Our RV Adventures

Well, unlike recent days, we couldn’t have had a much nicer day. Sunny, with a high of 70, and down into the low 50’s at night. Just about perfect gate weather. But unfortunately we supposedly have some more rain moving in on Wednesday. But then after that it looks to be back to nice for a few days.

I’m just really hoping for nice weather weekend after next when we’ll start breaking down our little encampment here. Not to mention any problems we might have getting the rig off the grass/dirt and back on the road.

I’ve made a list up of things that need to be done before we leave and portioned it out over the last week so I don’t forget something and leave a bunch of stuff to the last minute.

The vehicle count here on the gate has dropped back a little during the last few days. A week ago we were getting about 60 vehicles a day in through the gate, but since then it seems to have settled to a steady 35 to 40. Very nice.

We have the same six guys, three on each 12 hour shift, and then the rest are the tankers hauling out the flowback water. The crew shift changes around 4:15, with three coming in, and the other three going home. But the tankers don’t really have a schedule. We may have four coming one right after the other, and then leave pretty much together 30 or so minutes later. So I guess there must be multiple valves, (spigots? teats?) for them to all hook up and fill together.

After those four leave, it may be 45 minutes before we get another one, just one, and then 30 minutes later, another one. So we never know how many or when.

But you know for sure you’ll get a tanker come in when you go inside to go the bathroom.

I got my replacement transfer switch on its way today. Hopefully it will be here by Friday. They were nice enough to send me the new one with just a credit card number, and then I’ll send the bad one back. That way we’ll only be without shore power for 15 minutes or so while I swap them out.

Then while we’re still off shore power I’ll crank up the generator and be sure it switches over like it’s supposed to, since that was the original problem of only switching over to the generator if we were still hooked up to shore power.

After a blog post a couple of days ago talking about some project or other, or several, I was working on, blog reader Jan Mains left me a comment wondering if my brain ever shuts down, even when I’m sleeping.

In fact, No.

Here’s what I told her.

Jan,

No, I don’t think part of it ever sleeps. In fact I’ve come up with some great ideas while I was sleeping. But I usually forget to write down the building instructions immediately after I wake up, and it all ends up lost in the very dark mists of my mind.

Very dark mists.

But so far I’ve invented the following in my sleep:

A way to generate unlimited free power using a gallon of seawater, a banana, and two ‘D’ batteries.
A time machine using a Commodore 64, a blue shower curtain, and a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine.
An interstellar warp drive using a ’54 Buick Roadmaster, a 5 gallon bucket, and a German Shepherd.

Oh, and the shower curtain has to be blue. Any other color and it won’t work.

You might think I’m kidding about these, but I can see them functioning in my mind like I’m watching them on TV. I just can’t quite remember how to build them.

Supposedly Nikolai Tesla could design entire inventions completely in his head, testing and refining them until they worked perfectly. And then when he built them, they worked perfectly in real life too.

Me, not so much.

One idea I did write down is a do-it-yourself key-making machine (© 2012 Greg White,™, ®, Pat. Not Pending), that will duplicate any key of almost any type, does not need 100’s of different key blanks, and lets you put any pattern or design on the head, or bow, of the key (that’s the part you hold).

You can have this idea for free, as long as I get a 10 cents a key royalty on every one made in every machine. Go for it. It really won’t be that hard to build. Mostly off-the-shelf parts.

But as far as everything else goes, I do find that if I’m stuck on a problem, I just put it aside for an hour, a day, or a week, and usually a solution will come bubbling to the top.

But I’ve been inventing, designing, or building things as long as I can remember. As a kid, I invented some very useful things, only to find out that someone else had beat me to it.

Sometime in the early 50’s when I was six or so, and we were living on the beach at Gulf Shores, AL, we got our first television set. We would have gotten one earlier, but there were no TV stations in the area. But finally two stations, WALA and WKRG, went on the air in Mobile, AL (and why the heck I remember those call signs, I have no idea). Since they were about 50 miles away we had a tall, directional antenna to pick them up.

Then a little later, WEAR went on the air in Pensacola, FL. It was a little closer, but directly opposite the Mobile stations. So if we wanted to watch Ch. 3 in Pensacola, my father would have to go outside and turn the antenna around.

I began to wonder why you couldn’t hook up a electric motor to turn the antenna pole instead of doing it by hand. Now the only electric motor I had access to was the one that came with my A.C. Gilbert Erector Set, the big one that had everything in it, enough stuff that I think I could have built another Eiffel Tower if I tried. And if I knew what the Eiffel Tower was when I was six.

Besides all the gears and stuff, the set came with four large metal wheels that you could use to make motorized trucks and stuff. Using those, all the other gears in the set, and as I remember, a belt and pulley from an old Coca Cola drink case compressor, I finally managed to get that Erector Set motor to turn the antenna pole.

The only problem was that the motor had to be so geared down that it took around an hour and a half to turn the antenna 180 degrees. Not very useful.

But I was very proud of what I had done, and was getting ready to show it to my father when a problem arose. My father later said he knew something was up when I came running wild-eyed into the motel office, grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and ran back out the door. At this point, he of course was right behind me.

The problem was that this small electric motor was not really designed to run for 90 minutes, non-stop, under an extremely heavy load.

And it had burst into flames.

While I was trying to get the extinguisher to work, my father, seeing what was happening, just reached over and unplugged the motor from the extension cord. He said I had tears in my eyes as I watched my prized motor melt down into slag.

When I told him what I was trying to do, he just smiled and said, “Come on. Get in the car.” An hour or so later, we were in Mobile buying an antenna rotor system. That’s when I found out someone had already invented it before me.

Oh, and on the way home we stopped at Sears and I got a brand-new Erector Set motor.

So as you can see, I got an early start in all this. But it was only the beginning.

Maybe sometime I’ll tell you the whole story about how when I was 13 , a friend of mine and I got a beat-up wooden fishing boat, an old 36hp VW engine, and a 4ft propeller we bought at an Army Surplus store, and made our own airboat. Or tried to.

Unfortunately the boat wasn’t quite up to the strain, the transom broke off from the weight of the engine while we were out on the Bon Secour River, and for a few seconds it looked like we were either going to be decapitated, or run through a very large blender.

Or there’s that cold Tuesday afternoon in November, when I fired up my newly-upgraded, high-powered laser, using a very large bank of capacitors, two xenon flash tubes, and a ruby laser rod. Here’s a basic diagram.

I noticed when I was charging up the capacitor bank that the lights in the dorm were really dimming down, and I was using a light  bulb as a shunt to slow the charge rate so I didn’t blow a fuse. But my first shot was so successful that I impatiently bypassed the shunt to speed up the charging for the next shot.

In hindsight, this was a mistake. But hey, I was 17. Who has patience at 17?

When I fired off the laser the second time, the pulse of  the capacitor bank’s output partially fed back into the AC power supplying the two adjacent dorms and took out the transformer on the pole outside the dorm, causing it to shut down in a shower of sparks.

This then overloaded the already marginal electrical system feeding the 60 year old campus, blacking out everything a few second later. And apparently this led to sporadic outages around town for the next few hours.

While I was trying to figure out how I was going to talk my way out of this one, a friend came running into my room with the big news on his transistor radio.

Now most people seem to think that an overloaded relay on a main power line in upstate New York caused the Great Northeast Blackout of November 9th, 1965, but a lot of people in Columbia, TN think differently.

See, and you just thought I was weird.

Now you know for sure.

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Thought for the Day:

Never throw anything away.

Everything will have a use someway, somehow, someday.

But you won’t realize it until you throw it away.

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