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Destination, driving, Eclipse Trip, school bus RV, Skoolie

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 3)

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(Continued from Part 2)

Friday morning found us off to Metropolis via Louisville.  After a nice breakfast with our friends, we set out on an overcast day, finding our way to OH 562 to get us to  I-75, as I-71 was closed before the bridge to Kentucky.  Not surprisingly, the traffic was a crawl until we got over the bridge and into Kentucky.

It would have picked up more for us, had it not been for the hill. Called the ‘Cut-in-the Hill‘, it climbs about 380 feet over 4 miles, and a calculation over that distance gives it a 2% grade, though the steepest part reaches a about a 3% grade.  And as we were nowhere near up to speed when we hit it, we crawled up at 40 mph, but we weren’t alone, as there were several tractor-trailers in the same situation.

But on the other hand, there was a huge duck atop a building (Cornerstone at Norwood along I-71, for the 23rd Annual Rubber Duck Regatta)

But after that, the drive was pretty nice.  After the rain, the day was a little cooler than the first day, and the engine temperatures didn’t need as much attention, even with the hills and high speeds.  It did still take some attention, as there seemed to be more ‘discourteous’ drivers (not leaving space, weaving in/out of lanes, speeding in excess, cutting nearly sideways across several lanes of traffic to exit suddenly) here than there were in Ohio, and THAT was more than I’m used to dealing with on the road in New York.

But by the time we got to Louisville, though, I was used to it and was being a bit more careful than usual.  Before we were really deep into the city, we had to pull off because the Embroiderer’s Guild of America (EGA) is headquartered in the Butchertown neighborhood.  As my wife is a member of the EGA, and they have a small collection of high quality needlework, we needed to stop.

The Water Tower & Pumpworks around 1860.

As the name suggests, Butchertown was originally full of stockyards, and near where the Beargrass Creek was rerouted to, making it a great place to dump all the unwanted trimmings and such so they would float away to the nearby Ohio River.  So it was a great drive along River Road (right along the river) from the Louisville Water Tower Park to what seemed an overly industrial area for embroiderers.

But the EGA Headquarters is in a readapted historic leather work and cotton sash factory and warehouse (The Pointe), so that explained it.  However, the kind of residences that would have been for workers in such a mid-to-late 1800’s area were small and densely packed, and many didn’t have off-street parking to speak of.  Meaning that there wasn’t anywhere for us to park the bus! There were, however, a number of businesses around with large parking lots, so my wife went off to see if any of them would give us permission to park, while I waited in the bus to be technically ‘standing’ in a no-parking area.

The bus in the Butchertown Pizza Hall parking lot.

After making her way from business to business around the block, she came back to direct me to the parking area of the Butchertown Pizza Hall, where she spoke with one of the owners, and where, as we drove up, employees were moving cars from the back of the lot to give us space to park!  My wife had said that we would definitely buy something there, the owner had said that we didn’t need to, but we were determined to have lunch there after we’d gone to the EGA Headquarters.

A closeup of one of several wall-length hangings at the EGA Headquarters.

Being only a block and a half from the headquarters, it took little time to walk over there and make our way to the back of the building to see what there was. The re-purposed building was high-ceilinged, bright, and airy with terrific heavy wood floors.  The EGA offices were likewise bright and airy, and the displays of needlework were well-displayed over the walls of the small gallery.

The EGA dollhouse, full of miniature embroidery!

We spent a half-hour or so looking over the stitching, the needlework in the display dollhouse, and chatting with the staff members there, especially as one was about to be heading off to Tennessee to watch the eclipse!

And more modern needleart …

After that, we headed back to have some pizza for lunch.

We expected the Butchertown Pizza Hall to have pizza, but they also had wings, so we opted to not get individual lunch specials, but get a pizza with slices of home-made meatballs and mozzarella, and an order of bourbon-honey wings (we were in Kentucky so it made more sense than hot wings).

