Project: The Undocument Projects–Part 2

Well, as I said in my last post about undocumented projects, there was liable to be some I forgot. 

In this edition, I detail the second of my two current antenna arrays on my camper, my long range Yagi Wifi Mast.

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Yagi Wifi Antenna (February, 2010)

At my last place of residence during my full-timing days before I found Island Cove Park out on Sauvie Island, I had finally gotten myself a laptop. 

Where I was staying had Wifi, but even with being parked right next to the house, the camper’s skin cut the wifi signal down drastically. 

While down visiting family between contracts, I finally decided to install an external Wifi antenna of some kind on my camper.

After several pages of discussion on the subject of various RV forums, I ended up deciding to get a custom brass Yagi Wifi Antenna with built in Wifi card from InnovativeDevice on Ebay.

The antenna is 33” long and is section, though with how I have it setup, I just fold it down on the side of the rig in one piece. 

I made the mast for the unit out of a painter’s pole and made the mount bracket out of piece of aluminum channel. 

This antenna is wonderful for use in parks with weak or poor Wifi access points as I can simply point it at the location of their transmitter and be able to get a strong enough signal to enjoy the internet, even if I’m towards the far reaches of the park.

Project: The Undocumented Projects

I’ve gotten a few requests for the last couple years for pictures and details on several projects that I’ve done to my old camper that were never really photo documented or ever had a post written up for them. 

I’ve individually supplied the pictures and verbal details so many times that I decided to finally write a blog post about it so that I’ve got it archived somewhere . 

So, thanks to me having a handy little camera in my HTC Thunderbolt, I was able to make quick work of documenting a bunch of “Now” pictures of things that I’ve done for the blog.

Since I didn’t detail when exactly I did any of these projects, I’m going from my best guess based on events when I did these projects, so, the month and year are my best guesses as to when I undertook these projects.

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Pantry Cabinet Remodel (January, 2010)

The real project that started the whole remodel of storage in my camper, and also one of my more frequently asked about undocumented projects. 

The pantry cabinet began it’s life as a wardrobe that the previous owner had already decided was a waste of space as a wardrobe and rigged together a very simple makeshift storage rack in.   The previous owner also in his time of refurbishing the old KIT replaced the gigantic original Duo-Therm furnace that was located beneath the old wardrobe cabinet for a more efficient and far smaller Suburban DD-17DSI.

Sadly, he did a miserable job of filling in the opening where the furnace was with various individual scraps of plywood that looked horrible.

Original

Shortly after I took ownership, I did a mild redesign of his storage rack and added a little bit of old wall paneling over the plywood mess to make it less ugly to stare at and it remained like this till January 2010, when I decided it was time to overhaul it all.

First Remodel

I completely gutted the compartment, tearing out all of the 1x1 and 1x2 wood that was loose and barely stapled into anything, as well as the old partition wall between the pantry and the refrigerator enclosure. 

The latter turned out to be a very good thing to have done as the bracing under the plywood floor of the fridge was just about completely gone, having broke and crumbled over the years. 

I reframed everything using 2x2 lumber and 3/4” plywood and made use of the wasted space in the old furnace compartment that wasn’t being utilized by the far smaller tighter clearance furnace. 

Final Product

The upright on the left side is set back on the bottom shelf to to allow for the propane lantern and catalytic heater stored in their cases on that shelf to be slid out past the lip of the pantry opening. 

In the drop down area on the right, I stow my two captain’s chairs and various other long camping odds and ends, like those heavy duty wiener/marshmellow roasting spits. 

I made the top shelf reach fully across in the remodel to better accommodate the storage of bread products, allowing me to stow several loaves of bread, hamburger buns, muffins, etc….

Another thing I did was covered up the old opening for the furnace once and for all using some leftover FRP (Fiberglass Reinforced Paneling) I had left over from my bathroom remodel project of a couple years prior. 

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Over Dinette Cabinet Remodel (January, 2010)

This is actually part of a combined project I did of the course of January 2010 while I was spending my downtime between work contracts staying with family (back before I found Island Cove RV Park and found a more permanent home ). 

During that time, I decided to do away with the never-going-to-be-used fold down bunk bed that was wasting a lot of storage space above my dinette.  

The the main shelf of the cabinet itself was fine, but the design which used a double hinged front and fold back extension which held the front in the closed position (and had a habit of bouncing open on rough roads) wasted a full third of the potential storage space. 

