Since we’re back in the full swing of working on Merry for another summer, its time to keep up the pace and if all the stars align, we might actually get to something resembling done, or at least to a stage where we no longer have to stop in the winter 
When we were planning out how to upgrade Merry’s tanks, I decided to look over how some other folks had done theirs.
From 2cknights Amerigo restoration, he examined how Bob Whalen converted his to use two tanks:
Below is Bob's quote from email about the setup.
As described by Bob Whalen:
“The pics show the 2 new tanks installed . the black water is a17 gal and the gray water is a 23 gal.
The new black water tank discharge does not center on the factory cutout , but I will reshape it.
The gray water discharge is just behind the bracket for the stairs.
The inlet for the gray water does go through the side of the tank so you will not get the full capacity of the tank.
I also installed a fiberglass sheet over the plywood before installing the tanks as this area is exposed to the weather when driving.
It took longer to put the toilet back in than it took to re-plumb the tanks.”
While the idea of having separated Grey and Black tanks sounded appealing, their low capacities and their two separate dump valve locations for the capacity achieved was a turn off.
So, I decided to take a page from Mr. KIT.
Mr. KIT, much like Ms. Merry, had a single holding tank. Mr. KIT was different in that the tank had a diversion valve setup using two three-inch gate valves. When the outer valve is open and the inner is closed, the grey water is diverted off, either into a portable waste tank, or down the sewer hook up, leaving the holding tank for just the toilet.
If you closed the outer valve and opened the inner, then the grey water mixed with the black in the tank. Now, you could fill the tank all the way up by accident, but unless you were especially gifted, this would happen from showering, and would just be shower water that had filled the run of pipe.
Since nothing drained directly into the tank without going through this diverter valve setup, filling the black tank up didn’t risk an overflow through a shower drain.
So, I decided to recreate the diverter valve setup that Mr. KIT had with a new 40 gallon waste tank.
Two years ago, when I first bought the tank and parts, I talked about putting an inlet in the side of the tank for the grey water and spoke of the tank and drain being exposed. This was when I was still trying to make an impossible deadline for a Rally I was not able to make.
Since that deadline had passed, I revised how I was going to build the bathroom its its entirety, and decided to fully enclose the holding tank into a heated compartment, with all of the main drain plumbing up above in the main cabin underneath a raised bathroom floor.
So, with that revision, I bought an extra 3” valve that has the tangs for the hose on it and proceeded to grind the original tangs off the two valve assembly that I had bought back in 2016. This allowed me to glue the new valve onto the end of the original, doing like a previous owner did to Mr. KIT and created the diversion valve setup.
The one big difference on Ms. Merry’s is that unlike Mr. KIT, there’s a gate valve for the inlet pipe as well.
Unfortunately, the new outlet doesn’t line up with the old opening, so we’ll likely close that in and then put some aluminum diamond plate along the bottom edge of Ms. Merry to hide that change and make a nice clean point for the compartment hatch that the hose will go through. There’ll be another hatch on the underside, which you’ll reach through to pull the dump valves.
We still need to visit the RV salvage company in the area to see if we can find the perfect compartment door to use for the new holding tank compartment to make all of this as easy as possible.
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