Category: Equipment

This is going to be tedious stuff, but necessary knowledge if you don’t want your solar installation going up in smoke. The voltages of most solar/battery/inverter installations are relatively easy to manage, but the currents used are not. I’ve seen all kinds of errors in installations, even from supposed professionals. I am NOT a professional, so you can rely on me to make some dumbass errors of my own. What I’m writing is the result of my research. Before you take my word for something, confirm it for yourself.

Let’s start with fuses and breakers. Most of the fuses and breakers you can pick up at the local hardware store are a bad idea for large amounts DC power–especially the breakers. Remember that alternating current passes through a 0 voltage, 0 current point 60 times a second. If the circuit breaker trips and an arc forms between the contacts it’s going to last at most for about 1/60th of a second unless the voltage of the next alternation is so far above the rating of the breaker that it can reinitiate an arc along the ionization path. Breakers have arc-quenching structures inside them to minimize the damage of opening a circuit under full fault load, but AC breakers are designed to take advantage of the short period the arc will last even if the quenching doesn’t work immediately. That doesn’t happen with a DC breaker, so the arc can persist, melt all the guts and catch the housing on fire. That’s probably not what you had in mind. Some AC breakers have a DC rating, but unless you’re prepared to dig deep into breaker specs you should simply choose a properly rated DC breaker. Which will probably be about five times what an AC breaker costs. That’s a small price to pay for not turning into a crispy critter because a cheaper breaker popped and flamed out while you slept.

I’ve also discovered that Square-D makes a series of breakers called AO or AOB that are DC rated up to 125VDC. I haven’t tried these but the price is in the $20-30 range.

Fuses also have DC issues. A fuse with too short an air gap after the fuse wire vaporizes can also turn into an arc ball. Make sure you choose a fuse that is rated for the current and voltage you are trying to interrupt. Don’t assume a 50 amp 125VAC fuse will interrupt 50amps at 40VDC. It’s not uncommon to see a 125VAC rated fuse downrated to 32VDC. Don’t guess at this.

You should fuse each set of panels on the positive leg. If you are connecting panels in series you need one fuse appropriate to the current and voltage on the combined positive leg. Panels connected in series flow the same current as one panel–only the voltage increases. In the example of my six 310 watt panels, I combined each pair in series. A single 310-watt panel with an output voltage of 40 volts delivers 7.75 amps (amps = watts/volts). Two panels in series yield 80 volts and 620 watts, but it’s still 7.75 amps. I used 10 amp in-line fuses in my installation.

It’s common to use a combiner box to house the fuses and bring all the rooftop wires and connectors into two power leads that go into the cabin and to a solar controllers. No additional fuse is required between the solar controller and the combiner box since each leg is already fused. Since I’m using two solar controllers I connected my six panels as adjoining pairs in series with the resulting three positive wires and three negative wires going directly to the solar controllers. The MC4 connectors that are typically attached to solar panels leads make it easy to connect pairs in series. Just connect one panel’s male connector to the second panel’s female connector. the remaining two leads will be one positive and one negative. You can connect prebuilt extension cables to these leads to reach your combiner box or solar controller. Most installers leave the factory-installed connectors in place and just coil up any excess wire. Cutting the wire may void the warranty. I’m not too concerned about the warranty so I made them fit with minimal wire runs to neaten things up and reduce wire losses, and added new MC4 connectors as necessary.

Wire Guage
The current-carrying capability of a wire is a function of it’s diameter. As we mentioned earlier, increasing the voltage doesn’t require heavier guage wire, though in some cases it might require better insulation. It’s unlikely you’ll encounter those cases unless you connect a lot of panels in series. The Standard UL 4703 Solar Panel Cable used for prefabbed panel wiring and extension wiring used for connecting solar panels to the controller is is rated to 600VDC. It has water- and UV-resistant insulation and connectors (MC4) suitable for exposed outdoor installations. Extension wire is generally sold as double-ended, terminated with male and female connectors. If you need two pieces 5 feet long you generally buy a 10 foot extension of the proper guage and cut it in the middle. But if you want a little color coding in your life you can buy red extension as well as the more somber black. The red extension generally has a female MC4 connector since the panel Plus side is a male connector. Extension cable is typically sold in 16, 14, 12 and 10 AWG sizes.

