New owner of Vintage Bus 1980

[freds]

Well made my first mini trip which was a couple hour run to have a crab fest with buds. I was running late so it's a few hours later before getting a chance to look at the numbers.

Here's the engine coolant temperature monitoring of the flow in the heater hoses.




The temperature was fairly rock solid at 175 degrees. I think the rapid fall off is simply the cooling of about 20 ft of heater hose. It would have been interesting to kick in a circulation pump for the engine coolant and see what the decline curve actually looks like.

The next graph is for the two glycol storage tanks with a re-circulation pump running.




Note the maximum temperature reached was about 125 degrees after a two hour run.

This is with the engine coolant running through one ten gallon tank and constant stirring between the two ten gallon tanks.

In the above graph the increase in the decline is where I turned off the stir pump.

Just for grins, I decided to turn the engine pre-heat and the strip pumps on to see what would happen.



So it looks like my automation needs a sensor input of is the engine running and as long as the engine coolant is warmer the storage glycol harvest more heat by circulating the engine coolant.

I probably also should consider insulating the pipes...

[Joe Camper]

Fred that's pretty special. U r not suppose to be going anywhere cold.

Really.......what do u have planned next? I'm wondering.

Thst was a boatload of smarts and effort. Well done.

U and Chad from KC, he's here, 84 Liberty, u 2 need to get hooked up. U both went to different schools togeather.

Please tell whats next.

POG should do a community bus and build one from scratch with input and labor from all. Design and everything. Inagine how that might turn out with all the talent and input here. If it ever got done LOL

We would need a Donor and the barn and we could get started. could plan get togethers around it. Even better, Do 2, an east coast verses west coat then sell them and see who looses more. And then we can do it again.

[freds]

Hi Joe

I am equipping the bus to live in full time and really planning on chasing 70 degree weather around the country; with lots of boondocking.

However, I do have family and friends in Wyoming and Montana; so not ruling out cold weather adventures.

I will be doing more Node Red IOT automation's, next up is the climate control for the hydronic system and the air-conditioners. There is a Wify switch that is less then $20.00 that I will install in each air-conditioner which will bring them under computer control.

I am also going to do power monitoring; so, it will automatically shut down the inverter to eliminate phantom power draw when AC power is not needed.

The inverter already responses to voice commands "Alexa, power on or power off" as the first step in automating it.

So after I finish that out, I am going to put a boat load of solar on the roof, remove the refrigerator/freezer absorption unit and replace with a more efficient DC compressor and then work on the kitchen. I am not too great on carpentry, so just going to make it functional for now.

One thing at a time. However the bus has a cellular modem and a company router that allows it to participate as a sub net on our internal network. So, it's easy to reach out to the bus to tinker with the software remotely.

I am also noodling away on a automated robotic storage and retrieval system for one of my bays. So, I can say "Alexa open bar" and it will rise up out of the floor. Thinking I can have it store or retrieve a number of different storage units either to the cabin or passenger side bay door if it is open.

Maintenance wise:

1. Diesel generator still leaks diesel
2. Generator needs mounts replaced
3. Generator has to be manually started and stopped. Previous owner removed the run/stop solenoid which was probably a $20.00 part 30-40 years ago, but they want $1200.00 for it now.
4. Cruise control doesn't work.
5. Emergency blinker switch is busted off on the steering column.
6. Previous owner dash upgrade was never finished, rats nest of wires and gauges with inappropriate temperature ranges.
7. Original drivers air-conditioning system is inoperative, might have gotten lost in the dash upgrade. Oh did I mention most of the switches are unlabeled?

So anyway I will be tinkering away for sometime to come...

[Ck2hans]

With your talents you should change out the dash to the new full glass dash like a lot of the new airplanes have.
Chuck

[freds]

With your talents you should change out the dash to the new full glass dash like a lot of the new airplanes have.
Chuck

Actually I was thinking of visiting a semi-truck junk yard and finding the CAN based sensors and dash to do just that.

Also a Tesla dash is just just linux computer and display with CAN and Ethernet interfaces.

[freds]

With your talents you should change out the dash to the new full glass dash like a lot of the new airplanes have.
Chuck

Actually there is a youtube channel named: "This old bus" where he is working on this on a limited scale to have monitoring alerts.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...MFZ9XTctTIS1fz

[freds]

With the new surge tank doing the degassing functionality I was able to simplify the hydronic output manifold as it no longer needed an air vent in the mixture.

Here's the old rube Goldberg setup:



And here's the new much simpler layout:



A quick note about this type of electric ball valve. It only draws power when it is changing position, one voltage polarity drives it open and the reverse drives it closed:



Very important to test it and record which polarity goes to which colored wires before you hookup all the plumbing and can no longer see it!!!

So in my case I use a DPDT relay so that when it is not energized the default voltage polarity drives it to the open position.

Here's the last picture that I have on hand which show's the temperature probe installed into a tee.



This sensor is out of view in the picture, but I will now have readings on the feed and exit temperatures for the diesel boiler loop.

[freds]

Wondering if anyone has a guess as to who did the original conversion on my bus back in 1980?

This is the info that I found online about my bus:

Serial Number M104-2786-80 Motor Home MR80 [Private] Beckley, G.W. Produced in March 1980

Surviving original details that might identify the converter I think is the generator installation in the following two pictures.

Generator Bay:



Remote Radiator:



The generator is Kohler 12.5KW diesel generator which an external control box; which is not standard with Kohler generators according to a retired expert that they put me in touch with.

[Gil_J]

More great information...keep in coming.