Also given its fold down nature, there was a whole section of empty wall space that could have been utilized for storage over the dinette but wasn’t because of the fold down bunk. 

So, I tore it, turned it into an L shaped cabinet, and added newer, larger doors to ease of access and a double level shelf to maximize storage space.

Before

After

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Camper Tub Insulation

After my first winter living full-time in my camper, I discovered that the tub of the camper was made of nothing more than 3/4” sheets of plywood turned on end.  No 1x2 structure, just plywood with no insulation what so ever.

The simply solution was to buy a bunch of inexpensive 1x2s, build a frame up and then glue and screw it into the existing plywood, then fill the voids in the frame with 3/4” Dow Pink foam insulation, over the top of which I secured a single piece layer of reflectix, over while I installed Luwann paneling which I stained with Minwax Pecan combination stain/varnish, the exact same stuff I did the overhead cabinet with.

Before

After

I tore out the entire frame of the front tank area, pulled the tank and insulated around it and placed it up on a proper 2x3 frame and plywood frame to support it.  Originally, it was simply resting on a sheet of plywood sitting on top of scraps of plywood and the black gas pipe and the old city water main. 

I rebuilt the front of the tank compartment with a matching 1x2 structure to the design of the original, but backed it with 1/2” plywood which I glued to the 1x2 frame and then added 1/4” luwann to the front, making it far more sturdy than the old broken thing that was there before. 

I ended up raising the overall height of the compartment a couple inches to allow for the extra height of the tank with it sitting on it’s proper frame. 

Since there was no good way to tear apart and reskin the door frames and finding cabinet doors that would fit size-wise without having to have them custom made, I simply got some very thin door skin and finished it, then glued it over the original fronts on the doors. 

I scrapped the old push button knobs for brass knobs and sliding latches for the doors which did a far better job of holding them securely shut to their new weather strip seals, keeping the cold air out. 

I also boosted the insulation factor of the doors by building out frames onto their backs and filling those with insulation so that the doors still came flush with the outside tub wall.

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Replacing the Dinette area roof vent with a Shurflo ComfortBreeze Gold Fan (September/October, 2009)

This was actually part of a project in which I added Camco Louvered Vent Covers to all of the roof vents, but also scrapped the last factory original roof vent assembly over the dinette and replaced it with a Shurflo Comfort Breeze Gold vent fan. 

I had already upgraded the bathroom vent assembly to a Fantastic Fan I’d gotten from Sally and her Husband, fellow NATCOA members from up in Washington who’d removed it from their Past-time Truck Camper a year before, and while I liked the Fantastic Fan, I wanted the Comfort Breeze because:

A.) It had a real Rheostatic speed control vs the 1-4 preset fan speeds the Fantastic Fan had.

B.) It could be run closed with the fan set to exhaust mode to act like a ceiling fan in a home, mixing the air in the camper at slow speed when the furnace ran to get rid of having it be really cold by the floor and really hot by the ceiling. 

My only real complaint with the Comfort Breeze is it has made a sound like something is rubbing since day one, not really loudly, but it’s nowhere near as quiet because of that compared to the Fantastic Fan.

Before

After

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Under Cabinet Coffee Cup Storage (July, 2010)

Another of the little projects that I asked for help for on various RV forums on locating the safety cup hooks, but never really documented.

There’s not really much to this one, a fellow RV.net member had left-over hooks from his project that he very graciously gave me, going to the trouble of mailing them all the way from Georgia!  

The cup hooks have a spring flap over the end that keeps the coffee mugs from coming off them while underway, allowing for me to utilize some of the space underneath the cabinet over the kitchen sink to stow a set of barely used and rather beautiful coffee mugs I picked up from the Free Stuff pile in the park’s Laundry Room. 

The mugs are located far enough apart that they can’t impact each other and are placed such that they can’t swing and bang on the wall.

Before

After

I have roughly six coffee mugs, the other two are actually hanging up in the curved peak of the roof that is over the kitchen area, but aren’t visible because of the cabinet door being low and the cabinet being full.

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Well, that pretty much wraps up the undocumented projects, there’s likely some that I missed that I’ll remember at some point later on, but the ones you just read about are the bulk majority of the undocumented ones that I’ve done in the last four years .

 

Thanks for Reading!

Project: Thermostat Upgrade

For the last four years, I’ve been full-timing in my camper.   For the majority of that four years, my camper’s furnace has been controlled via the original factory thermostat.

