Author Archives: roger

Surrealness abounds!

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To catch you up on our story…

I retired the end of last year and our plans are to get the heck out of the state of California.  I am a native born Californian and I cannot stand how this state has changed.  We are going to create a domicile in Texas (initially) and will head there first to register the trailer and get drivers licenses.  Therefore we are prepping our house, truck, and trailer for this transition.

This is Thursday night and our launch date is this Sunday and it is getting really weird around here!  We have just removed our bed from the bedroom and will sleep in the trailer for the next 3 nights.  The bedroom has the headboard, footboard and 2 end tables.  Previously we have moved our armoire, dresser, and chest into our small bedroom.  We are ‘renting’ a climate controlled storage from our son who is renting the entire house from us.  We have a pantry and a few kitchen things to go through.

Roxie has gone through her clothes, as have I, and she leads the race, 2 bins to 1!  It is very weird to go through all of your things and determine its disposition (discard/donate, store at home, take along).  We have gotten rid of numerous items throughout the house, we are lightening up!

Now we just have to now load things into the trailer and the truck.  That should easily take Friday and Saturday.

I have tried to organize the items that are in the bins with a spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet lists the contents with the bin ‘number’.  I hope this makes it easier to find.

Today I went back to my old office for a visit as a coworker also decided to retire and they had his ceremony.  It was a good time to say goodbye to people there.

Although things are surreal now, I think they are going to get moreso.

Various enhancements

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As launch date counts down and the solar project is done, there are numerous other little things that I can work on now.  We have about 2 weeks to get all this done and time is running out.  Here are some of the things that have been done.

Stove guard

The small little piece of aluminum that Airstream stuck to the wall next to stove was for some protection but it slipped over time and was more unusable.

We also needed more space for stuff.  I got a piece of stainless steel and attached it to the wall:

We plan to put spice containers (magnetic backed) on there and a magnetic knife rack:

 

Bedroom lights

The trailer came with two lights on each side of the bed.  One directional and one a sconce on the side.  These were nice lights but we always seemed to hit our heads or arms on them.

We liked the direction lights but not the sconces so much.  I was able to find some flush mounted lights that did both white and red light!  I love a red light at night.  I removed the sconces, put the flush mount ones where the directionals are and moved the directionals.  Like this:

Another mod that needed to be done was using the old holes for the sconces.  We put small baskets in the mounting holes.  The power cable hole will have a phone charger cord going through it.  That way we have a location for our phones that is easily accessible:

 

Underbed storage

The trailer bed will lift up and grant you access to the drawers that are there.  You can also access some of the rear storage in that manner.  We thought it would be nice to have a bit more storage available underneath.  I took a piece of plywood and made a divider wall to cordon off some extra space under there.  Space I wasn’t using from behind:

 

Key hooks

I have a habit of putting my keys, wallet, sunglasses on any flat surface that is near a door.  This will be a problem in the limited confines of the trailer.  We got a small set of hooks and are looking for a basket to hang by the front door for me to use.  Here is the hook set (with a set of keys on it!):

 

Centramatics

I have looked at Centramatic wheel balancers for quite a while.  I wanted to get them when I got my new tires and wheels but wasn’t able to until now.  We only have 3400 miles on the new tires so I don’t feel that bad about the delay.

These devices are automatic wheel balancers.  These are rings that attach to your wheel that have a weighted ballast in a viscous fluid.  As speeds go above 35mph the ballast will move to a location opposite where your wheel/tire has extra weight, balancing it on the fly.  This video can explain it.

This requires removing and reinstalling ALL 4 wheels!  Not a great job but it needs to be done.  Time to use the trusty trailer aid.

Simply take off the wheel and put on the centramatic:

The instructions state that if your wheels have been balanced recently to NOT remove the weights.  I considered 3400 miles to not be recently so I removed the weights:

Put the wheels back on and torque them to 110ft/lbs.

 

Inline Surge Protector

I have two surge protectors (30a and 50a) that I try to use whenever I hook up to shore power.  Better safe that sorry.  However, this can be inconvenient and easy to forget them.  I recently saw something about an inline version by Progressive Industries.  I got one and just installed it.

There appeared to be room by our fuse panel above the bed ( the same picture as above but it shows it):

Disconnect all the power, remove the shore power wire from the panel, put the shore panel wire into the surge protector, run another wire from the surge protector into the panel.  Done!   Just like that, easy, no problem.  Right.  Anyone that has worked on any project knows that things are not that simple.

The panel after the front cover is off.  Take out that red, black, white and ground wire.  Remember these are 6ga wires and are not real flexible.  THEN I had to put another set of 6ga wires back in and connect them.  Lots of vise grips twisting and cramps in the hands.

I was able to move the panel up higher to leave room for the surge protectors.  Here it is all wired up:

I also made a video to show it and the monitor display that you can get.  I made a mistake in the description, it is a Progressive Industries unit, not a Progressive Dynamics.

I still have a few more projects to finish so I will post another entry.