Westward bound

On Thursday I had a meeting west of Moose Jaw and then drove up to Saskatoon to meet Marilyn. She arrived that night on the plane from McLean Lake and we spent the night on the Husky parking lot. We left Saskatoon Friday morning with all our worldly possessions on wheels. The famous cubevan appears to be running well. It sucks a bit going uphill but it is pushing a lot of wind and dragging a relatively heavy boat so that is not too surprising. Not to mention that its engine is getting pretty tired.

On Friday we met Marlan in Medicine Hat for supper and delivered father's dresser. Marlan has a good selection of mom & dad's furniture now. I was glad to get the dresser unloaded off the truck. I had it well wrapped and protected but I was worried about it getting wet if we drove in rain and it looked weird on the truck. I had it double wrapped - blue tarp and then a white bedsheet. For some reason it ended up reminding people of a coffin loaded on the truck. I thought it was maybe just me but a couple of other people commented on it too.

Yesterday we came the rest of the way to Airdrie and camped in Alison and Camiel's front yard. They are trying to sell the 2nd house on the acreage so I'm a little concerned that we aren't exactly enhancing the value of the property but they claim it doesn't matter. I think they are just being nice so we won't stay too long. I've got a bunch of work that needs to be done on the bus and Marilyn has to make a trip back to McLean Lake before we can leave for Mara.

My battle with the generator has continued. Last week in Regina it was shutting itself down as if it had no oil pressure. It would run for about 15 seconds after it started and then kill itself. It has done that before but I thought I had solved it by cleaning the various wire connectors inside its guts. Now I'm not so sure that it is a connector problem and I am leaning toward blaming a bad pressure sender. It seems that it only is a problem if the generator hasn't been used for several days. Once it has been started a few times and then allowed to sit for a while it appears to cure itself. I hate electrical gremlins like that because they are so incredibly difficult to troubleshoot. After it decided to stay running it developed another problem. The previous owner of the bus installed an auxiliary fuel filter on the line to the genset. On the surface that is a good idea but like a lot of things that Clarence did the idea is sound but the implementation was flawed. He put the filter on the suction side of the auxiliary fuel pump that he also installed. Then he mounted the whole works about 10 feet away from the fuel tank. That means that the vane fuel pump has to pull a vacuum through the filter and then through 10 feet of hose back to the fuel tank. Right now I have the auxiliary fuel filter disconnected but as soon as I can find a replacement cartridge for it I will hook it up again except this time it will be on the output side of the pump. There is a filter on the genset which Kubota obviously thought was sufficient so I'm not too worried about running it without the auxiliary filter.

I had one of Jim Shepherd's temperature monitors shipped to us here at Airdrie. My new plywood generator enclosure is very close to the exhaust manifold on the engine. I've got it heat shielded but I still worry about it. The generator compartment is a concern too now that I have it well enclosed the temperatures inside there could get pretty high. The big risk with an RV is that you get a fire while you are going down the road. With high airflow feeding the fire by the time we were aware that we were on fire it could be too late. Typically that is what happens - by the time the owners are aware that they are on fire all they can do is stop the rig, bail out and watch it burn to the ground. Now I need to run some wire the length of the bus and get the monitor installed. We have basement air (like a home airconditioning system) so we need to run the generator while we are travelling in order to have AC. It looks like it might finally warm up enough to need AC when we head west from here.