Today started with our usual SLAARC breakfast. Linda has been cleaning up the financial records for our ham radio club and discovered in the process that the status of our EIN application was murky. She has spent some time this past week trying to track down just what happened so she can figure out what to do to fix it. She finally determined yesterday that the EIN that was issued by the IRS was indeed valid and approved but it does not appear that the 501(C.)(3.) non-profit status was ever established correctly.
When we got home we loaded the disassembled plastic foundation from our old Select Comfort mattress into the back of my car along with our usual tubs and bags of recyclables and drove to Recycle Livingston. We had no other errands to run and returned home directly.
Scotty (AC8IL) reminded me at breakfast that Universal Tower in Mt. Clemens, MI (Clinton Township) sells free-standing aluminum towers that are compatible with the used Heights tower we bought last year. I may be able to get a tower section to replace the iron clamshell and also a base to set in the concrete. I made a quick check of their website but some of the pages did not load correctly on my iPad.
I checked the ICANN domain name registry for “SLAARC.com” and all of the owner/contact information still referenced Gary, who set it up originally in 2009. I dealt with a change in ownership for “dactm.org” years ago and it was not a simple, easy process. Add in the GoDaddy factor, and moving the domain name registration and web-hosting from GoDaddy to QTH.com is something I am not looking forward to. I sent an e-mail to Mike and Larry seeking their input and assistance. I checked and replied to a few other e-mails and then went upstairs. Our USPS carrier, Michelle, came to the door with a small package that would not fit in our mailbox. It was my prescription medications that we thought would be delivered on Monday next week.
Linda headed to the grocery store while I changed into my work clothes and started working on getting the dinette in the bus disassembled and removed. I figured out that the dinette was, indeed, built in two pieces. The base was screwed to the floor and had a u-channel around the top that was sized to receive a similar upside down u-channel on the bottom of the upper part. The two channels were locked together by screws inserted horizontally from the inside. The upper part was the seating and seat backs, most of it with built-in cushioning. All of the leather furniture in the bus is in less than ideal condition and the foam cushioning is shot. The furniture was designed so that the only way to replace it would be to remove it, disassemble it, rebuild it, and reinstall it. We do not like it enough to do that and after owning the bus for over five years we now know how we want to change the furniture and re-purpose the space.
Needless to say, but said anyway, coach converters only care about making the original buyer happy and count on them getting rid of the coach long before any of these design decisions become an expensive maintenance and repair issue. And that is a shame, really, because luxury motorcoach conversions are elaborate, expensive custom projects and the buses being used for these projects are capable of being driven for 50 years and 2,000,000 miles given the required routine maintenance. Over that kind of time and miles the house/systems are also going to need maintenance but they do not seem to be designed/built with that in mind.
When Linda returned from her shopping she helped me get the two pieces of the dinette out of the coach and into the garage. She then got back to work at her desk finishing up the accounting for our ham radio club. I continued working in the coach figuring out how to disassemble the J-lounge sofa that occupies the rest of the passenger side of the living room and mated to the dinette. Like the dinette it was a custom designed piece of furniture built specifically for this coach and constructed in the same way. The differences were its size (longer), and three powered accessories. From front to rear the accessories were a footrest, center table, and drawer.
The footrest is self-explanatory. The center table rises up/out of the base in the center of the couch (after removing the loose seat cushion that covers it) and goes back down/in if you need that spot for sitting. We set it at a comfortable height, level with the tops of the seat cushions, without it intruding into the limited isle space and pretty much left it there. The drawer would have been just a drawer if not for the large rubber tube used to open and close it at the touch of a button.
The tube, about 1/4″ in diameter, is arranged like a long, skinny race track above the drawer and under the seat. At the back end, deep in the bowels of the couch, is a motor with a vertical shaft connected to a horizontal drive pulley. The tube is looped around this drive pulley and the other end is looped around a second horizontal pulley at the front edge of the drawer opening. That pulley is free to turn. If that’s all there was to it turning on the motor would cause the tube to just go round and round in one direction or the other. The top back of the drawer, however, has a little finger sticking up that was clamped to the tube so when the tube moved it pulled the drawer with it. At least it did before the tube broke. The big drawer under the sleeper sofa is also powered by a similar mechanism, or was until the tube broke. Neither of these drawers has worked as a powered drawer in the 5+ years we have owned the coach. The motors work, but they do not cause the drawers to open or close.
