Tag Archives: Shur-Flo

2013_07_11 (Thu) We Finally Got To Use “Guns”

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The team receiving the daily building instructions from Brian at "circle."

The team receiving the daily building instructions from Brian at “circle.”

The forecast for today was partly cloudy with 60% humidity and a high of 100 degrees F.  Most of the team was at the Works site and ready to go by 7:00 AM.  The main task today was to set all of the interior partition walls, nail them to the (concrete) floor, and tie them together.  Additional work included building the front wall and beginning to assemble the west side wall.

Assembled partition walls ready to be installed.

Assembled partition walls ready to be installed.

There was other work, of course.  At 9:00 AM six of us went over to the other building site at Popular Grove to load the roof trusses for the Works house onto a 2-ton flatbed truck.

Retrieving roof trusses from the Poplar Grove building site.

Retrieving roof trusses from the Poplar Grove building site.

The roof trusses.

The roof trusses.

When the truck got back to the Works site, everyone pitched in to unload and stack the trusses.

Unloading the roof trusses.

Unloading the roof trusses.

When it was time to install the partition walls, I volunteered to use the RAMSET to nail them to the floor.  This tool is a gun that takes special hardened nails and drives them using a .22 caliber blank.  This RAMSET was a single shot model that had a pump action for the firing chamber.  With the chamber open, a nail is loaded into the barrel and then a .22 blank into the firing chamber.  The pump slide is pulled back to close the firing chamber and cock the firing pin.  The tip of the nail must be pressed into the wood to release the safety interlock.  The trigger can then be pulled to drive the nail through the board and into the concrete floor.  Sliding the pump forward opens the firing chamber and un-chambers the spent shell so it can be removed.  We try to keep our worksite clean as we go, so I put the spent shells in a tool belt pouch rather than ejecting them onto the floor.

Installing the interior partition walls.

Installing the interior partition walls.

After lunch a couple of our team members went to work at the ReStore, and seven others went to help Matt load a trailer and pickup truck with donated materials from a closet organizer company that went out of business.  That left half of our team at the Works site, some of whom (including Linda) continued working on the 76 foot long west wall which is being built in three sections.

Bruce connecting interior partition walls together.

Bruce connecting interior partition walls together.

The partition walls still needed to be pinned together, so John, Bruce (the other one) and I worked on that.  Brian finally got the air-powered framing nailer and air compressor out for this task as we had to hold pieces in alignment and then nail them at awkward angles while standing on a ladder.  I did the ladder work with the nail gun, so that was my second use of a “gun” today.  Now I really feel like I am in the west!

 

Discussing the plans with Sandy, the architect.

Discussing the plans with Sandyy, the architect.

We wrapped up at the Works site by 2:00 PM as planned but were asked to join the rest of the team at the ReStore to help unload the donated material.  That made for a longer day, and everyone was beat by the time we finished.  But we accomplished a lot, and that felt good.

 

 

We did not go for a walk as we were very tired and I had to sanitize our fresh water system as the water in the fresh water tank had turned rather foul.  We try to travel with fresh water “just in case” we need to boondock or pull of to the side of the road and use the on-board facilities.  What we have discovered, however, is that the water can only be left in there for so long, especially with long, not days, before it goes bad.  I started the sanitizing process around 3:00 PM.

Sanitizing a fresh water system on a RV involves the dumping, adding, and pumping of water along with the use of chlorine (household bleach) and the removal/replacement of carbon filters, which will be overwhelmed and ruined by running chlorine through them.  The process takes time and uses (wastes?) water because the chlorine has to be diluted to the proper concentration (1/4 cup per 15 gallons tank capacity), flushed into the fresh water tank from an empty filter housing, circulated through all of the plumbing, and allowed to sit for hours before being rinsed out with fresh water.  First I had to dump the old, gnarly water.  It’s still considered fresh water, so it’s OK to dump it on the ground.  We are lucky in that our 125 gallon fresh water tank has a 1.5″ RV dump valve installed near the bottom that discharges through the floor of the bay and can be used to drain the tank relatively quickly.

We do not have any way to pour chlorine directly into the tank, so I have to shut off the water, relieve the pressure, unscrew the inline filter housing, remove the carbon filter, pour the pre-determined amount of chlorine into the housing, screw the housing back onto its base, and start filling the tank by opening the diverter valve and adding water to the tank.  I then have to use the house water pump to fill every inch of plumbing in the rig, and let the diluted chlorine solution sit for 3 to 4 hours and do its magic.  I know I have chlorine in all of the plumbing when I can smell it coming out of all of the faucets.

