In all my years......I have never....

19 years. That's how long I have lived in Bragg Creek. In all my years I have seen a few black bears, a grizzly, lots of moose, a literal herd of deer, elk, coyotes, marten, squirrels, owls, hawks, even an eagle or two. But never had I ever seen a cougar. I had heard of them in the area, I had talked to friends and neighbors who caught glimpses of them running across the road. But never had I ever been able to sit less than 50 feet away (in a car)from two of them feeding on a fresh kill.

At 10:30 last thursday night by friend and neighbor texted me and said " what are you doing?" When I said watching TV he simply said...."get over here". I am convinced that he would have said get over here if I said I was doing anything aside from active CPR on someone, alas I digress.... When I got to his place we hopped in his car and drove 200 meters down the road and , what you see above is what we saw that night. Truly a once in a life time opportunity.

Not quite as exciting to the general populous as seeing one of  North Americas fiercest hunters but just as exciting for me....my new starter came in. But before I wanted to put the starter in place I had a couple of other things on my to do list

This is where the starter mounts on to the flywheel housing. If you look inside you'll see the ring gear where the starter engages and turns the engine over. This is significant right now because of the tachometer.

I know about now you are scratching your head and saying....."what???"

Allow me to go back in time. There are two ways to run your tach, off the alternator or a sensor that counts the teeth on your fly wheel...called a Halls effect sensor I think.  However....when you switch out an engine your calibration is all shot as your ring gear is different etc. So when I swapped out the engine back in 2011 from a gas to a  diesel I wasn't able to hook up the tach as it didn't have the ability to be switched from working with an 8 cyl gas engine to a 6 cyl diesel . A subsequent search found that I could not find a diesel tach that matched my instrument cluster. I remained optimistic and persistent....and maybe stubborn as well. I found an after market piece of tech that will take the signal from the sensor and convert it to work in the tach meant for a gas engine. The trick is you have to know how many teeth are on your ring gear to set up the conversion properly. Up until now I put it low on my list of things "to do", I wasn't going to pull the starter just to count the teeth, but now out of necessity....here we are. 

I was going to have to enlist the help of my lovely side kick. My partner in life, my buddy.....my sweetheart who really doesn't like to get herself dirty , greasy, or to generally "smell like bus"

So before I conscript her to crawl under the engine and count teeth on the ring gear I must make the environment as hospitable as possible. While I was removing the old starter I noticed that my flex pipe in the exhaust system was.....well.... toast. So I need to remove the exhaust and repair it. Seems like a good time.

Once it was out it was a quick fix and I still managed to have a piece of 4" flex pipe kicking around. Before I put it back in though, it was a good time to get Michelle. Without the exhaust there was more room for the task at hand.

I put down a clean carpet, got her some coveralls, a bright lite....I even had classical music playing on the radio!

At this point I had to remove the rear shroud for the engine bay so that I could access the flywheel in order to turn the engine and advance the ring gear so Michelle could count. As I mentioned in the previous post, this was the point where I realized I recognized the wiring harness that was responsible for my battery drain. The voltage regulator!!

Ring gear counted, starter put in place, exhaust fixed and now reinstalled. I'm just waiting for a new regulator and we should be good......

Except for the damn fuel shut off solenoid....

 

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...

A special day or everyday is special?

Friday marked international Daughters day, and boy do I have a daughter to celebrate. Smart, stunning, driven, stubborn, loving, compassionate, the list goes on and on. All I can say is I love my little girl to the moon and back, and there was no better way to celebrate her than to watch her kick my ass up a mountain. So many hikes I would be coaxing you up the hill....somewhere you blew past me and now are the one patiently waiting for me to catch up. I love that you do and that you want to.

We are so proud of you , where you are and what you've done, and its just the beginning of your journey.

                                                                        You go girl!

On the Fillmore side of things....a funny thing has happened. I started having electrical issues. Particularly that something is causing my engine battery to drain. I'll have a fully functional, fully charged battery, then a few days later.....nothing. I checked the usual suspects but nothing! I charged my battery and let it sit outside the bus for a number of days and it held it's charge and the electronic battery evaluator says all is well.

Nothing was obvious, I put a multimeter in line on the negative side to see power draw but  I'm not even getting a consistent reading. So far I am still searching but along the way I have found some issues that are not likely associated with the draw, but need to be fixed none the less.

On the engine/chassis battery main shut off, I found one of the ring connectors was ready to fail. 

A simple fix.

The path of power if you will, from the positive terminal of the battery goes from the battery to the starter, then from the same post on the starter a lead to the fuse panel. I decided to follow the path, evaluating connections and connectors along the way. Fillmore has been running so dependably for so long I cant remember when the last time I just laid down underneath the old beast and just looked. So as I was following the electrical cables from the battery I saw something that made me do a double take.

Not really believing what I was seeing I decided to do the wiggle test.....and frankly I wasn't thinking I was going to see anything.....but.....

And that sealed the fate......nothing to do with my electrical issue but now I have uncovered another thing that needs my attention and needs it now.

The starter is mounted to the bell housing by three lonely bolts. One literally turned out of the housing with my fingers(oops), the second was tighter but nothing to write home about.....and then of course....the last one.

These are 12 point bolt heads, you can use a regular hex head socket...unless someone has already tried that and rounded the points on the dodecagon and your sockets are just slipping..... so off to Napa for a socket.