I learned really fast in my first winter full-timing that it wasn’t the best of thermostats by design when the furnace started to run constantly because the temperature pickup coil would be affected by the, at the time, un-insulated fridge compartment.  

My fix that winter was to cut a piece of Reflectix, wrap it in duct tape and install it behind the thermostat.

It’s performance improved more with the remodel of the fridge compartment to fill all the dead air space around the fridge with insulation so that it was no longer affected by the outside temps, but it still was a pain in the butt to set accurately, but I lived with it.

I bought a replacement, sometime before the Fall Colors Rally of 2011, but didn’t get around to installing it till April. 

For a replacement, I bought a programmable digital thermostat, a Honeywell RTH221B 1 week thermostat.

I picked this particular model because it was designed for fairly wide range of heating and cooling applications, including millivolt use.  My old Suburban furnace uses a very basic 12volt circuit loop to switch the unit on and off, so all the thermostat really does is complete the power circuit, so this thermostat was a perfect replacement.

Other advantages including being able to program a lower temp during times of the day, and have it automatically adjust, or simply set it to hold a specific temperature which can be adjusted up and down in 1 degree increments.

Fortunately for me, the previous owner used the correct color coded wiring for a thermostat for house systems when he did the furnace upgrade, so it was simply a matter of matching up the wire colors to their specific terminals on the backing plate.

The thermostat is designed to work with heating and cooling, so if you have a roof top A/C that can be run by a remote thermostat, this will work for that as well, however, it doesn’t have a fan speed control, simply a fan ON or Auto option. 

That was pretty much all the wiring, the actual thermostat is removable so that you can change the two AAA batteries it uses. 

There’s one tiny Phillips screw on the top that secures it in place and that’s pretty much it for installation.

One thing I dearly love about this particular model of thermostat is while you can’t set a specific number of degrees you want it to wait between cycles, you CAN set how many times an hour the furnace can cycle, the slowest being once every half hour will it check to see if it needs to cycle on. 

I have mine set to once every 20 minutes, which keeps the camper temperature even without too wide a range of temperature swing, and at the same time keeping the runtime to a minimum so that the batteries don’t get drawn down too far.

So, there you have my super simple and quick thermostat upgrade.  

Company in the outdoor living room

Well, got a new visitor today while sitting out in my little heated patio room next to the camper enjoying a cigar this evening.

Meet George the Cat, my neighbor from across the park’s cat.  Sorry for the somewhat poor quality of the photos, I was using my phone as the camera and it doesn’t always do the color very well in low light.

 

Freak January Snow, Pretty, but damaging….

Well, we had a weird bit of weather here.  For the first time in the two years I’ve lived here on Sauvie Island, this is the first time we’ve ever gotten snow. 

The biggest irony is, when I left work that evening, which was at a higher elevation, there was only rain there, but by the time I got home to the island, two inches of snow had already fallen.

I thought it was rather beautiful, a nice change from the never ending pattern of grey and brown that is Oregon nine months out of the year.

Since I still had my Christmas lights up, I turned them back on again to snap a few snow pictures.

I used my tripod and an extended exposure for all of the pictures, absolutely no flash was used at all. 

By the time I was done, the snow had stopped and I thought, “well looks like we’re good for the night.”

I, like several other people, got a little caught off guard.

My patio room, the next morning….

I got off cheapest, my patio room only cost me a $100 to replace, however, eight different rigs in the park had their rather bigger and more expensive permanently mounted awnings collapse under the snow load that night.

Apparently, some time after I went to bed, the sky opened up and dumped roughly six inches of “Colorado Concrete” on us, that nice extra wet and heavy stuff. 

Several people got trapped in their RVs for a while as their awnings collapsed down against their doors.   I ended up having to mark off from work that day to both replace my patio room before the rapid melt off and oncoming rain that was in the forecast hit, as well as help neighbors get their awnings up enough to get their doors open.

My love of snow has been somewhat tamped down after this, next time, I’ll remember to get up once an hour to sweep the snow off the patio room roof with a broom.

Chinese New Year & another cigar haunt

Well, happy new year to all my readers!

Since I was rather quiet during the traditional new year I figured I'd do a little post about the Chinese new year celebration I attended over at one of my local haunts, the Decoy.

Now, for those that may not know or remember I live out on Sauvie island just outside of Portland, Oregon and my little neighborhood bar is the Decoy tavern over in Linnton.

