Odds and sods

The greatest majority of the work on Fillmore these days is little projects that need time and attention. Work continues on cabinets in every little nook and cranny that I can find.

Another job that came to light last summer while camping in the rain in Jasper was the sunroof. Turns out the mounting screws on one side were stripped and the seal was incomplete. So during the rain we had a little leakage. So the job was to re tap and drill the frame and mounting brackets.

Everything looks good, now we'll need to  field test it!

Another job that has been put off was the mounting of the antennae for the stereo. Nothing more nerve wracking (and permanent) than drilling a hole in the body....

Drilling the hole was the easy part, fishing the wire through the deadspace was the challenging task.

In the end it looks good and now we have unencumbered radio signal!

I'm starting to muse on design for the pull out pantry. Turns out I can probably buy a premade roll out cabinet from Richeleu but where's the fun in that?

Leslie Ann Sinclair

A mother’s love is forever strong,
never changing for all time…
and when her children need her most,
a mother’s love will shine.

I am late with this, not for lack of desire but rather perhaps the fact that it forces me to admit that she is gone. On March 12, 2019, Leslie Ann Sinclair, Bridget, Nanna, Mom, passed away surrounded by her family. She lived her life with smiles and laughter, she was full of love and mischief. Never one to pass up on a get together or a chance to play a game of cards. In keeping with her wishes we didn't have a "stuffy funeral" as she referred to it but rather the "Irish wake" she wanted. We celebrated her life, with music,wine and stories in a fashion to which she would be proud. In my heart and on my mind, I will miss talking to you about everything and nothing. I love you, I miss you already. Be well, and say hi to Dad for me.

Less is more

Have you ever been to a friends house who did renovations? They could have torn half the house down to put on a new addition, move the kitchen and create a media room to die for....AND they did it all themselves! Impressive! But once you've gotten over the shock and awe of what they did and how good it looks, you start to notice small things. Things like the base board in the new bathroom is just sitting in place, not brad nailed down yet.  The toilet still has the manufacturer sticker on it and the cold air return vents are still the temporary construction ones.
After a few beers, you call your friend on it...and say.." You did so much! Why don't you just finish it?...all that's left is the small stuff!!"
It's true, the less there is to do, the longer it seems to take. Is it motivation? Is it a feeling of calm? laziness? complacency? I don't know what the answer is really but what I can say is that when I'm working on Fillmore these days I am calm. I don't feel rushed or under a deadline. I am happy to spend a couple hours out there and all I have to shoe for it is a test fit of a cupboard door.

Maybe deep down I don't want to finish...ahh look at me, using Fillmore and 'finish' in the same paragraph...pretty presumptuous I would say!

Until that day comes, I will continue to putter away, creating small cupboards for storage of things like bed sheets and blankets

Some of the lounge cabinets finally got taken out and prepped for paint. While some of the other cupboard fronts get another coat or two on them.

The big news is at long last the bathroom door has finally been installed. I fought with mounting trim, but in the end perseverance paid off!

Every nook and cranny

 If I see a small unused space, I start scheming....how can I use that?

 If you remember I am working on the cabinets in the "dinette"and there is a small space under the rear facing lounge chair...

 So, time for yet another drawer

 And then an even smaller space to the outside from that....

Perhaps big enough for a deck of cards and a crib board maybe?

Baby it's cold outside....

It may be December outside, but it's warm and cozy inside Fillmore. I crank up the furnace for a little while and then just have a space heater keep it up for the rest of the day while I putter away at "the lounge dinette"

It's time to put the foot rests in place. Which is a little trickier than it sounds. Mainly due to the curved wall, the wheel well and the chair which was purposely mounted at an agle to maximize lounge room for each traveler.

So I resort to my fall back method of  cardboard templates.

Followed by a test fit on scrap wood.

The actual facing is to be made from two 1/4" birch plywood laminated together

Once the pieces were cut out, a healthy layer of good ol carpenters glue...

And then clamp the heck out of it. From wall to isle it has a bit of a curve. Once the piece is set I can remove it and clean up all the edges.

While the rear facing seat dries, it was time to work on the forward facing seat. Part of this cabinetry was already roughed out last year, now I just needed to create a cabinet for around the supplemental coolant heater. First order of business is to mount the unit on rubber mounts to decrease vibration and noise.