My panels have 14 AWG wire, which has plenty of capacity for the individual panels. But at 8 amps I’ll see a 2% voltage drop with only 4.5 feet of wire run. There’s one good reason for keeping those cable runs short. I used 12AWG for my extension cables to reduce the wire loss even though it’s not necessary for current carrying capacity.

So I have four panels feeding one MPPT controller connected to a 24 volt battery (two 12V batteries in series) and two panels feeding the second controller. The four panel set delivers 15.5 amps at 80 volts (1240 watts) to the controller . The controller converts the voltage to 24 volts and therefore delivers 51.5 amps to the batteries (1240 watts/24V = 51.5 amps) disregarding any losses. We need 6 AWG to carry that current to the battery. Note that 6AWG wire at 50 amps has a two percent voltage drop in just 5.5 feet. Got to keep those wire runs short or invest in really heavy wire.

I’m using DC breakers for the controller to battery connection. One for each of the controllers.

The battery to inverted connection is even uglier. My inverter is 6000 watt with peak watts or 18,000 watts for 20 seconds. The battery input to the inverter is 24 volts. sizing just for non-peak loads that’s 6000 watts/24 volts = 250 amps. That’s right off our little chart into /0 guage territory.

This chart doesn’t show voltage loss figures. The lengths listed are probably ten percent voltage loss numbers. I’ll be using 3/0 wire if I can keep the runs to less than ten feet, and 4/0 if I can’t.

Worse yet is the potential peak load, which is more important for fusing than for wire sizing. The most likely source of a high starting current is the air conditioner. The rated locked current load for my Mach 8 heat pump is 63 amps at 115 VAC. That’s 7245 watts, which translates to 302 amps at 24 VDC on the battery side of the inverter. It’s certainly possible to see that peak while other high-draw appliances are running, so I’d add another 100 amps to that figure to cover another 2400 watts of load, meaning I should probably fuse this wire with something like 400 amps. Or maybe more likely 300 amps of slo-blow since it should be a momentary load. I’ll also add soft start to my air conditioner.

I’ve also considered adding an ultracapacitor bank to the inverter input to smooth out demand on the batteries and give the wiring a break. Some of these whackier ideas will probably wait until I need to solve an actual problem instead of just getting out in front of one.

The next post will be about batterys and their management systems and I think I’ll be done unless people have other questions.

I’ve had a few questions about how and why I’m doing a solar/battery system for Fritz, what I’m using and how I chose it. This is going to be a fairly long post with a bit of math, so if you’re interested, get a cup of coffee and settle in.

Fritz is an extreme experiment. If I can make this system, sized in this way, work for Fritz, then it can be done almost anywhere. Fritz is a 1978 GMC motor coach. It’s not designed for this kind of stuff in ANY way. I’m using this coach because I appreciate the size, build quality, brilliant design, and overall character of these coaches. They’ve never been equaled. But it’s an insane platform for this experiment–which makes it perfect.

RV appliance and comfort systems haven’t changed much since the 70’s with pretty good reason: The systems work. A quick review will help the inexperienced, you veteran RVers can skip a few paragraphs.

A typical RV has a refrigerator, stove, a water heater, a furnace, and an air conditioner with propane tanks and a generator to make everything work when shore power isn’t available. The water heater is often dual-mode, gas/electric, as is the refrigerator. The furnace and stove burn propane, and the air conditioner is purely electric and may have an electric heating element to do double duty for space heating. With a few minor exceptions, all the electric components use standard 115V alternating current, just like your house.

