I arrived in Obetz, Ohio Monday night. We ended up here about one year ago on our way East with a bad starter solenoid, and the folks here at N & W Garage Bus and Truck Repair are the best you can find. The Newsome family are extremely knowledgeable, kind and generous, not to mention motor-cross heroes of yore. We’ve been trading stories, them telling me about buses trucks and motorcycles, and me trying to keep up my end of the bargain by telling them about the BioBus adventures. Before I leave I will have to put a sample of water from their pond on the microscope.
The progress has been much faster than I expected. I’m doing the work myself, with some advice from the folks here, but I’m getting to be faster at fixing up the bus. I had three major goals here: 1) fix an intermittent bus electrical issue 2) add a new oil pan and 3) fix the veggie oil system. I’ve completed tasks 1 & 2 in the last two days, and am now starting to work on getting the veggie fuel system back in operation.
Transmission Wiring
First I tackled a long-standing, intermittent shifting issue, which would occasional cause the bus to get stuck in reverse. It wasn’t the end of the world, because it didn’t happen very often, and you could turn the bus off and on and things would be OK. But recently it has been getting worse, and I’ve managed to narrow down the problem more than the last time I worked on this back in January. I know the problem is between the transmission solenoid and post 17 (see wiring diagram if you really want to know) in the engine junction box. I had already replaced the reverse limit switch in January, and while the problem did go away for a little while, it still came back occasionally. Well, this time I figured out that even when I remove all the wires from post 17 except for the wire that goes to the transmission relay, post 17 is still hot – so this wire was somehow causing the bus to stay in reverse when it shouldn’t, but only after you energized reverse in the first place. Now, when I removed the wire from lead 3 on the transmission solenoid, the circuit went off.. both the wire AND the relay. And soon after, the problem went away by itself, seeming to go into remission. So I cleaned up the connections on the transmission relay, and I am going to get a replacement relay in case the problem comes back. I’m still not 100% sure it is this relay, but it is the most likely candidate right now – it must somehow be shorting post 3 to post 1 (which is always hot), but only after you energize post 3. In short, it is behaving like a lock-in relay. The big question is, however, why is it locking in only when you are in reverse, and not in forward? The same relay is used for both forward and reverse. But, for the moment the problem is fixed. I think that this problem is actually fixing itself every time I get to close to finding it so that I never remove it completely.
Yes, I know – that means that the BioBus might be gaining some form of consciousness, bringing into question my oft used example of the bus as a non-living thing.
The second thing I did was add a new oil pan to catch oil from the ‘slobber tubes.’ The detroit diesel engine was built to drip oil all over the place. Ahhhh the ’70s – what decadence. And complete disregard for the environment. Well, I have installed the 21st century solution – a pan that catches the oil as it is ‘slobbered’ out of the engine. I planned on doing this months ago, but had to wait until I was at a garage with the bus on the ramp so I could stand under the engine and really get a good angle on the tubes.
Also while the bus was on high, I took the chance to reinforce some of the supports for the gray water tank (where the sink drains go) as well as fill some holes in the floor with a spray foam for insulation. Its not going to be warm forever, and this bus needs all the help it can get staying warm!
Congratulations if you stuck with this post through all the gory details. I’m starting to use categories in WordPress so that you can just skip any post that is labeled ‘bus maintenance’ if that kind of thing bores you to tears.
SOB
Ben
re “that means that the BioBus might be gaining some form of consciousness, bringing into question my oft used example of the bus as a non-living thing.”
of course the bus is alive ! microtubials all over the place..