Unfortunately the bolt head was too far gone and I needed to pull out the hail Mary tools to see of it would budge. Some heat, a rap with a big hammer, tighten then loosen and eventually it came out.

Thankfully I don't have to put these ones back in.

Once that starter is out (heavy bugger) and on the bench top, the crack is very obvious. I can honestly say I've never seen one like this....not that I've seen a lot of cracked starter housings.....

                                                         

CRIB

March 16, 2020 was the date....I don't think I blogged it until a month later in April but, that was when our world started shutting down. That was the weekend that my brother and family came for a visit that got modified because of CoVid. Unfortunate for them but great for us....me in particular. On that trip Shawn and Adele helped design the cribbage crib, as I like to call it, for the bus.

                                             

This is a crude screen shot of the 3D modeling that they did

                    

And this is how it all turned out

This side is the metal inlay with acrylic top

                                        

And this side is the crib board....yet to be used for the first time.....perhaps soon??

Of course no matter how much I plan, there always seems to be some snag, as Robert Burns said, "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men". I designed one of the crib cabinets to house the subwoofer and also the crib table. Everything looked great until....

it seems I forgot to account for the retention pin knob. The only way the table will fit into the cabinet is to remove the knob and pin prior to stowing it away, and THAT will never work for me.

 But thankfully I was able to  trace the path of the knob placement on the table, then using a  forstner bit and the router to create an insertion channel. This is not the finished product but already allows the table to be stored, in its entirety, in the designated area as originally designed. 

A series of firsts

Another day another first. After some contemplation I decided to get some work done on the bug(stereo) and I maaaaaaayyy have had a little mishap with the buses rear view camera which required a trip into Calgary to see the professionals at ARA automotive accessories  Thankfully they could take care of both issues on the same day. I just had to get both vehicles to them. It would be the first time to test the whole tow-car concept. I must say it worked like a charm!

 

Oddly enough, not to far away I came across a GF brewery that has some delicious wares to sample. First one in western Canada, and a first time for me being there. Good thing Fillmore has a fridge!

Shortly after, we got the kids ready for their first time "alone" in the back country. I give the quotation marks because they have been camping, they have been alone(without parental units) and they have been in the back country. But they have never had the trifecta. It was a first for them.

So the three amigos set out hiking and camping on an envious quest.

So Michelle and I got inspired and shortly after dropping the kids at the trail head we packed up Fillmore and headed out on an adventure of our own. We hit spray lake for a little kayaking. Once we got there we explored the campground and found an open site to which we slipped into.

It was another first for us, I may not elect to drive Fillmore down those roads again, but I would definitely go back to that lake!! 

A little here a little there

All of us just want to get out for a little fresh air and exercise. A week or two ago we hiked prairie link, a section of what we rightly or wrongly called powderface trail for many years. None the less it was a beautiful day with some great friends......and Fillmore of course.

Alberta has a lot of things to offer, beautiful mountains, glacier fed rivers and lakes, but warm hunid nights are not on the list off assets. So being from Manitoba where you can sit outside on a patio until the wee hours of the night is not an option unless you bring layers of fleece and down. So I decided that we needed a fire table to extend the comfortable evenings on our deck. After some research and going to the showroom, I decided I could build a fire table. Michelles dad was here and we cut down an old Oak wine barrel formally used as a rain barrel for the base, then I constructed a temporary fire pan and table top. Well the prototype fell short of a few key elements. The base was perfect, but my fire pan was flimsy and my table top was...well....combustible. Not good qualities when your talking about a table with open flames and heat for hours. So with some cajoling motivation from my baby brother, i decided to pour a concrete table top.

Jeff and I made the form from 1"  wall foam board. 

In an effort to keep the table top thin(and therefor as lite as possible) I used a specialty concrete with shredded fiberglass fibers in the mix. We spent a lot of time vibrating the pour to make the surface as smooth as possible.

It was our first time doing this but we were happy with how it turned out.

                        

After some sanding and de burring, the surface finish was smooth enough I dont even feel like we need to make a slurry to fill holes

I can see many a late nights by the table coming up....

Savor the moment

Simply put life is short. We should live each day like there will be no more tomorrows. Its a cliché but its true. It's not like the world is going to end  tomorrow (although the pandemic makes us think so) but there will never be another today. You will never meet the same person in the same place, with the same state of mind.....so savor the moment!

Anna went out with her buds on Canada Day a few weeks back and they did just that, they laughed and loved and goofed around. Anna's girlfriend Poppy(@wildpoppy.photography )is a very talented photographer who was part of the gang and she captured the spirit of the day.

So much love....so few words....

While I live vicariously through the kids I do manage to get a little something done here and there. This is some trim for the counter in the galley kitchen. Been a long time coming, but the time is right.

While I play with shiny metal, Jeff undertook a job of redoing the exhaust system on his buddy Pete's car with slightly less clean shiny metal. Enlisting the help of Pete and Anna, music blaring, it did my heart good to see the three of them achieving a pretty darn good job.

My trim turned out well as well! Now on to the other side!

Just like I am savoring the moments with the kids, Michelle and I are savoring the opportunity to get out and see our own back yard as well, Nihani Ridge....

And some good together time on Prairie Mountain!

The back of the bus is turning out to be the place to be these days, we even installed the artwork!!