In general, this system works fine, and many people are satisfied with it. There are some inconveniences and a few dangerous aspects, but it works. It’s good. But it’s not great, and it’s possible to do much better. Let’s start with propane. If it hadn’t been used for the last 50 years, with well-established appliances readily available, there is simply no way it would be introduced as the ideal fuel for appliances in confined spaces. It’s acceptable because it’s deployed and readily available. Lots of energy in those bottles, readily available–but also toxic and explosive. You’d have to be a little nutty to go ripping out all your propane-fueled appliances just because they might kill you, and that’s not really why I did it with Fritz, but yeah, I’m that kind of nut.

And then there are generators–gas or diesel. Generators suck. End of discussion. If you didn’t need one you’d never have it. They’re noisy, they stink, and they use a lot of fuel. It’s feasible to operate without one today, even if you’re boondocking. So that’s what I intend to do.

Appliances

I think the future for RV’s is all-electric, even the drivetrain, but it will take quite some time to get there. To my knowledge, there is one low voltage compressor-type refrigerator available for RV’s, the Nova Kool refrigerators from Canada. They represent a tiny fraction of the number of adsorption-type refrigerators sold today for RV use. They are ideal for all-electric use, drawing 2.6 amps at 24vdc.

There are no commercial alternatives to propane stoves, so that little carbon monoxide headache you get after cooking dinner is likely to persist a while. I’m replacing mine with induction plates–portable, efficient, versatile and cheap. Mine can be controlled from a smartphone and serves as a slow cooker and sous vide systems with temperature control of the contents of your pot via an attached thermometer. They draw 1600 watts at 115V. We also installed a Breville Smart toaster/oven that serves well for baking. At 1800 watts (80 amps at 24VDC) it’s a nasty load. My system can accommodate it, though we’re unlikely to do much baking without shore power.

The biggest issue most people question is the air conditioner–and rightly so. AC is a near requirement for the small space of an RV, and it’s a consistent load. You can decide not to bake a pie because you don’t want to use up your battery reserve, but who wants to swelter? RV air conditioners are 115VAC systems–no one has seen fit to build a DC one yet. It’s clearly feasible, but there isn’t a market demand for it. So my system needs to accommodate that AC load. A typical Coleman Mach8 heat pump draws 16 amps at 115VAC, or 1840 watts. Ignoring small inverter efficiency losses that means 76 amps at 24VDC. Starting current is around 60 amps at 115V, so 6900 watts or 290 amps at 24VDC. Yikes. Of course, a soft-start capacitor will help with that, but I’m sizing my inverter and system to accommodate that very hefty momentary load. More on that later.

Water heating is pretty straightforward. It’s not a continuous load and the water heaters in RVs are small and reasonably efficient as long as you don’t try to use much hot water. I’m simply not going to use the gas side–electric only. Mine takes 1400 watts. Another hefty load, but you can decide when and how to use it, and even if you just leave it on all the time, the load is only what is required to make up for hot water use and heat loss. I’ve taken advantage of eliminating the gas and required venting to substantially improve the insulation.

For heat, I’m using the AC heat pump, and I’ve added an electric strip for those occasions where the outside air temperature is too low for the heat pump to work. I’m a warm weather type, I don’t think Fritz is going skiing so I don’t think this is a big concern. I could be wrong.

Summing up the appliance loads:

Turn everything on at once and it’s about 280 amps at 24V,  which is 6686 watts. That’s why I installed an AIMS 6000 Watt low-frequency pure sine inverter that can handle peak loads to 18,000 watts for up to 20 seconds (no, I’m NOT going to test that claim), and why my battery to inverter circuit is fused for 300 Amps. And obviously, this system is going to depend on a lot of solar power, and some big lithium batteries. I could do this with AGM batteries, but who would want to? Lithium batteries will last much longer with these loads, are much lighter, and are ultimately less expensive. There are some legitimate concerns about Lithium batteries, especially for those who live in the frozen north, and we’ll talk about those later.