By 4:30 PM most of us had recovered sufficiently from our long, hot work day to gather at Kathy’s motorhome for our SKP social.  We were joined by Russell, a fellow SKP from Texas, as a SKP happy hour is always open to any SKPs who are around.  We’ve met one other SKP on our evening walks, but he did not attend.

We had a light dinner of Masala Lentil Pilaf.  By the time we were done it was 8 PM and still warm, so we skipped our evening walk.  The chlorine solution had been in the plumbing for about four hours so I dumped the fresh tank (again) and refilled it with good water from the campground through our sediment filter, water softener, and carbon filter, which I had re-installed in the inline housing.  The Shur-Flo pump was then used to flush all of the lines out with fresh water.

We finally took our showers and Linda headed off to bed while I replied to e-mails and worked on this blog post.

BTW:  The Shur-Flo 4048 water pump is working very well, providing better pressure and flow than we get from the campground connection.  Given that the pump is working well, it us our plan to start using the water from the tank to keep it from going bad and refill it as needed.  There is also the issue of having water pressure applied to the coach when we are not here.  Whether it’s the shore hose or the on-board pump, having the water system pressurized poses a risk of flooding and water damage if the system develops a leak.  In general, the system should not be pressurized unless it is being used and can be monitored.

 

2013_06_10 (Mon) Working On The Bus In Twelve Mile

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Linda worked all day on the accounting for Service Motors.  Butch and I drove to Logansport first thing in the morning to get various parts for the bus projects.  When we got back, Butch welded unions on either end of the bendable exhaust while I worked on the water pump issue.  On the genset end, one part of the union was welded to a cut-off pipe nipple and then threaded into the outlet from the GenSet turbocharger.  The mating part for the other end was already installed in the floor of the generator bay.  We secured the pipe with the unions on each end and ran the genset to check for leaks.  Seeing none, we bent the pipe into its initial/open position.  I them wrapped it in 2” wide fiberglass header heat wrap, using a 50% overlap, and secured it with hose clamps.  We tested it again and say no evidence of leaks, so we slide the genset back into the bay and coaxed the pipe into its final/closed position.  It now works well and looks nice.

Genset exhaust union

Genset exhaust union and bendable pipe

The fresh water pump is connected to the coach plumbing by 30” long hoses whose purpose,

beyond allowing the connections to be made, is to isolate the plumbing from the vibration of the pump.  We disconnected the pump outlet hose from the plumbing and checked the pump flow by pumping the discharge into a bucket.  The flow was not good.  We then attached the hoses so we could draw water out of the bucket and pump it into the fresh water tank, thus back flushing the supply (suction) line.  That seemed to improve the flow a bit.  We also drew from the bucket to test the outgoing lines to house and that flow was also quite restricted.

One of the problems with bus conversions is that they are essentially one-of-a-kind vehicles built to the requirements of specific original buyers.  To that extent they are custom built more than they are engineered, and that really shows up in the systems that are hidden from view.  Our fresh water system was built with two supply lines from the fresh water tank to the water pump.  These lines leave the fresh water tank on the driver side near the floor of the bay and are routed up and over

the fresh water tank to the other side of the bay and back down to a compartment about 18 inches above the bay floor.  This is definitely not a good design as water pumps like the Shur-Flo 4048 are not designed to draw very hard on the vacuum side.  We back-flushed the other supply line and them plumbed the two lines together using additional short hose sections, plastic pipe nipples, and black iron pipe connectors.  The flow was improved a bit, and we decided it was as good as we were going to make it for now.

Long term the better solution will be to relocate the water pump to the driver side of the bay and mount it at floor level near where the water exits the fresh water tank, which will eliminate the draw on the vacuum side.  I will then attach the outlet of the pump to a new, larger supply line and route it to the other side of the bay and then redo the plumbing in that compartment to eliminate as many

of the right angle fittings, T-fittings, and valves as possible.

In the midst of all this work we also discovered that the middle (kitchen) air-conditioner was not producing any cooling.  Butch, among many other things, is an HVAC guy, and suggested we take a look at the three house AC units before we left the next morning.  Knowing that we would be spending much of the summer in the high plains and mountains of the west, that sounded like a good idea to us.

While it was not our intent to work on the Zena power generator, I was able to pick up some welding cable and crimp on terminal lugs and make the battery connection cables using Butch’s press.  They did not get installed, however, as I still need to locate and mount a fuse holder for a Class-T fuse.

A good day’s work done, we headed to Logansport for dinner at Pizza Hut.  Pizza hut serves various pasta dishes, but they all involve meat sauce and/or cheese.  We had a thin-crust pizza with no cheese, and it was OK.  They also have a salad bar, and that was OK too.