Our Butchertown Pizza Hall pizza!

The pizza was a full 18″ pizza with a fairly thin crust you could fold to eat.  The sauce and meatballs were really nicely spiced/herbed and the pizza as a whole was really filling!  Even with our growing boy, we barely got through half of it.

And some bourbon-honey wings!

The wings were just awesome.  And coming from Buffalo, I guess you could say that we’re sort of ‘wing snobs’.  While Buffalo is known as the ‘birth place of chicken wings’, even in Buffalo, people know where the best wings in the city are and what makes a good wing.  The Butchertown Pizza Hall wings had the hallmarks of great wings, being completely cooked through, still tender and juicy, with crispy skin.  The sauce was really well put together, being just a bit sweet and buttery, with a well-rounded bourbon flavor that made them way too easy to eat.

While we finished the wings, we had to get the rest of the pizza to go, and left feeling very satisfied and happy that we’d found the place. It was well worth the stop.

Then we headed off to the Bulleit Distillery, originally the Stitzel-Weller Distillery, which was only 20 minutes away.

(Continued in Part 4)

 

Appliance, Backup Camera, Dash Cam, Destination, driving, Eclipse Trip, Electrics, school bus RV, Skoolie

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 2)

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(continued from Part 1)

We planned out our meals, assuming that there would be days when it would be too hot to want to cook over the fire, but leaving room for a hot meal too.  My wife had shopped just before we left, and had looked for some steaks to take with us.  The store, however, had some ribs that were on sale (50% off!) so those were what came, along with some hamburgers, luncheon meats, hummus, snacking vegetables, cheeses, frozen pizzas, bagels …  The list went on.

The regular canned & dry goods pantry.

Luckily, our fridge is pretty big, and everything we wanted to take that needed to be kept cold fit.  We also had a bunch of canned goods, soups, beans, tomatoes, spam (of course), herring, you name it.  I usually keep a stock of those on the bus, but we added in some more soups and things.

By 11:00 am, we were all packed up, the house was secure (after being locked and alarmed and then me realizing that ALL my directions were sitting on the kitchen table!) and we started off. It was a pretty nice day, and after a quick weekend trip to Sprague Brook Park the weekend before (as a sort of shakedown trip) I’d filled the tank, so we were all set.

Except that the inverter wasn’t working.

Rolling farmland and countryside as seen from a moving bus …

I didn’t think it was a big deal, and we just kept going.  Along through New York on I-90, the speed limit was 65 mph, which is the top end for the bus, so that was fine.  It was a hot day though, and the temperatures kept creeping up over 200, so I feathered things a little to watch that.

I was also watching the output from the backup camera that I had finally installed.  It does a nice job, the static lines on the screen indicating about 1′, 3′, 5′, and 12′ from the rear bumper.  It also has a large field of view as I mounted it just up above and to the side of the rear door. (It was a little odd at first though, as the 140 degree fish-eye picks up the break and signal lights!)  The screen is nice, because if I turn the power to the camera off with a handy dash switch, it goes to sleep until it gets a signal form the camera.

But I had plenty of time to get used to the camera and watching temperature gauge along in New York. The I-90 through Pennsylvania, though, had sections of the 90 that had a 70 mph limit, which meant that I was holding some of the trucks back (especially on some of the steeper hills where we lost speed).  I really felt badly about that, but we continued on into Ohio.

Which also had 70 mph speed limits.

And the hills got steeper, so our average speed dropped some more.

Many people don’t realize that there’s a major watershed divide in Ohio, and as we headed south from Cleveland, we were heading uphill toward that.  Using a really cool website called www.flattestroute.com, I’ve been to find out the grades of the possible routes that we’ve looked at to travel on.  The route from Buffalo to Cincinnati is interesting as we start out in Buffalo at about 600 feet above sea level, and end up at about 485 feet above sea level at Cincinnati, but hit altitudes of almost 1400 feet along the way.