Anyone undertaking a similar project, even one of more modest ambition, can make the same kind of calculation. Decide what the minimum size inverter should be by adding up all the loads that could be put on it. You can choose to limit the loads by having electrical distribution sub-panels that provide inverter power only to those loads you choose, or you can go for broke and size your inverter to supply everything, worst case, as I have. Big low-frequency inverters aren’t cheap, but they aren’t the monster expense they used to be. My 6000-watt inverter was about $1300.  That’s for a highly-rated inverter charger that supports multiple battery chemistries, provides automatic power transfer with a 10ms switching time, hibernates at 25 watts, and has built-in GFCI and battery prioritization. In other words, a top of the line, feature rich inverter that could provide uninterruptible power to a small house. That might not seem all that exciting to most folks, but it sets my geeky heart fluttering.

The calculations for solar panel requirements, controller size and type, and battery bank require a little more work. We’ll get to that.

Solar Stuff
The underlying rap about solar power is that it’s expensive. People still apparently think we live in 1985. The current cost per kilowatt for solar panels is about $1.00 per watt, and if you don’t simply buy panels from the handiest source they are less. I paid $126 each for nine 310 watt panels. That’s $.40 per watt. Six of the panels are going on Fritz and three will go on my Airstream race car hauler–eventually. These big panels are not typically used in RV installations–the 100-watt panels are easier to handle and install–but I’m doing something a bit different anyway, I’m not installing a few hundred watts of solar, my Fritz installation is 1860 watts. You can get good quality 100 watt panels for about $100, which is $1 per watt, and that’s a pretty remarkable price. I have no trouble remembering when panels were $20 per watt–I was working at nuclear power plants at the time and people were saying solar power was the future. I thought they were morons. Oops.

If you’re trying to do a simple installation, these are not the panels for you. They require substantial fabrication to install.

Most modern Class A RV’s have a lot more roof than a 1978 GMC motorhome. It’s feasible to do a flat installation of several thousand watts without getting too creative. And on those big flat roofs, you could avoid shading just with positioning. You could also install a tilting system to improve the angle of the sun’s rays and substantially increase panel output when the sun is not overhead or in winter months. For Fritz, I simply raised the entire installation above all the roof-mounted equipment and covered the entire roof. I could make some of the panels tilt, but the improvement in low sun angle performance would come at a cost in complexity that would only work with the rig pointed in particular directions. If I find it’s necessary, I can retrofit tilting mechanisms, but for now, I just settle for a lot of cells.

If you’re doing an installation directly on your roof you need to map out how the equipment will shade potential locations for installation. Based on that map, you’re not only going to need to make decisions about which panels sometimes get shaded, but also which to connect in series or parallel. If one panel in a series string gets shading you lose most of the output of the entire string. That doesn’t harm anything, but it means a little shade takes a big bite out of your charging rate. There are good reasons to connect some of your panels in series, and yes, we’ll get to that soon. But if you have two panels in series, and one is shaded, neither will do you much good. If they’re in parallel and one is shaded, the other will still deliver power.

Charge Controllers
Here’s an easy one–get an MMPT controller. If you don’t want to know why, you just want to know how to select the right size, then skip the next few paragraphs.

Back in the old days of solar a typical panel generated about 16 to 18 volts and not a lot of amps. You could connect them right to a battery and just charge it. With typical use, the battery would never overcharge. If you didn’t draw enough power off, the system would overcharge the battery and slowly boil the battery dry. The earliest controllers simply opened the charging circuit when the battery was fully charged. PWM (Pulse width modulated) charge controllers do this a bit more gently, changing the amount of time the solar panels are connected to the battery. If the battery voltage is low the connect time is long. When the battery voltage gets higher the connected “pulse width” gets narrower, until it stops charging the battery almost completely. The voltage coming out of the PWM controller doesn’t change–just the amount of time the panel is connected. That’s fine for panels with lower cell counts, but today’s 60, 72 and 90 cell panels put out much higher voltages. The controller will be effectively averaging the output voltage of perhaps a 40 volt set of panels to something around 14 volts, so you’ll lose about 50 percent of the panel output. Of course, no one actually does that, most PWM installations match the panel voltage as close as possible to the battery charging voltage, but that means heavier wiring and more resistive losses for a similar system with an MMPT controller. The typical efficiency increase of an MPPT controller over PWM in properly sized systems is likely in the 30 percent range, but that’s still too much to give up.

MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) controllers are dc to dc converters that convert the panel voltage to the optimum charging voltage of the battery. The panels can operate at the most efficient voltage while the output voltage of the controller stays relatively constant, delivering as many amps as the solar cells can produce. The most sophisticated controllers can accommodate multiple battery chemistries, charging profiles, and output voltages. You can also use series connected cells, which means you can use lighter wire and suffer less energy loss in the wiring from the solar panels to the controller and from controller to batteries. The electronics are more sophisticated, so MPPT controllers are a little more expensive, but that’s changing as the MMPT controllers become the standard and are produced in larger quantities. MPPT will completely replace PWM in the near term.

Choosing and Sizing
All you need to do is pick the right controller. Yes, you can buy a properly sized kit, but you should know how to figure out something this simple. MPPT controllers are sized by output current. A 60 amp controller handles 60 amps of output, regardless of whether the output voltage is 12, 24, or 48 V. If you choose to have a 12 V system output and you have 720 watts of solar panels you need a 60 amp controller (720watts/12volts=60amps). If you have 24 V system output and have 720 watts of output you need a 30 amp controller (720watts/24V=30amps) and obviously, for a 48V battery at 720 watts you could use a 15 amp controller.

You also need to pay some attention to the input voltage. For an MPPT controller to be happy, the output voltage of the solar panels should be substantially more than the battery voltage, but not so high that the system can’t handle the voltage conversion. That’s a highly variable number that the manufacturer will supply, but a decent starting point is at least double the battery voltage and not much more than four times the battery voltage.

In Fritz, I’m using two MakeSkyBlue 60 amp MMPT controllers. I have six panels, connected in series pairs. The open circuit voltage of my 72 cell, 310-watt panels is 40V, so each series pair puts out 80V and about 7.75 amps. Typical practice is to connect rooftop panels into a combiner box which usually contains fuzes on the positive lead of each panel set and then combines the leads into a bus for the positive and negative sides. These combined connections are then lead into the cabin and to the controller through a single lead each for the plus and minus connection. I hope that makes sense, it was a little torturous to write.

I’m not doing that. I used inline fuzes that connect to the positive MC4 plugs and I ran all six panel connections–three positive, three negative–down to the two controllers.

Each controller has two sets of panel connectors, so two sets of connectors go to one controller and one set go to the other. Doing it that way gives me more options for output voltages and battery chemistry. The capacity of a single 60 amp controller was in the ballpark for connecting all three sets of panels to a single controller, but I would have been pushing the capacity limit. The controllers are about $150. For that price, having some redundancy, more flexibility, and more capacity margin seems like a bargain.

Well, OK, we’ve got solar power flowing to the controllers. This is getting ridiculously long. Let’s end here for now and I’ll do the rest in a few more posts.

No, it’s not a medical condition. As I mentioned in the last post I stripped one of the bolts on the driver’s side output flange. I ordered a rather expensive TimeSert kit to repair it. At least it wasn’t the $400 these kits used to cost–a more reasonable but still stiff eighty bucks.

Expense aside, the kit works very well and saved me from having to weld up the hole, drill and tap a new one. And I’m not sure what alloy the part is made from, so distortion or damage from welding is always possible. The drill grabbed some while I was removing the threads. I had some concern that the hole might not be properly aligned, but the tap stood straight.

The finished insert is flush to the surface, the small shoulder ensures it won’t turn out when the bolt is removed in this application, and the alignment is perfect. The chip inside the threads is just a chip left over from tapping the hole.

I’ve reassembled the driver’s side suspension and temporarily bolted up the flange with standard 3/8 X24 bolts, now I’m just waiting for some new ARP bolts to torque into place. Everything looks great and now it’s back to the 500 other things that need to be done.

Fritz has taken up a HUGE amount of my time this summer. It’s not a terrible thing since I’m enjoying the creative work, and the grunt side–the mechanic-ing–is familiar and comfortable.