 

2013_06_08 (Sat) Set…

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Reorganizing the front bay

Reorganizing the front bay

As a result of the work I had been doing on the coach since the previous July, the storage bays had become somewhat disorganized.  We decided to empty the front bay into the driveway and also moved much of the RV related stuff in the garage out into the driveway.  (“Stuff” is a technical RVing term, sometimes spelled “stuf” when used as a “4-letter” word.)  We then selected and repacked items for travel, reloaded the front bay in an organized fashion, and put everything else back in the garage in as organized a way as we could given our time constraints.  Although simple to describe, this took a good portion of the day to accomplish.

We then filled the fresh water tank with filtered/softened water (but not Reverse Osmosis, or RO) and de-winterized the plumbing by flushing the potable antifreeze from all of the lines.  We did this using both shoreline water and water pumped from the fresh water tank using the on-board water pump to make sure the anti-freeze was out of all of the lines.  This was the first time the new pump had been used and the water flow was still surprisingly poor, not what we had expected.  I e-mailed Butch Williams, a fellow busnut, to give him a heads up, as their house/business in Indiana was our first planned stop, hoping that he might be able to help me figure out what was wrong, and, more importantly, what to do to try to fix it.

By the end of the day we were 98% ready to go, but with a number of question marks hanging over our heads.

 

2013_06_07 (Fri) Ready…

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Welcome to our blog.  I (Bruce) will be the primary person posting here, but Linda may contribute something from time-to-time.

We purchased our converted coach in September 2009.  It is a Prevost H3-40 that was built as a shell in August 1990 and sent directly to Royale Coach (Monaco) for conversion, so it was never in commercial service.  Monaco finished it in October 1991 and titled it as a 1992 vehicle.  The conversion was 18 years old when we bought it with the shell being about one year older.  It is now four years later.  Since it’s titled as a 1992, the state considers it to be 21 years old.  At age 25 I think it will qualify as a historic vehicle.  The license plate is OMNIBUS, from the French phrase meaning “every man’s conveyance.”  The term “bus” was ultimately derived from this word.

As best we can tell we are the 4th owners.  The coach had been sitting (outside) in a northern climate for at least a couple of years before we bought it.  We were still a few years from retirement at that point and wanted some time to fix it up while we were still gainfully employed.  We have been fixing it up ever since, while using it primarily to attend nearby RV rallies.  I have been submitting articles to Bus Conversions Magazine describing some of this work.  The first article was in the February 2013 issue, where our coach was featured on the cover.

I (Bruce) retired June 1st 2012, and Linda retired April 1st, 2013 (no fooling).  We have been pushing hard to prepare for our first extended travels.  We planned to leave on June 1st, but could not pull everything together in time.  We finally set our deadline as June 9th, ready or not.  On the date of this post (2 days prior to departure) I tried to finish up work on several bus projects as best I could, which is to say, they were not really finished.

One of my projects was the installation of a Zena power generator system for charging the house batteries while driving the coach.  The physical components were all installed, and the wires were all run but not completely hooked up and thus not yet operational.  This is a complicated system that needs to be installed correctly, so it was unlikely that I would finish this project while on the road.  This was not absolutely necessary for travel, however, and finishing the project could wait.

I had also installed a Parker Fuel Polishing Module (FPM) and had to redo some of the fuel lines due to leaks.  The re-worked lines still had a small leak in the return line from the Aqua-Hot.  The leak is either where the hose fitting threads into the check valve or between the two halve of the check valve body itself.  The purpose of the FPM is to circulate and clean the diesel fuel when the coach is parked/stored long-term, so it was also not necessary for travel.  The leak is only present when running the FPM; operation of the Aqua-Hot was unaffected, so it was usable while traveling.

Another project I was trying to wrap up was replacing the leaking flexible exhaust pipe in the generator bay.  I discovered that I was unable to get the new bendable exhaust pipe end-fittings to fit on either the powerplant exhaust or the fitting going through the bay floor so that they would not leak.  This, in turn, prevented me from wrapping the pipe in exhaust header insulation.  Without a leak-free, heat-insulated genset exhaust we would be unable to use the genset, and that would be a problem for travel.

Finally, I had replaced two older Aqua-Jet fresh water pumps with a single Shur-Flo 4048 water pump.  The pump was installed and connected, but yet to be tested as we had not yet filled the fresh water tank.  All-in-all it was a pretty discouraging start to a long trip.

While I was wrapping this stuff up Linda started cleaning and organizing the interior of the coach to make it ready for travel.  We spent the evening trying to get the house ready for us to be away for a while.