No Alternator? No Problem!

 You guys got a kick out of my last vehicle disaster story so I thought I'd share one of the more comical ones from our past:

We own a 1973 Silver Eagle RV bus-conversion.  It was originally built for Trailways, a commuter coach company.  It's a real bus.  It's also a 4-speed manual transmission.  You have to double clutch to shift gears (clutch in and out to remove from gear, clutch in and out to put in new gear).  I didn't know that for a while.  Turns out you can just clutch once for both if you time it right or just no clutch and slam that bad boy if you're feeling squirrelly.  If you can't find it, grind it, amiright?

Anyway, it also doesn't have a working alternator.  Well, it has a working alternator but no working voltage controller.  Basically, the controller allows power generated to flow from the generator to the rest of the vehicle.  That means the generator (alternator) effectively provides wattage in the range of 0 to jack squat to the batteries.  So the batteries don't really work after 4 starts or so.  For our first 6 mos on the road, we lived in it.  Travelled all over PA in it.  We developed a system of swapping out batteries (it takes like 900 cold cranking amps to get it turned over) when we needed to to get it started.  It wasn't our main vehicle.  It was our house.  So we only started her to change locations about once per month.

One day we were on our way from PA Dutch Country, Thousand Trails to Circle-M, Thousand Trails.  It's about a 30 mile trip, mostly down hill.  But there's a traffic stop that is almost a 7% grade right at the light.  Did I mention that along with the gear system I couldn't operate properly the bus also likes to slip out of first gear during take off?  Yeah, I stalled the crap out of it.  Not sure what was more horrifying, the idea of being dead at a stop light or not hitting the breaks in time to keep from crushing whoever may be behind me on that 7% grade.  After burning a hideous amount of clutch I chose the stall over an impromptu monster truck show.  So now I have no more batteries.  No batteries means no more restarts.  I'm stuck in Lancaster, PA, in a giant rolling condominium.

But there was an Autozone across the street!!!!  The wife and kids were in the chase vehicle.  They immediately deployed to assist.   I pretended to "do mechanical stuff" to the bus as people get all angry passing by while the wife goes and gets us some more batteries.  I swap them out and giver her a crank but it's still not enough!  Apparently 4 class C batteries wired in parallel on the side of the road don't produce enough amps to turn over a 1960's Detroit Diesel engine.  We had to be close, though.  I mean, c'mon... I just need a LITTLE more power.  In what surely wouldn't be the last Star Trek Chief Engineer moment of my RV life, I hatched an insane yet perfectly effective plan.  I'd use the chase car.  I'd jump the massive hunk of death metal with the tiny Italian Fiat 500L.

In what had to be a freakishly moronic display of manic engineering, I positioned the Fiat almost completely up against the right side of the bus.  Passers-by HAD to be hearing circus music in their heads as they witnessed it.  It was truly a Voltron-meets-Sanford-and-Son moment.  I knew quite well that I may end up blowing the electrical system out of the Fiat but I had to try. I was in too deep at this point.  I was about to throw good voltage after bad and I knew it.  But I already decided when we began this lifestyle that I was leaving the comforting and predictable shores of proper decision making behind.  Was it possible to make so many unreasonable decisions that you eventually overflow the buffer and end up with a good outcome?  I didn't care.   Just one more start of the bus would be worth frying our only working vehicle. I don't even think I had jumper cables.  I'm pretty sure I hard-wired the Fiat battery terminals to the terminals of one of the bus batteries.  Whatever, power would flow.  I jump in, clutch it, RUMBLE RUMBLE, she starts!!  We cleaned up and rolled out of there like we just stole both vehicles.  The legality of the bus was always questionable at best.  Not good to have police asking questions.

You ever have one of those traumatic events that's so particularly traumatizing that when it finally ends you feel safe?  The adrenaline is gone, you're exhausted, you're hungry, but you're safe!  Ever occur to you in that moment that though you may be done with the event the event isn't done with you?  Me either.  But I'd learn.  Soon, in fact. So I get parked all nice and snug in our camp site and start setting up, plugging stuff in, and realize I've parked way too far from the utility pedestal.  All our stuff would reach except the water hose. Hmmm... I had to move.  But would she start?  I unplug the electrical and the bus starts and I move it up about 5 feet maybe?  But now the electrical doesn't work!  WTH????  I go to check it out. Seems fine.  I go to the junction box in the bus and the power cable is missing.  Like, it's not there anywhere.  And it's hard wired.  It's always there, it's a part of the bus.  

I know, I know.  I can hear you asking, "Uh, how much force is required to yank a 50 AMP cable out of a steel junction box?"  I can't give you an exact foot-pounds number on this one.  I know that the bus is around oh 40k pounds.  Now, let's say you just happen to move a bus like mine with the power cable laid out on the ground, not stowed in the power compartment like it should be, you can end up driving over the cable.  Interesting thing happens when you drive over a cable that's connected to the actual vehicle you're driving.  The vehicle continues to move but the cable does not.  That's how much force is required to rip a 50 AMP cable out of a steel junction box.  You know what, let's call it 400 clown-pounds of force.  

I would have been well within my rights to throw all my tools in the river at that point and declare to the wife and kids that we'd have no electric until I could schedule an appointment with a neurologist and a proctologist.  There's no way I should have been fooling with electric while I had my head so far up my own ass.  But whatever.  Full-time RV living is merciless.  So is the heat in Pennsylvania in the summer.  It was probably 90 degrees and 90% humidity at this point.  Nobody was going to get any sleep without A/C and A/C runs on the sweet sweet electricity delivered by our flaccid 50 AMP cable.  I may be a clown wearing his ass for a hat but I'm no dummy.  The cable had to go back in.

Call it persistence or grace or just dumb luck but I managed to get her wired in quite quickly.  I won't bore you with the technical details.  Suffice it to say that sometimes us asshats just have to put on our squeaky noses and lace up our cartoonishly large shoes and get after it, whatever it may be.