The interior design is basically complete, though anyone looking at it might find that a surprise. It’s sparse. Diane and I really don’t like the cramped feeling of most motor homes–the dinette that takes up a huge block of space and leaves you edging your way down a narrow aisle. The heavy overhead cabinets, the cramped kitchen. So yeah, it’s simple and open.

Here’s a hugely distorted panoramic view of the interior:

The refrigerator is really great compressor type made by Nova Kool. It has the singular advantage of not bursting into flame as the absorption type occasionally do. It’s also very efficient in both  DC and AC mode. I made the decision to have no propane in this coach–all-electric. We’ll be cooking on induction plates, which can be used both inside and outdoors. They store under the counter with the pots and pans, leaving the counter space unencumbered. Above the refrigerator is an electric toaster oven. Very useful and fairly efficient. The heat from the oven warms the open rack above it, useful for both keeping food warm or warming plates.

The pantry shelves are all ultralight. The shelves I removed totaled over 120 pounds. These are less than ten pounds each

This is the over-counter light and vent fan for the kitchen. It also houses an outlet for the induction cooktops. The shelf above is for food prep. It includes a fold-out extension for supporting platters. The cooktops we are using are made by Tasty and include a thermometer and smartphone control, which lets them be controlled remotely or programmed for complex cooking sequences and can be used as a slow cooker.

While I was doing all this I also added a towbar/bumper to Archie, the dune buggy we plan to use as a dingy for Fritz.

The Propane tanks in the background are for my next really stupid project–a giant smoker in the style of Austin’s justifiably famous Franklin Barbecue.

These shelves are more high-tech than they seem–honeycomb aluminum panels covered with faux stingray shagreen and trimmed with aluminum edges. Turns out you can’t weld honeycomb aluminum–made a mess, and now we know, eh? The box below houses the water heater to the left, and a 6000-watt low-frequency true sine inverter charger and two 100AH 12V lithium batteries. The batteries currently are my own design, using LiFePO4 cells and a 12V BMS. I may switch to commercial LiFe batteries if my BMS continues to give me fits.

Ultimately I’ll have somewhere around 6-800AH (7000-10,000 watt/hours) of Lithium batteries, depending on what we determine is required. We want to be able to “dry” camp, meaning, no connection to power or water, but still cook and run air conditioning and heat as necessary. Which brings me to the massive solar array I’m sticking on the roof. Six 300 watt panels covering the entire roof–1800 watts of solar power. In full sun I should be able to run the air conditioner and still juice the batteries a little. The panels go over all the vents and air conditioners. We’ll have roof storage for some stuff, and of course for surfboards and foil equipment, but it will be under the solar panels. I’ve built the brackets for the raised rack and I’m waiting for some additional angle aluminum to weld up the rack frame. I’ve ordered a Colman Mach 8 low profile air conditioner to replace the tall one now in place. When the rack is done it will have a streamlined front cover and doors on the sides to allow stuff to be put on the roof. I’m going to cover the entire roof in EVA–basically yoga pads.

You might notice that there are no front wheels. The GMC coach in stock form weighs between 10,000 and 12,000 pounds and has the front end out of a 4000-pound Tornado. It looks as under-specced as that sounds. I’m installing a kit from Manny Trovao that replaces the lighter components with those from a 1 ton Chevy 4X4 truck and spaces the front wheels out even with the rear bogies. When I drove Fritz back to Hood River from Northern California I noted numerous handling flaws. I think this modification will eliminate a lot of them. I’m very glad that I did the tear-down, a lot of the front suspension was poorly assembled or had simply worn loose. The nuts holding the ball joints to the lower A-arm and control arm were finger-tight instead of 100 and 40 foot-pounds respectively. The passenger side control arm taper was beaten out by the ball joint working loose. The driver’s side lower A-arm had some kind of butchered modification or repair done to it. Seriously ugly.

Since I’m an idiot, I welded the seams of the suspension arms. Probably completely necessary, but I have all this cool welding equipment, so…

And of course, once you’ve welded the seams you need to clean them up and paint the parts. Am I just MAKING work for myself???

