Our RV Adventures

This time last week we had days in the 50-60’s and nights in the 30’s, really nice. But now we’re seeing days in the high80’s and nights in the 60’s. Summer is here.

I called the park office this morning to extend our stay here until Saturday the 10th of June. Then I went through our schedule and updated it, pushing every thing back 4 days,  which still leaves us a few days of padding before we have to be back at the Colorado River TT on the 25th of June.

Later in the early afternoon I went outside to begin the change-out of the starter solenoid of our rig’s generator. When I started working on this problem, I was surprised to find that Cummins/Onan does not make the diesel engines in the generator. They’re actually 3 cylinder diesel engines made by Kubota.

Since all I had to do to swap out the solenoid was to remove the two nuts and pull it off after removing the 3 wires, and then install the new one in its place. I figured it would be easy peezy.

Wrong!

Yeah, the removal went just fine, and only took a couple of minutes.

But before I installed the new one, I wanted to check out the position of the yoke inside the starter, the part that the solenoid hooks into.

Here’s the yoke in the new starter.

And  here’s the pin on the end of the solenoid that fits into the yoke.

The solenoid pin is easier to fit into the yoke if it’s pulled forward, so I used my phone to take a photo of the yoke, and here’s what I found.

I’m not sue why, but the left fork of the yoke was blackened and a little melted. So after thinking for a few minutes, my solenoid replacement had morphed into a full starter/solenoid change-out.

Still easy peezy, right? I mean it’s two bolts and off it comes, right?

Nope!

The top bolt was no problem, so after loosening it I started on the bottom one. And there things came to a halt. I could just barely feel the bottom bolt head with my fingers, and when I tried to fit my ratchet into place the handle was too long to allow it to ratchet due to hitting the frame rail.

So I I tried my 12mm box end, which was short enough to move, but with the time it took me to get the box end wrench seated back on the bolt head, and the small amount I could move it, I needed a better way.

So checking Lowes.com, I  found that the local store stocked a stubby 3/8 inch ratchet.

And since it was now almost 4pm, we were off to the Lowes in RC for a wrench and then on to HuHot Mongolian Grill for an early dinner.

Back at the rig, I was able to get the starter off without a lot more work and was now ready to install the new starter. I left the solenoid off because it looked like it would be a little easier to get the bolts started that hold the starter in place. And it was.

But unfortunately it also meant that I didn’t have enough clearance to get the pin on the solenoid seated in the slot of the yoke. So now the starter was going to come back out, the solenoid installed, and the starter put back on.

But since the sun was going down, that’s a chore for tomorrow.

adfasdf

This morning seemed to be a good time for breakfast, so we headed into RC about 11:30.

Based on a recommendation of blog reader Jeannine Sheridan we decided on Cambell Street Café. And yes, that’s the way it’s really spelled. And that’s how the street name is spelled.

But when you try to Google the place, it changes your spelling to ‘Campbell’, and every review spells it ‘Campbell’ also.

But however it is spelled, it was really, really good, with giant portions. And as a bonus, good coffee and great service.

Jan had two eggs, scrambled dry, with extra crispy bacon, hash browns, and a biscuit.

I went with their pancakes, eggs, and Polish sausage.

Jan and I both ate on the pancakes and didn’t come close to finishing them.

As we were leaving we mentioned to the owner? and our waitress that we were RV’ers and another RV’er had recommended the place. We said that they were having their RV worked on for a month or so,  and had  eaten here a number of times.

Both said they remembered them, and our waitress said she had waited on them a lot. So I guess Jeannine and her family made a good impression.

Coming home we made a Wal-Mart stop before getting back to the rig about 2pm. At this point I guess I was still a little washed out from my headache yesterday, so, putting off working on the generator solenoid, I took a nap.

But later I did pull the new solenoid off the starter to be ready to tackle it tomorrow..

In a follow-up to my travails with my Verizon MiFi and the data speed throttling, I recently mentioned that after my MiFi had throttled back at 10GB, I had switched over to hotspotting my S8+. And that while I had used up the 10Gb on the MiFi in just seven days, it took me almost three weeks to get to the 10GB limit on my S8+.

And now I’m at almost 20GB on my phone, but I’m still not being throttled. And my MiFi is still throttled, and I guess it will be until June 8th when my account resets.

We’ve been recording the Torchwood marathon on BBCA since 4am Friday morning, and it finally finished up at 6pm this evening, so now we’ve got all 37+ hours of the series. Looking forward to binge-watching it in the near future.

But right now we’ve been catching up on a couple of series that we had recorded and saved, Motive and Murder in the First. Somewhere along the line we had missed one or more of the last few episodes of both series, So we’ve streamed the missing episodes from the Internet filling in the blanks, and then watched the ones we still have recorded. We’ve finished with Murder in the First, so now we’re working on Motive.

Jan slow-cooked a big batch of her Chicken Vegetable Soup so that’s what we had for dinner. Really good, as usual.

Tomorrow, back on the solenoid?

asdfasdfad