At first blush things look good, but if you take a close look you can see that the new panel doesn't sit flush with the adjacent cabinet. This is due to the mounting brackets for the seat itself. So I will have to create a rebate to allow for the brackets.

Using my hand help laminate trimmer with a square cut bit allowed me to trim away what was in my way!

A little boxing out of the space to the heater core, and we're done!
Except for sanding, painting etc etc

Minutia and not so minutia

 Sometimes a job takes a while because you need just the right little detail. Which will likely go entirely unnoticed by the majority but I will know, and being that I am my own worst critic.....I must try to please the critic. My desire is that I want to add a little of family into the bus. What I mean by that is I have purposely included a few details along the way to give a nod to family members that have contributed to not only Fillmore but to us as well. One of which is the wood counter top and trim on the cabinets in the back of the bus... in the master bedroom if you will. The cabinet tops are made from Fir flooring that was stored in a shed on the Keeler family homestead, the trim on the drawers is made from Mvuli, wood from Africa that Michelle's mom and Dad brought back when they were there back in the 60's. My issue is that they are different colours of wood, and , I would like to make them match or get close if possible. Being that I have dropped a couple of cup holders in them I have used the 'pucks' as test pieces.
 I thought I had a winner, but when I stain the entire counter top it looked like a tribute to the purple rain album of the  artist formerly known as 'Prince' 

 So after spending a lot of Sunday morning sanding all the stain off....thank god I love listening to CBC radio and zone out to classical music, I tried different combinations. And I'm not happy with any of them....yet.

 So it was time to regroup and move onto another project on the list. The bathroom door. More of a challenge than what it seems. Due to the nature of the bus...where things aren't exactly square, plumb or true, the door is a little rhomboidal.

 So the sides aren't parallel....which I can deal with.....really....honestly...I can do this....
Oh and the edges are angled, but outside of that this is easy peasy.....

In the end. the first draft looks promising. I now just have to laminate a second layer, reinforce with birch trim, make a header.....and then install the hardware. I'm pretty much done......ha!

Plan ahead

It's finally time to once again, put things back together. After removing all the cabinet fronts for painting in my makeshift spray booth, it's finally time to assemble all the pieces. In my minds eye I have an idea of what things will look like, and I must admit for better or worse what I am getting is what I planned.

Over the toilet storage area for towels,toilet paper,etc is coming together. It has to house the duct for the bathroom heat and the faux junction box and black pipe hiding the electrical for the TV outlet.

While I was there I really wanted to incorporate a piece of the original. In the drivers area I replaced all the instrumentation, opting to go with a newer dual gauge air pressure readout. The original was still in working order, so I kept it, in hopes I could use it somehow, somewhere. Being that the design 'motif' is subway industrial for the bathroom.....I thought 'perfect!' and incorporated the working gauge into the area.

Now some of my planning lacks some of the finer details. in the last post you saw the kitchen vertical plug. Well the plan is working well. I had the space, I had run the electrical wire, I had the hardware, but I neglected to install a junction box for the outlet tower to plug into. Installing one wasn't impossible, but it sure would have been easier BEFORE I installed the kitchen cabinets!

And finally, my biggest pride and disappointment. The finish on these drawer fronts is excellent, the allotted hardware purchase ages ago was right were I stored it and was a breeze to install. The momentary mind fart allowing me to be sloppy looks out of place. you be the judge.
I can't live with that, I'll have to redo that drawer.....eventually....grrrrrrr!

The time has come

 For quite a while I have been finishing components of the cabinetry in the bus. AS I did I would prime them and then put the first few coats of paint on with a foam roller. The finish was good....but not great. Despite the claims of the guys (sorry Mr. Trudeau ) persons at the paint store, I could never get a super smooth finish with a foam roller. So the time has come to create another spray booth.

I sort of forgot how many big drop clothes I really have, I was able to mask off the entire work space, and therefor protecting all the power tools from over spray. The ventilation works well and the heater in the room kept us a nice working temp.

The set up took about a half hour, the spraying took less than 5 min and the clean up probably closer to an hour of time! But well worth the results...

 Another "I'll do it later" projects is due for attention, and that is power in the kitchen. Trying to minimize placing an electrical plug through the bathroom wall, I opted for a little more unconventional approach. This long narrow box sits behind the kitchen counter on the drivers side. It acts as a storage area and conveniently is just the right size for , oh I don't now, a bottle of fermented grape juice?

