Life With A Car Trailer

As far as I can remember there has for the past 50 years or so almost always been a car trailer lurking in and around our back yard. I have always been tinkering with things mechanical like race cars, old cars, old tractors, or anything as Lucy says that makes noise. And as such a car trailer or equipment trailer has been part of the tool kit. My 1928 Peerles road from Kittery Maine barn fresh to our home in Massachusetts on a trailer behind our then new 1973 Ford pick up as did most of my other treasures. When we moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire there were many trips with the trailer behind our Dodge van to get all my junk moved. So trailers of the “move the mechanical stuff” genre have been a part of my life forever. I had also owned a variety of motor homes over the years and the car trailer then was pressed into duty to transport what ever car we wanted to take along. Now that is not to say that I did not stray once in a while and tow with a tow bar or a dolly. In fact when we went to the 1985 Daytona 500 we had a then pre production Ford Taurus station wagon on a tow dolly behind our old Winnie. The car was on loan to me, I was an auto writer then road testing and writing about new cars, by Ford Motor. Only they did not know that I was towing it to Florida and that it would be seen by almost all of the motoring press in the world, but that is a story for another time. Over the years I have gone through a number of car trailers, some good and some bad.... Read more

Like Old Busses? Check Out The Bus Museum

By Brad Sears Hershey Pa: Hershey is known world over as the town that Chocolate built and proudly advertises that fact with the downtown district street lamps being the shape of Hershey Kisses. The smell of chocolate permeates the air giving the manufacturing town a truly sweet smell. The climate and soil around Hershey produces a vibrant green growth of grass that makes the entire are look like a well groomed golf course. During three seasons of the year it is tourist town with the world class Hershey Theme Park, Chocolate World, Chocolate Museum, and more. However for the second weekend in October the old car crowd invades town for the Antique Automobile Club of America’s annual swap meet and show, the largest in the country and possibly the world. The event was held at members homes until 1942 when it grew too big for private homes. The show continued to grow and was finally moved to Hershey Stadium for the October show in 1954 with the paved parking lot reserved for the 2,000 plus cars that showed up for the Saturday show. The surrounding grass fields were used for the for the swap meet. The problem with this was it is prone to rain in October in this part of Pennsylvania. The first year that I went to Hershey as a vendor, in the mid 1960’s, we were on the field the day before the show began and had tables set up, merchandise displayed, and tables covered for the night waiting for opening day. Sometime during the night we woke to the sounds of rain falling on the... Read more

Some Of the Geezers Rambling’s On LED’s, CF’s, and Other Stuff

By Brad Sears In the last few blogs I have kind of zeroed in on the electrical side of the rig. You know, battery voltage and LED’s so it blew my mind when Sunday Morning on CBS-TV aired the following. It seems that the first recorded pedestrian/auto fatality in the US occurred in New York as follows. See the connection to electricity; 1899: Henry Bliss becomes the first pedestrian known to be killed by an automobile in North America. Bliss, a Manhattan real estate salesman, had just stepped off a streetcar (electric trolley) at West 74th Street and Central Park West when he was struck by a passing taxicab. The driver of the cab, an electric-powered vehicle, was arrested and charged with manslaughter. The charges were dropped after it was determined that Bliss’ death was unintentional. Note, that in 1899 there were electric taxi cabs in New York City. Now one hundred and ten years later we are hyping electric vehicles as the latest and greatest. Electric cars were as popular or more so than gasoline driven machines in that era. The majority of the advances in electric use and vehicles has come from not the advance in battery technology but in the devices that are driven by the battery. Edison developed the incandescent filament lamp and for over one hundred years it was the standard. Now the LED and the CF are invading the lighting field and providing useable light while consuming 60 to 90% less power. In the last blog I commented about some lighting changes that I... Read more

The Big Switch to LEDs, Good or Bad

LEDs As Replacement For Incandescent Lights Last year, as those that have followed this Blog, I got bitten by the solar bug. We were leaving for a 6 month round the country trip and planning on a fair amount of boondocking. I contacted RV Solar in Phoenix Arizona and settled on a package that they sell as Noels Package. It consisted of a pair of 85 watt panels, control unit, a Magnum 3000 inverter/converter/charger, and most of the wiring to make the installation. Read more  Read More →

Is 43 Volts From the Converter Really Too Much?

Larry D. asked a question about charging voltage that has been asked a lot. His question: Brad, a battery charger question please. I have a Magnetek 7200 Charger/Converter in our 1993 Winnebago. Have you ever heard of the charging voltage increasing to 16.8 volts as the battery approaches full charge? I am not sure if this is normal or not or if the regulator is the problem? I have just replaced two size 27 old batteries that gassed and boiled out (which almost overcame me with H2S as I slept). I replaced it with one group 29 battery that also gassed and boiled on the first cycle. Brad: OK Larry, there is more to your question that I will address in a minute but lets take this part first. The problem is not the battery. The problem is in your charging device. All chargers are supposed to have a voltage high end limiting device in them to control the battery charge. In a 12 volt system that limit is usually around the 14.4 volt range. However my solar system will charge to 15.3 volts and then top off there. 16.8 volts is way too high and the charger needs service or replacement. Now to the second part of your question. Larry D. With no battery connected and the Converter/Charger on I turned on my radio. It commenced to crackle and then smoke came out of it. Would you believe that when I measured the voltage it was 43 volts? Brad: First of all a unit should never be run with the battery disconnected. The battery acts as an absorber for the current that the unit will put out. The... Read more

