“THEIR ONLY COMPLAINT IS THAT THEY WANT MORE.”

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2) BioBus approved Wednesday as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity by the IRS

3) On Tuesday, the transmission dropped its top 2 gears, but only five miles away from the garage, and U.S. Coach was able to fix it easily. Something to do with a piece of Bakelite in the governor cracking.

Do I have to choose?

I spent the day with a file, sand paper, and baking soda, and a few jugs of distilled water, doing some maintenance on our battery bank. These are the batteries that allow us to save up solar power for use on a rainy day, and really it is time to buy a new set, but that would run about twelve hundred dollars that we don’t have right now. Our bank is made of eight Trojan T-105 deep cycle batteries, known as the most reliable, long lasting deep cycle batteries around – given proper care. And we’ve taken real good care of this set, regularly cleaning corrosion off of terminals, checking water levels, and equalizing the cells. But after over 5 years of hard use – freezing cold weather, lots of vibrations from a bouncing bus, and at least 500 charge-discharge cycles, these batteries are ready to start a new life as lead paper-weights (actually, the lead will be recycled for use in new batteries). But they can still store up enough energy for an entire school day without complaining too much, so for the moment they’ll have to do.

Of course, the guys at Farber we’re hard at work today. They put down a wood sub-floor, laid down and glued in the new blue rubber floor, finished new cabinets for the wet lab, and got about half-way through the new bench-top in the computer classroom. Check out the pictures below. Tomorrow is the final day, and I can’t wait to see how everything comes together – it is already starting to look amazing.

Most of the morning I spent in a meadow on the farm, the lows of cattle occasionally rising above the sound of a gentle breeze and patter of light rain. There was little time for daydreaming however – I spent my time under the tutelage of Donovan Farber, learning how to shoot a composite hunting bow. Donovan’s friend owns the farm, and it abuts an area of old forest, habitat to a number of animals, including deer, turkeys, and wild boar. I really enjoyed target practice with the bow – I haven’t practiced archery since I was 8 at summer camp. I didn’t do too badly, though I had to stop after a short while because my muscles gave up! Bows have gotten bigger since I was a kid.

The strongest feeling I had all day was drawing out an arrow embedded 8 inches into our foam practice target. For a split second, as I grasped the arrow shaft and it slid slowly from the styrofoam block, I envisioned kneeling above a freshly killed animal, bloodied, dying. The image itself, while disturbing, also fascinates me. Where would this come from? I have never hunted in my life, I certainly have never pulled an arrow from anything living (or dead -  when I was 8 we used wood targets and the arrows never penetrated more than a half inch). Where would such a strong vision come from? Is it possible some evolutionary memory is embedded inside me from my hunter ancestors? Rationally, I guess it’s more likely I’ve just watched Lord of the Rings one too many times. But that flash, with a feeling somewhere between triumph and repulsion, is still with me hours later.

Donovan and I then forded a small stream and the trail up a hill, carrying a climbing stick and deer stand with us, as well as a number of containers and tubes for sample collection. We spent the afternoon erecting the climbing stick (a type of ladder for climbing trees) and attaching Donovan’s deer stand (a seat a hunter uses to sit in a tree). Donovan will return next weekend and spend 6 or more hours a day perched 15 or 20 feet up in the tree, silently waiting for deer to wander by on the nearby path. If he kills one, he will butcher it and use the meat for food over the winter months. While he hadn’t managed a kill last year, he says it is worth it just to sit in the woods for for long periods at a time, watching and listening.

After the stand was up, Donovan took a practice shot, and I collected some soil samples from the forest leaf litter. I am trying to figure out how to collect the slime mold Dictyostelium from the wild, after growing it from mail order with my intern Ryan all summer. It was getting late, so we headed back down the hill, collecting a few water samples and driving back to Columbus while the sun set orange and blue under late breaking rain clouds. On Monday, when I get back to the Farber shop and the BioBus, I’ll get to see what I found.

Speaking of the BioBus – you wouldn’t believe what it looks like right now! Friday morning, we removed almost everything from the interior, and by Friday afternoon the improvements were already visible. Check out the photos below, and keep checking this blog (http://blogs.biobus.org/) for our progress.

Thanks for reading, and please keep leaving your comments and sending me mail – I love hearing from you!

Ben

The garage I was at for the last few days is a really special place. Conley Newsome is the owner, and his son David and daughter Anita help him run the business, along with CC and his brother-in-law Beak (Anita and CC are missing from the photo. Conley is an 8 time motorcycle hill-climbing champion (here he is in a Sports Illustrated article), and is tough as nails and strong as an ox – he broke apart some of the pipe fittings that I was having trouble with. Whenever I had a question about something or needed to borrow a tool, they were always there to help, and the coffee they brewed in the morning kept me going. I am hoping that their business might actually pick up because of the economic downturn, since people might start fixing their old vehicles instead of trading in for new ones.