And now for something completely different...

Think, New York Subway old school industrial.....that's a thing isn't it?
Custom building is a world of compromises, form vs function. When building a wall in a house, you from the wall, then sheath it. Therefor you have a hollow core wall that you can mount(and hide) electrical boxes and wiring. But a hollow core door eats up a lot of real estate. A typical wall would be 4.5-5" thick. For the bathroom in Fillmore that's 10" which is a lot! So I elected to go with a solid wall of 5/8" plywood. I saved a lot of floor space but lost my ability to conventionally hide the outlets for the bathroom lights and fan, the TV, the wiring for the AC system, and the water pump and tank sensors and controls.So I had to get creative with manufacturing faux electrical junction boxes. This will hide some stuff, and some others instead of hiding, I dress it up and display it (light switch and wires) A bit bulky...yes....solve my problem?....yes!

Where's Waldo?

Don't get me started, Oct 2 brought winter in full force, somewhere in there is a 2013 Volkswagen Jetta TDI....for real....

Nothing to fear but fear itself.

 Let me start by saying I love my Webasto Dual Top. It is a Diesel fired furnace and hot water tank. The concept is great, a combo unit that provides heat and water and runs off of the same fuel source as the bus. Making fuelling up the unit, a one stop shopping deal.
That being said, I have been fraught with challenges as of late, which all came from a water leak. Now I could blame the design engineers for putting the water inlet directly above some of the system electronics, so that a leak would fry a mother board, then some of the delicate 20 gauge wires leading to the water overheat sensor can easily become damaged when you take apart the furnace yourself because you can't find a webasto service centre willing to work on this model of furnace. I could say all that but I wont, that would be childish and petty.

Instead I will expound on how I thoroughly enjoy online shopping and shipping. Although I cannot find any help in Calgary with this unit. I am able to find parts and advice internationally! And they ship to my door. So after replacing the furnace blower (water damage) and the hot water sensor (technician error) I was ready to reinstall  the furnace. But....(queue the sombre foreshadowing music)
before I did, I decided it was time to right a previous wrong. This past spring I installed the Webasto X100 cooktop. Unfortunatley I had a few issues with the install process, first the electrical then the fuel line. As according to instruction, I spliced into the return fuel line from the engine and ran a fuel line to the cooker. My issue was that the fuel line I used was a 3/32 I.D. Which was difficult to find off the shelf. The line that I found was a soft sided line (blue line attached to the side wall in the photo) that I wasn't convinced was going to cut the mustard. But we tried....and it failed. So Again, I had a Webasto fuel line kit sent to me, and it sat in wait in my shop waiting for the right moment to strike. And this was the moment.

So while I was under there I ran the right fuel line, using the correct filter, and fished it up to the cooker to be connected at a later date when I have time to putter and drink coffee.(insert dramatic suspenseful musical crescendo) -camera pan across and zoom in on the text "to be connected at a later date"

After recruiting Anna to help me lift and hold the furnace into place, the electrical hook ups were completed , fuel line attached and .........Notta....No Go....epic fail....
The furnace would start up, the exhaust would get warm indicating the start of combustion and then....shut down and error code. The error code indicated there was a no fire/fuel problem. with each possible avenue for error things checked out. I then got it down to the fuel pump. I wanted to test and make sure the fuel lines were drawing the appropriate amount of fuel and that the pump was working properly. I disconnected the fuel line in between the  pump and the fuel filter. and I found good news and bad. The bad new was, I couldn't get a good bleed on the fuel line. Every time I put the inline pump on the line it would suck up a whack of air.

The good news was when I placed a direct fuel line into a separate fuel source, the furnace fired right up(after two attempts). I had to take a break to cook dinner, which gave me time figure out how this could be a problem now where it never has been before? The $64,000 question was..."what has changed?"

 (flash back to installing the new X100 fuel line, and the sentence " to be connected at a later date")
I essentially created my own problem. The open fuel line to the cook top was allowing the fuel pump for the furnace (which is attached to the same fuel tank pick up as the return line from the engine) to suck up air. Thus no fuel error code. A simple crimp of the open line, bleed the line to the furnace and we have heat!