery drain. In the last post I started to search for the source of the drain on the engine battery. I didn't get to far into the search when I stumbled across another (significant) problem of the cracked starter mount. I have ordered a new starter and while I wait I decided to continue my search for the elusive electric parasite. I shut everything off and then placed my multimeter in line on the negative side of the battery and you can see the drain.

I then kept the technique simple and started pulling fuses and watching the meter. I went through every fuse and every relay and found nothing! I checked and re-checked and came up with the same result.

I decided to dig a little deeper and make sure I was getting all feeds. When I pulled my fuse panel away to study the battery isolator, that is when I spotted it. A line running to the engine side of the isolator with an inline fuse. When I pulled the fuse, my drain disappeared. The wires were wrapped in a very distinctive shrink wrap. I remembered installing the wiring harness but I couldn't remember from what....furnace....speakers?

 This picture jumps ahead a tile or two of the dominoes that fell as a result of searching for the battery drain, but sufficed to say that I needed to remove the rear engine shroud to count teeth.....yes, yes I get the irony of my statement but it will make sense in a subsequent post. But when I did remove the rear I spotted the familiar wiring harness immediately.

Turns out the wiring harness was for the alternator and the voltage regulator. Again I tested. When I unplugged the voltage regulator the drain went away. When I left the regulator plugged in but unplugged the alternator...the drain remained. So I am very confident that replacing the regulator will take all my troubles away...