Daily Archives: August 24, 2010
Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work I go…
First off, here’s the latest photo of Landon in his light vest hanging on to his bottle for dear life. He’s wearing the light vest to correct a high bilirubin count. He’ll probably have to wear it for another couple of days.
I spent the day once again saving Nick’s rear end by fixing all the things he keeps breaking. Sometimes even Miss Terry can’t keep up with Nick’s wide swath of destruction. So I have to be called in to pull his chestnuts out of the fire once again.
I started out working on the tail light system that connects his rig with his van. He’s been having problems with the system blowing fuses and the lights not working correctly.
Like many troubleshooting problems this one turned out to be a series of things.
The first thing we did was replace a flakey fuse holder in the power line to the tail light converter. Then it was time to try and figure out why the system kept blowing fuses. It originally had a 5 amp fuse, but Nick had upped it to 15 amp trying to get it to work.
With a little investigation I found that 2 of the 4 wires inside the connector that plugs the system into the van had come loose and were shorting out. The plug itself was dirty and corroded inside, so we decided to just replace it with a new connector.
After a trip to the trailer supply store for the new one, I first wanted to check out the lights before I wired it up. And I immediately found that there was no power coming in thru the power line that I’d just put the new fuse holder in.
A little checking showed me that there was no power coming into the line at all, and it wasn’t obvious where the wire was coming from. It may have been that another fuse somewhere upstream had blown. We decided it would be quicker to just pull power from another line so that’s what we did.
Now I was finally really to test the light system. But no I wasn’t. I had Nick turn on the tail lights and one turn signal on the rig. Only to find we still had another problem. The tail lights worked OK, but the turn signals didn’t. One of them stayed on all the time, and the other didn’t work at all, even though they were working fine on the coach.
This meant the tail light converter had to be bad. A tail light converter is used when you have a coach that has separate brake lights and tail lights and a toad that has combined brake and tail lights.
So now we needed a new tail light converter. We decided we’d pick one up at WalMart while we were at supper.
So we moved on to the next job – installing the Winegard Wingman antenna booster on Nick’s external TV antenna like I did on mine a couple of weeks ago. While I was up on the roof of Nick’s coach, he abandoned me to run off and play nice with the tent guy about where to put the big tent he’s using for the rally.
Finishing this up a little before 5, Michele Henry of Phoenix Commercial Paint called and wanted to come by and bring one of the repainted doors to see how the colors match. And she did a beautiful job. It looked great.
Now for the other 6 doors.
About 6 pm we drove over to Culver’s, a restaurant chain found mostly here in the Mid West, that has great burgers, fried chicken, and ice cream too.
After Culver’s we went next door to WalMart. While Terry got some groceries, Nick and I perused the Auto section looking for a tail light converter. Unfortunately, the only one they had was not right for Nick’s system, so we’ll have to try again tomorrow at the trailer supply place.
On a final note, the weather has been really great the last few days, and tomorrow the high is supposed to be 77, with a low of 54. NIce !!
More tomorrow…
Quote of the Day:
Don’t pick a fight with an old guy. If he is too old to fight, he’ll just kill you.
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