Adding pre-charged pressure tanks

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Ben

I pulled the plywood off the bottom bunk and found plenty of space to add my pre-charged pressure tanks. They used to be under the sofa, but now that the sofa is gone I had to put them some place.

Without a pressure tank, the moment you turn on the faucet, the pump turns on to maintain pressure in the line between the pump and the faucet. Adding the tanks allows us to run several gallons through the faucet, then the pump runs for several minutes to fill the tanks.

Here’s how the tanks work:

The tank hangs on the line between the pump and the faucet, like this:

Here are the two tanks installed next to the existing water tank:

Less per capita floor space than us!

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Ben

I’m pretty sure, anyway:

Good luck Kellogg family! You can follow their adventures here.

What does a man need?

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Ben

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all – in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

-Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

More doors

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Ben

One of the first irritants we noticed in the RV was how there weren’t enough cabinet doors. The seven-foot span of cabinetry above the sink only had three doors, and there are neither shelves or dividers in the cabinet, so when items migrated between the doors, it could get tricky those items out:

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The solution was to cut out the wide cabinet face blanks and install two more doors. There’s a thin member where the door hinges and catches attach, but otherwise there are no obstructions. It also looks a lot more residential, I think:

I have more doors on order, at which point I can go from two doors to four on the other set of cabinets.

Keeping the back end rolling

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Ben

One of the downsides of having a rear bathroom is that the dump fitting is in the rear corner of the trailer, which exposes it to potential bottom-out damage when pulling onto or off of a sloped surface. The problem is serious enough that I would pull out of our driveway without the weight distribution bars on, as the rear axle sag on the SUV would raise the back end of the RV up enough to avoid bottoming out if I was careful.

The designers of the RV installed V-shaped skid points so that the plumbing would be protected from bottoming out:

By the end of last summer’s vacation, we had bottomed out enough times that these members had been bent to the point of being useless. I welded reinforcing stock on as well as castors:

When I took the trailer out for inspection, the casters worked very well. Let’s hope they hold up!