Battery Voltage, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This column is in reply to a question about the charging voltage being delivered to batteries while driving. The question from Bill is “I would like to know what the maximum battery charging voltage should be when the engine is running. My rig runs around 14.4 volts at anything over 1000 RPM. Is this voltage going to shorten the life of the battery? We usually drive 5 hours or so between camping stops. The coach battery is a group 24 deep cycle flooded cell type.” Read more  Read More →

Voltage The good, The Bad, and The Ugly

By Brad Sears This column is in reply to a question about the charging voltage being delivered to batteries while driving. The question from Bill is “I would like to know what the maximum battery charging voltage should be when the engine is running. My rig runs around 14.4 volts at anything over 1000 RPM. Is this voltage going to shorten the life of the battery? We usually drive 5 hours or so between camping stops. The coach battery is a group 24 deep cycle flooded cell type.” Well here’s the deal as I see it. The term 12 volt battery is a bit of a misnomer. We know that a battery is fully charged when the at rest voltage of the battery is 12.65 to12.7 volts depending on who is telling you what it should be. That means that when a battery has an at rest voltage of 12 volts that it is damned near dead. The definition of at rest is after the battery has been charged it is discharged a bit to remove what is called surface charge, and then allowed to rest, called recovery, a bit before the voltage is tested. Taking the voltage reading of the battery immediately after charging will give a false reading. In the charging process the battery will accumulate a surface charge that does not have deep reserve. The surface charge can be removed from a normal auto battery like a group 24 by turning the headlights on for three minutes. Then turn the lights off and let the battery recover for several minutes and read the voltage. That is when 12.65 to 12.7 volts indicates a full charge. A... Read more

CURUNCH THUMP THUMP!

By Brad Sears “What was that”, asked Lucy. I checked the rear view mirrors and there was a little white car veering away from the car trailer that was attached to the motor home. I was, at that point, in the middle of the intersection going straight across on a green light so I pulled to the curb on the other side of the intersection. After all it was morning ruse hour traffic in Harrisonburg, Virginia on a rainy spring morning and as the incident appeared minor I pulled clear of the intersection and over to the side. Almost instantly a police cruiser appeared with lights blazing. The other driver opened the damaged door and stepped out with a cell phone to her ear. She identified herself as a county employee and was talking to her supervisor on the phone. That is only the beginning of the story. The officer asked each of us for our papers and then asked up to wait in out vehicles for him to come back. He processed the county employee first and then came to the motor home. First he handed me my paper work and then issued me a citation and a summons to appear in court for illegal lane change. This without seeing the incident, taking measurements, in the absence of witnesses or anything else. As he asked me to sign the citation he said that he was going to the court and have the charges dropped but that under the law he had to other alternative than to issue the citation. He gave me the case number but not any information about the other driver and he had already sent her on... Read more

WERE BACK, SOLAR AND ALL!

THE TRIP IS OVER! WE ARE HOME! WERE BAAAACK! By Brad Sears Oh how time flies when you are having fun. Just over seven months ago Brian and I had the electrical system of the old Foretravel spread all over my work area. The solar panels were leaning up against the barn wall and the inverter/converter/charger and control units were laid out on the work bench. The new secondary circuit breaker panel had been purchased from Home Depot and the rolls of wire and boxes of connectors were ready to go. And the six batteries had been removed from the golf cart as it was not going with us, but the batteries were, and they were near new and tested perfectly. There is one point here that may drive some techies wild. The battery pack for the house system was a mix and match. There was the six 6 volt golf cart batteries connected in a series parallel configuration and they were then tied to a couple of year old 8-D heavy duty truck battery. The battery pack gave me 1025 amp hours of power meaning that we could draw one amp for 1025 hours, 1025 amps for one hour or any combination in-between. But the guru’s said that a mix and match was bad, however it worked well for us on the six month road trip and is still working. The only thing to watch here is to make sure that the batteries test good. A weak battery in the system will raise havoc. The system went together piece by piece and the original wiring modified to work with the new concept. That was to be able to use 110 volt A/C current... Read more

The Grand Adventure is Almost Over, and Tales of Solar

I have been negligent in writing blogs and have no excuse except that we have been having a blast traveling around the country in our old Foretravel. This trip as you might or might not remember was around the perimeter of the country dipping our literary toes in the waters of the four corners of the country. We left New Hampshire the 19th of October 2008 and headed west with our newly installed solar panels and big battery pack and inverter. The last time that I made this trip was in 1984 as a participant in One Lap America. OLA was a road rally around the perimeter of the country in seven days. It was the gasoline shortage version of Cannonball Run or Gumball Rally, which were flat out high speed dashes from the east coast to the west coast, making the 3,000 plus mile trip in just over 32 hours. This trip will take us, when completed, close to 7 months. Read more  Read More →

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