North of the red line goes to the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence River, and south of it ends up in the Mississippi.
Altitude and slope of the route between Buffalo on left) and Cincinnati on right).

Just for interest, the first peak on that altitude graph is just east of Erie, PA (1259′), with the next lowest point being just east of the Pennsylvania/Ohio state line (677′), followed by the low point at the I-90 and I-271 interchange (648′).  The next high point was near Woodmere (1193′), but when we got to where 271 crosses the Cuyahoga Valley National Park it was lower (968′), only to rise again when we got to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River/Mississippi River Watershed boundary, just south of Medina, OH at about 1216 feet.  Then it was down again near Burbank (920′), and finally up to the highest point of our trip near Lexington, at 1391 feet, before our next low point just south of Lou Berlinner Park in Columbus (707′).  Another climb after we were out of the city brought us to the next high point at Exit 58 for Bowersville (1078′), then the next low near Mason, OH (762′), the next high point near Landon (871′), then finally the low of the Ridge Road Exit where we got off for the night (588′).

So, just looking at our starting and finishing altitude for our first day, we went down 12 feet, but if you look at even just the major high and low points along that day’s route, our ups and downs total some 5210 feet of altitude change!

And by the time we hit Jeffersonville, we were near a quarter tank of fuel, and decided to stop at a Love’s for fuel.  As per all of the travel stops that I’ve been to, I expected that the diesel pumps to be set for easier access for large vehicles, and away from the gas pumps.  Accordingly, Love’s has a banks of diesel pumps, and all the trucks are lined up right there, so I pull the bus in.  We wait for 10-15 minutes for the trucks ahead to fill, clean their windshields, and finally move ahead, and try to run our cards in the automated pumps.  Not a single one of them is accepted, they’re all declined.

I go through a minor panic, and my wife runs in to find out if there’s something wrong with the card reader.  And she has to wait on line for several minutes to find out that ALL of the pumps in those banks only take corporate cards, not regular credit cards.  If we want to use a regular card, we have to go to the one pump mixed in with the gas pumps that dispenses diesel. Which I was able to do.  And finally we got filled up and were back on the road.

Anyhow, we have friends who live not far from the Ridge Road exit in Cincinnati, so we got to drive down some lovely quiet little streets to get to theirs. We had talked about parking in front of their house on their dead-end street, but there were too many cars, and the exhaust pipe of the bus scraped about half-way up the slope of the entrance to their driveway, so backing in there didn’t work either.  So it was a multi-point turn (made much easier by the back-up camera) to turn around head the bus back out on their small street where we parked in the lot of a small apartment building at the end of the street that was in renovations (and our friends knew the manager who said it was okay).

We were treated to a great meal and a tour of their house (all the cabinets were hand-made by our friend Jeff, and they’ve stripped and refinished all the original woodwork, so it was great).  The rain which had been forecast for our trip had been spotty as we got close to Cincinnati, but really let loose once we stopped.  But at that point, it didn’t really matter, we were tired and ready to sleep.

But …

Without the inverter running (and since I don’t have the LP plumbed for the fridge yet), our fridge was a big cooler.  We had some worries, but there wasn’t much we could do right then, so we just left the doors closed.

The first day of the trip was done, and tomorrow would be a Kentucky day …

(continued in Part 3)

 

 

 

bus trouble, Engine, learning, School Bus, school bus RV, Skoolie

Replacing the IPR *or* No more Hot Start Fail!

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So, I finally got to replace the IPR (Injector Pressure Regulator), in hopes of tackling the very frustrating Hot Start Fail problem that I’ve been dealing with on the bus’ T444E engine.  The IPR is attached to the base of the high pressure oil pump, between the valve covers and kind of under the fuel filter/water separator, and lots and lots of wires and air ducting.

