Daily Archives: November 7, 2015
I Made My Own . . .
We probably had more rain last night and early this morning than we’ve had total since we’ve been here. And none of this drizzle stuff. It was heavy and just kept coming.
In fact it was the first time I’ve seen the small ditch between our canopy and road start to fill up. We have a couple of pallets laid across just for this possibility so it wasn’t a problem. Luckily we didn’t have any traffic because with all the lightning around, I think the flowback shut down for a couple of hours or more.
The one other thing the storm did was apparently put a real crimp in the first day of deer hunting season. In fact I didn’t hear a single shot all day.
Happy Deer!
After my recounting of my ongoing problem with boot laces, and my finding ones made from paracord on Amazon, a blog reader, Lloyd Jackson, suggested I could just get some paracord and make my own.
Doh!
And thinking back I remembered that last year I ordered 50 ft of paracord from Amazon just to have some on hand. After rooting through a couple of bins, I found it. It’s black and my boots are brown, but I’m not trying to make a fashion statement here.
So I cut off a couple of 50” lengths to give it a try. I did 50” pieces rather than the standard 54” lengths because the 54” always seem a little long. I then used a candle to melt the ends to keep the cord from unraveling. But this caused another problem. The ends tended to melt into a big knot that wouldn’t go through the boot eyelets.
I also found that the nylon outer braided covering and the seven inner nylon strands didn’t like to melt together, but wanted stay separate. But by melting the ends again and using a pair of pliers to squeeze them into a smaller shape, I was able to make it all work.
For my next pair (50” is a little too short, so I’ll try 52” this time) I’ll try Lloyd’s other suggestion and use a piece of heat shrink tubing to seal the ends. I guess I could make a fashion statement after all by using red or green heat shrink.
That would be snazzy.
I spent a while yesterday afternoon working on getting a warranty replacement for my Progressive Dynamics 50 Amp Automatic Transfer Switch that I purchased last December. It’s getting close to the end of the 1 year warranty so I wanted to get a start on taking care of the problem.
It worked great up until we hit the road again after the 2 month blowout repair hiatus that we spent in Prescott, AZ in May and June of this year. It was pretty cool the morning we left Affinity RV and drove over to Prescott Valley to have my new tires put on. But by the time we were finally ready to head on over to the Verde Valley TT park in Cottonwood, AZ, it had warmed up considerably. So once we were out on the main road I fired up the generator and . . . nothing. It was running, but no voltage was getting to the coach.
It was really too warm to continue without it, so I found a place to pull over so I could take a look. I figured the best place to start was the transfer switch under the bed. So getting to the switch, I pulled the cover off and check the voltage on the contacts coming from the generator.
And they looked fine, 116v on both legs. Next I checked the output contacts going to the coach.
Nothing.
So the contactor wasn’t pulling in for some reason. Getting a large screwdriver, I pushed down on the top of the relay and with a loud snap, it locked in and we had power to the coach.
So we were good to go. And every thing worked fine all the way to Verde Valley. Then a few days before we were ready to leave there, I fired up the generator again, and the transfer switch transferred just as it should. So why didn’t work before?
I thought about this over night, and realized I hadn’t really recreated the conditions when the problem occurred. So I disconnected shore power to the rig and tried the generator again.
Nothing. No power to the rig.
Put shore power back to the coach, cranked up the generator, and it worked.
Again, no shore power, nothing generator power.
Thinking about it, this didn’t make sense. The transfer switch gets its power from the generator when it’s running, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to pull in the contactor. So why does it suddenly need shore power to pull in.
And when talked with the company tech, he said the same thing. It should be able to do that. Lucky me. In fact he really wants it returned so he can see what’s going on with it.
Looks like we’re going to have sunny, but cooler weather for the next three or four days, before the possibility of more rain on Wednesday. Not looking forward to that.
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Thought for the Day:
It would amaze people from the 1960s if you were to say, “In my hand I am holding a device about the size of a deck of cards that has access to the sum total knowledge of all humanity from the beginning of time.
I use it to argue with strangers, tell people when and where I am going to the restroom, and look at short movies of cute cats.”
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