All of these mechanisms are very clever but ultimately completely unnecessary. Footrests can be actuated manually, drawers can opened and closed by hand, and a table can be built in where it needs to be. These mechanisms also add weight, require power, wiring and control switches, represent potentially difficult (expensive) maintenance and repair items, and take up space that could be better used to store things. To paraphrase a popular song of my youth “the things that pass for luxury I can’t understand.”
Because of all of these mechanisms the J-lounge was considerably more work to disassemble as they made it more difficult to access the screws that held the top piece to the base and the base to the floor. In order to get to everything I had to remove the footrest, the table, the drawer box, and two decorative panels. The drawer was attached to a pair of substantial double suspension glides by four bolts with Nylok nuts inside the drawer. The suspension glides did not have release mechanisms so I had to remove the drawer box. The two rear bolt heads were virtually inaccessible but I eventually figured out where to position the slides so I could push the bolts out from the inside.
Somewhere in the middle of this work Linda came out to bus. It was good timing on her part as I was at a point where I had to assume awkward positions to reach things and having her hand me tools was very helpful. The top back edge was wedged under the window trim so once everything was unscrewed we moved the couch out from the wall enough to lift the top off, verifying that it was unscrewed from the floor and the top was completely disconnected from the base. We did not carry the pieces out of the coach, however, as we need to remove the front passenger seat first and create space in the garage for the pieces. The couch and dinette are about 16 feet long when installed.
Disassembling the couch was not a problem as we are not going to reuse this furniture nor are we going to try to sell it or even give it away. The most we might do is see if the metal has any value as scrap. If not, Linda will call our garbage service to see if they will pick it up on our regular trash day. I plan, however, to remove and keep the motors, pulleys, and acme screw linear actuators; you never know when you might need something like that. 🙂
I asked Linda if she wanted to go out for a pre Mother’s Day dinner and she said yes. We went to La Marsa in Brighton and got there before 6 PM which allowed us to find a parking spot and not have to wait for a table. I had their fresh lemonade, made with juice from fresh squeezed lemons and oranges blended together with ice. I suspect it also had honey as it was sweet. It was delicious. The pita bread and garlic spread were good as usual. We split the salad, which was god, and an order of zesty almond garlic Ghallaba (vegan). This is the second time we have had this dish here and it has been a real disappointment both times. We have come to the unhappy conclusion that the food at this La Marsa is simply not as good as the food at the Farmington Hills location. Sadly, it is one of the few places in Brighton or Howell where we can get something vegan besides a salad or a no-cheese pizza.
When we got home I made some decaf coffee and we settled in to read, write, and play games on our iPads. We looked at the website for Polar Power Inc. They are a competitor to SunFrost and make similar kinds of refrigerators but with some important differences. They sell to the marine market and have super-insulated units with remote compressors that run directly on 12VDC or 24 VDC. Unfortunately the only unit they make that will fit in our enclosure is 9.6 cubic feet, and some of that is the freezer compartment. It would allow us to build a generous vertical slide out pantry, but it is just not enough refrigerator volume. Replacing the refrigerator is going to be a difficult project but it will be nice when we are done, especially if we can gain a tall, narrow, deep pantry in the bargain. I plan to call SunFrost and Polar Power to see if they will make a custom sized unit and if so, what the added charge would be, but I expect the answer to be “no.”
I am once again behind on posting blog entries and need to upload all of the posts so far for May. I did not take any photos in that time so they will be a bit less work. I did take photos today, however, so now that we are back in project mode I really need to get back in the habit of off-loading images daily, selecting a few for the blog, posting it, and filing all of them for use in future magazine articles.