I got to see a little bit of Columbus, including the COSI science center, thanks to my school friend, Sam. And there was a really nice yard sale nearby that I stopped at twice, where I bought a little hand held vacuum for the bus.

Well, do you want to see what working on the bus? Here is a little photo journal of the work I did this week at N&W, including hooking up the ‘slobber tube’ collecting pan, reinforcing the waste water tanks, and putting together the veggie valve assembly.

One of the reasons to go to a garage is that you can put the bus over a pit or up on a ramp, making it much easier to get underneath of the thing. This particular ramp actually tilts back when the bus gets on it – it is a peculiar feeling when the bus starts tilting back. Once the bus was up there we ran it for a while to try to see where the oil leak was (the engine is hanging off the ramp at the back of the bus). We thought that the leak was just coming from the slobber tubes, which are designed to drain oil out of the air box. As Sam put it, the bus ‘sweats oil’. 

Well, what do with someone who slobbers too much???

No guesses? Well in this case the bus was definitely slobering too  much, and since lots of people with these buses don’t like the idea of leaving a trail of noxious slime behind them, there are special kits that will collect the oil and also prevent it from going back into the air box which can be bad. I was able to remove one of the old tubes easily, however the other one was directly beneath a big metal compressed air tube, so for that one a just extended the existing tube. Then both tubes clamp onto the drain box. You could do this using a milk jug too, but it doesn’t look as good, though milk jugs are very cheap.

Of course, I will still need to drain the can whenever it is full, but I can recycle the oil properly instead of leaving it to runoff into our already too-polluted waters. You should see the gigantic catfish that Conley and his grandson caught in the pond right next to the garage! These guys know how to run a green garage.

Gray water support

Here is a very exciting picture of the new support I put in for the gray water waste tank. You can’t see the tank – what you see is the drain line for the tank, and the thin steel ribbon I added to keep it from sagging down. The bus has two 50 gallon waste water holding tanks, one for the two sink drains (gray water) and one for the toilet (black water). In the future, I would like to try to recycle the gray water so that it is used to flush the toilet, since that water doesn’t need to be clean for that purpose. Daniel had actually set up this kind of system at the Flowershop (Daniel appeared in some of the very early posts here). Can you imagine how much water we could save if every house had a system like that? And it is not all that difficult to setup.

Every night in Columbus there were beautiful sunsets and beautiful moon-rises. Here is a picture of the bus where I was parked most of the time, in front of the garage’s ‘wrecker’ tow-truck. Well, no towing for me this time! (Knock on wood.)

The bus’ paint job is supposed to represent the sun, the water and the sky – one reason I like this picture, because you can see the colors of the bus in the colors of the sky. Soon we will start putting murals of molecules, cells, and ecosystems on the blue parts of the bus. The idea is to eventually use the outside of the bus as a teaching aid.

Valve assembly

Valve (dis) assembly

The first two photos here are the valve assembly that I diagrammed in an earlier post. In the first picture you see how I’ve disassembled it, in the second you see it put together. The metal rods in the first picture get covered by the black blocky things in the second picture – the blocks are solenoid electromagnets that pull up on the valve stem that is inside the rod, opening the valve underneath. Depending on which of the valves are turned on, you either use vegetable oil or diesel, and you can also choose where the unburned, ‘return’ fuel from the engine goes. This allows you to put diesel in your veggie tank if you would like to dilute it before burning it. The fifth valve is ‘magic’ – but since this is a science bus I shouldn’t talk about magic, so I won’t.

Veggie system installed

Finally, I stuck the entire assembly into the engine compartment, in about the only free space there is, which happens to be a very inconvenient space for working! But after some fiddling, I got everything connected and the thing bolted onto the firewall (that’s the metal mesh in the background).

I’m not showing you pictures of the electrical system, which I also did a bunch of work on. But if you thought pictures of a bunch of valves stuck together were boring, imagine photos of a mess of dull colored wires. I’m just not a good enough photographer to make that look at all compelling… yet!

Spending the night near Cleveland, but I hope to make it to Ithaca by tomorrow night. I prefer not to drive at night if I don’t need to, and I’m not in a big rush right now, which is a nice change! So when it got dark, I found a place to park, lit a fire in the wood stove, baked an acorn squash, and enjoyed a beautiful fall night.

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