In doing my research on changing this part, I found that I’d have to be prepared for some oil leakage from the high pressure pump’s reservoir, and that I’d need a deep socket to get the regulator itself out.  I had a chuck pad I could use (they’re really absorbent) and was able to slide it in under the old IPR to catch the escaping oil – though no quantity had been specified, just that I should “have a bunch of paper towels ready”.  I hoped I was ready.

The IPR is a solenoid valve, and the electromagnet comes off the stem that houses the moving bit to control oil flow.  So, to take the piece off, you first have to remove the holding nut, a spacer, and the electromagnet from the stem, which can then be unscrewed.
All in this very small place.

But it can be done, and relatively quickly, it turns out.  The electromagnet has an electrical connection for controlling it, and that just has two clips on either side, then slides out and can be woven back around some pipes and wires to keep it out of the way.  The upper portion of the plug is wider than the lower, so you can’t plug it in the wrong way – an important detail for putting everything back together and doing it by feel.

The next thing is to take off the 3/4″ nut that holds the electromagnet and spacer onto the stem.  This is a very thin metal nut, so it doesn’t take much to get it off, but if your 3/4″ wrench is long (like mine), be prepared to make a bunch of very tiny pulls to get it finger-loose.

Once the nut is off, the electromagnet and spacer should come right off.  I ended up having to unscrew the spacer for a bit along the threads for the holding nut before it broke loose enough to slide.  And a little wiggling was necessary to get the electromagnet to slide, but it came more easily than the spacer once I got it wiggling.

It was then time to get the deep socket.  In doing my research, I had taken the new IPR I had apart and fitted the stem to a large (shallow) socket that I had to find that it was a 1 1/8″ size.  Our local Autozone had a deep socket in stock for $8, so that wasn’t bad at all to get the right tool.  However, the stem is so long that you need every bit of space in the deep socket (I wasn’t sure that the ratchet end would sit in the socket securely), and it turned out that the deep socket’s center hole wasn’t a full 1/2″ in diameter, so it wouldn’t fit the stem up into it.  And of course, that would mean that the socket wouldn’t engage the points.  Luckily, I was able to use a 1/2″ drill and get the hole open so that it would work.

Then there was just the matter of getting the socket onto the stem, which involved some wiggling, moving of wire harnesses this way and that, and then, once on, doing some more of it it get the ratchet down to engage it.  For this, I ended up using the 3/8″ ratchet with a 1/2″ adapter on it to be able to get a better pull, as well as to get a spacer between the socket and ratchet that was long enough, but not too long, to work around hard engine elements.

The stem broke loose fairly easily, and with some wiggling and shifting, it came out!  I could see that the chuck pad had collected some oil, but couldn’t see how much at that point.  But the important step of removal was now complete.

I transferred the protective red plastic cap from the new stem to the old one, and set about reversing the process to install the new IPR.  The only real difference was that as I was tightening the new stem in place, I slid the chuck pad back away from the high pressure oil pump, so it wouldn’t have a chance of getting caught and messing up the seal.  Once the stem was nice and snug, and the electromagnet, spacer and holding nut were on and secure, I plugged the control wire back in.

In cleaning up, I checked out the chuck pad.  It looks like there might have been about 4-6 oz of oil that drained out when the stem came out of the pump.  I don’t know if that’s typical, but it’s my best estimate.

Once all the bits were stowed away, I started up the bus.  It cranked without starting at first, but knowing that it would have to pull enough oil to the high pressure pump before it would start, I kept it cranking, and then it caught.  It ran rather ragged for the first half-minute, then smoothed out pretty well.

The new IPR is more responsive than the old one, but some of that could be  in the fact that part of the seal on the bottom of the old IPR was missing!  I’m wondering if that, coupled with either less viscous hot oil, or perhaps some dynamic of the metal being heated was what was causing the hot start fail.

At any rate, a quick test-drive, then attempted restart of the engine proves that the engine now starts up fine when hot.  It also seems a bit more responsive to the accelerator pedal, so I have to get used to starting off in second all over again.