I usually visit there when I'm on the mood for comfort food and a quiet drink. Peter, the proprietor and I chat when he has a few free moments from his grill and during my last visit he invited me to the Chinese New year celebration he was having on the 15th of January.

Naturally, I said yes :P.

So, at around 6pm I showed up and discovered that Peter was having a free Chinese buffet. 

If you know me you know that I hardly ever turn down free food, even when I'm already too full to begin with ;).

 

Food was good, though .  I do love a good Chinese Buffett some times, and Peter’s cooking has always been good. 

 

The Decoy has always been a good place to eat a lot of different things.  From the outside, it looks like your average working man’s tavern, but has a menu that covers more than your basic burgers and beer. 

 

For one, besides a good list of Burgers and Beer, they’ve got Chinese Food, Pizza…. and on. 

 

Making me hungry just thinking about it . 

 

So, I gorged myself till I could eat no more, thanked Peter for his hospitality, then decided to drive up north to the Wal-Mart Super Center up near Vancouver, WA to get a universal windshield mount for my new HTC Thunderbolt phone/Wifi/GPS/pocket computer…. Dang the thing does a lot!

 

Trip was pretty uneventful, got to try out my first go round navigating via GPS, using Google Navigation. 

 

With the evening still fairly young, and not really wanting to go home, I decided to add one more place to my stops for the evening and punched in McMenamin’s Kennedy School in Portland, Oregon to see if the rumors I’d been told of it’s Cigar bar were true or not.

 

 

Little history of the Kennedy School:

The Kennedy School has been a center of lively activity for the Northeast Portland neighborhood since opening in 1915. Over the years, thousands of kids congregated here to decipher the three Rs, eat mac and cheese on Mondays and climb hand over hand up the gym rope to ring the bell.

When built, Kennedy Elementary School's location was rather remote; it stood three blocks beyond the end of the nearest streetcar line. And that line, which came out Northeast Alberta Street, passed through some pretty sparse country, judging from an ordinance that outlawed the shooting of rabbits from the streetcar.

Also, the school was just eight blocks from the city line, then set at Northeast 42nd Ave. — and in those early years, the numerous Kennedy students residing beyond that boundary lived without electricity, water, sewer or telephones.

Actually, the first elementary school classes were held on the school grounds in portable, one-room buildings in 1913, two years before the present-day school building was built and opened. Just 29 children attended that first year.

As decades passed, the school took on additional civic roles, further endearing it to its neighbors. When school was not in session, "Kennedy" served the community as a public meeting hall, polling place, Red Cross blood drawing center, collection site for paper and tin can drives, weekend playground and even flood-relief shelter.

It was a sad day indeed when at the end of the 1974-75 school year, faced with declining enrollment throughout the district, school officials closed Kennedy, declaring it too old and crumbling to repair.

Scrambling to ward off several demolition orders, a coalition of neighbors, former students, past PTA presidents and the Portland Development Commission fought successfully to save the building.

Mike and Brian McMenamin presented just one of several proposals for reviving the condemned property. Other ideas ranged from a retirement home to an indoor soccer facility. After receiving the approval of the city and the support of the neighborhood, McMenamins launched its renovation in the spring of 1997, infusing the 80-year-old structure with new life. In particular, a river of artwork was inspired by the stories of generations of Kennedy's students and teachers.

On October 22, 1997, the original principal's bell was rung on the front steps at 7 a.m. sharp to herald the old school's new beginning as McMenamins Kennedy School. Offering a unique and fun lodging, dining and meeting experience, Kennedy remains a lively gathering spot for neighbors and newcomers alike.

Since I’d already eaten, I forewent any dining on site, plus, I’ve eaten quite a range of McMenamin’s fare, so it wasn’t a great loss for me on this particular visit. 

Instead, I found myself here, in detention if you will:

The tiny cigar bar is actually the old Vice Principal’s outer office area, where the original benches that students once sat upon awaiting their fate before entering the principal’s office (now used a storage closet). 

The room is very small and very dimly lit, I only managed to really get a couple pictures. 

 

The heating in the room is supplied by a cantankerous old wood stove that is either in a constant state of running out of fuel or trying to roast you out of the room . 

While definitely not my favorite of the McMenamin’s cigar bars, it does have the best selection of cigars that I’ve found at one of their establishments so far. 

I enjoyed several cigars, chatted with a number of folks, and heard some rather amusing tales from a fellow who’d worked in Cellphone sales for a number of years.

Afterward, I retired home for the evening and slept well.