Here’s the front end with everything ripped out.

Kind of empty in there.

Here are the new knuckles, bearings, and disk rotors. Much meatier. The bearing are sealed and should be good for many beaucoup miles.

The instructions said to use a crowbar to hold the wheel while torquing the CV joint flange. I found that unhandy.

So I whipped this simple thing up. Much ho bettah.

Works for torquing the adapter onto the disk rotor as well.

Unfortunately, when I was torquing the last bolt on the driver’s side CV flange the bolt stripped out of the flange. I tried like crazy to convince myself it would be OK to just leave it, and it probably would. But I can’t do that kind of stuff. I’d think about it every time I drove. So I took the flange off and I’m waiting for a Time-sert kit to be delivered. The inserts will take full torque if installed properly. As it turns out the instructions have an error in them. With the original flanges and bolts, the passenger side bolts are longer than the driver’s side, and they are torqued to 75 foot-pounds. The driver’s side bolts are shorter, and they should be torqued to 55. The bolts Manny Trovao provides are all short, and he told me after I’d screwed the pooch that I should only torque them to 50 pounds and use red locktite. Ok, will do. I’m going to fiddle a bit with the bolts to get maximum engagement. Since I’ve had to take everything apart I might as well. It should go back together quickly once I get the new bits.

More on that later.

I still have a lot of wiring to do and a dashboard to build. But I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think.

May 27, 2007
I had the best intentions to post every day, but I’m way behind. I blame the frantic drives between tracks, a slow internet connection and too much fun to be had at Elkhart Lake. So I’ll use this post to catch you up on what happened.

The drive to Road America was long but interesting. Great scenery, what a beautiful country this is. I was astounded at the amount of traffic you encounter in nearly every town and city. People complain about the price of gas, but I don’t see any obvious evidence of anyone driving less. It’s also obvious that America continues to be “malled to death”. Everywhere you look there’s yet another franchised fast food joint going up. And there are not a lot of skinny people or healthy food available east of the Cascade mountains.

I listened to a lot of music, but I lost my notes. Then I started to listen to some books on CD. I listened to a David Baldacci novel called “Last Man Standing”, bad choice, contrived and juvenile.

My plan was to stop at Jack Drews house in Geneseo, Illinois to unload a couple of motors for him to build. Amazing little town, like some perfect slice of the midwest preserved by people who appreciate it. Sparkling clean, mature maple trees everywhere with fat squirrels running around. I made my way to Jack Drews house and had a nice conversation with him while we enjoyed a cigar. Had dinner at nice local restaurant for his visitors from England–Keith Files and John Wood, delightful guys. Joe Alexander showed up a little later. Very enjoyable, and good food, but for a guy who is used to eating healthy Northwest style, dishes like cheese sauce puddled on fried hashbrowns made my chest hurt (no, Diane I didn’t eat any, just looking at it made my arteries ache). I don’t know how these folks stay so healthy.

I spent the night in Nero parked in front of Jack’s house, and I got off to a fairly early start with Michael Connolly’s book “Chasing the Dime” on the CD player. It turned out to have a pretty shaky ending and there were several plot elements that were obviously being set up for later use. But at least he can write.

I got thoroughly lost, wound up stopping at a Best Buy to get a GPS Navigation system. I think it’s going to be worthwhile. I made it to the track after traveling an extra fifty miles and set up Nero near Tony Garmey’s trailer with Bill Hart and John James as Tony’s trackside support customers for the weekend.

ONE RESPONSE TO “CATCHING UP”
Bob Babcock Says:
May 26th, 2007 at 5:39 pm e
I envy you the trip Bill. I’m going to have to do something similar someday….albeit without the 40′ airstream/garage. Did you post your books on tape list? I could have told you to stay away from Last Man Standing….horrible…I felt cheated of the time I spent reading it.

You need to start posting some pictures in the blog….I appreciate descriptions but a thousand words and all.

Hows Nero handling….seems like it would be a beast….although Peyote probably isn’t all that much heavier than the cabinets and such you ripped out. What’s the weight differential?