Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - Centerville IA
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Lazy Daze Structural Repair, September 22, 2007
Oh shit... part 2
See yesterday's post for part one of this messy story.
So here I sit on the edge of the road with a black tank full of "stuff" dragging on the ground and no great desire to work on it right here. The tank is on the driver's side of the rig, much too close to passing traffic for comfort crawling around under there with my feet hanging out. Plus there is a pretty fair chance of losing it's contents whilst trying to get the situation under control. To say nothing of the attention mucking about under there will likely draw when I'd really like to work undisturbed. Some things are hard to explain to the helpful.
Well, hey, there's an entrance to a farm field not 100 feet ahead. Perfect! - if I can get from here to there without losing it. Slowly I drag the dragging plastic tank along the gravel verge, grinding away at the plastic, and turn into the farm road. Phew!
Ok, now what?
Let's see, the bolt that holds the front tank support bracket broke, the bracket is missing, and the front of the tank dropped to the ground. Maybe I can find the bracket down the road and bolt it back in place. The bolt is a long carriage bolt through the floor of the rig. I don't have any of those with me but surely that can be worked around somehow.
However... the fresh water tank is mounted in the kitchen right over the head of that bolt. And covers the floor over the whole forward 2/3rds of the black tank totally blocking access to any efforts I might devise to hang the tank from above. Ok, no need to go any further down that line of thinking - I'm not going to be hanging the tank from above any time soon.
This thing is way too heavy to somehow support from underneath while it's full of, well, you know, stuff.
And way too heavy and unwieldy to remove the tank entirely. This rig isn't even going on a tow truck with the tank dragging , especially now that it leaks on account of the new holes ground in the forward edge. I've got to dump it.
Ground Away & Leaking Black Tank, Lazy Daze, May 9, 2011
Well, this ain't suburbia, there are no houses nearby, and this is a farm field. Dumping here shouldn't make too big of a stink in the neighborhood.
Down hill is to the passenger side of the rig and slopes off into the weeds quite steeply on that side. Passing the hose under the rig and into the weeds should pretty well screen my work from passing motorists - if I don't look so distraught that one of them stops to see if I'm ok. I know it's a humid 90+ degrees but keep your cool John.
Perhaps it's just as well my big dump hose isn't long enough and I have to use the macerator pump and an old green garden hose to do this job. As I pull the hose off into the weeds what do I find? A most conveniently located old woodchuck hole. How lucky can you get? The stuff just disappears down the hole - gone & out of sight & not even a stink!
Most of it anyway - the tank drain is now at the uphill end of the dragging tank. I have to lift the tank back into position before the rest will drain.
With the tire jack, a couple blocks of wood, a plastic toolbox, and a couple other things I got the tank jacked into place and finished emptying it. Then I quickly put away the pump and hose.
Temporary Black Tank Support, Lazy Daze, May 9, 2011
Now let's see. Either I have to find a way to hold the tank up or remove it completely. Empty it weighs very little so here's what I did. I had on board a 3 foot length of 3/8 diameter steel rod I bought for a project some time back. One end tucked up over the truck frame and the other resting on the rolled under lip of the fiberglass lower body panel, with a block of wood to spread the load on the fiberglass worked perfectly, with a generous application of Gorilla's tough duct tape to hold everything in place and I'm good to go.
Elapsed time - maybe an hour and a half. Not bad! I'm a happy camper.
Oh shit... part 3 - the fun's not over yet
There's a lot of work ahead of me but at least I'm no longer dead on the road.
When the black tank dropped the vent pipe pulled out of the slip joint on the top of the tank and when I jacked the tank up the vent did not go back into place. The pipe got pushed upward maybe an inch. This had to have disturbed the seal at the roof and there's a major storm coming through in a couple of days. I have to attend to this seal and anything else I need to do before that storm gets here.
Black Tank Vent Access, Lazy Daze, May 13, 2011
At the campground last night I set about finding a way to gain access to the joint where the tank vent pipe slips into the fitting in the top of the black tank to see if I could get it back in place in the tank. This black tank and it's associated plumbing is perhaps the least accessible system in the rig. The vent piping is especially difficult to access. The pipe comes straight up out of the tank, up the back corner of the kitchen counter and up into the cabinet above where it takes an offset, hidden behind a false end panel in the cabinet, before exiting the roof.
The lower section of this vent pipe, where it joins the black tank, is completely inaccessible without blasting a hole in the bathroom wall. You can't get to it from under the kitchen sink cabinet - there's a fifty gallon fresh water tank right in the way. Lucky me, I had the carpet already out of the bathroom and it was a simple matter to cut away part of the ledge the toilet sits on and then cut a hole in the bathroom wall big enough to get my hands through to straighten the bent flex tank coupling and slip the vent pipe back in place - once I had cut the pipe about a foot above the tank to make it maneuverable. Some Gorilla duct tape later coupled the cut back together until I can get a permanent rubber repair coupling.
Surprisingly, there is no evidence of any disturbance or leak where the vent exits the roof. I'm not sure what that means but at least I'm good to go through the incoming storm. I'll figure it out later.
Next I took what little Eternabond tape I had on hand, cleaned the ground through tank corner with alcohol and carefully applied tape to the ground off area. I hope it won't leak but who knows. I didn't have enough tape to do a thorough job. We'll see. I figured if I could at least slow the leak to a slow drip I'd be able to use the toilet so long as I dump often and keep the level low. And keep the tank weight low so my temporary support has a chance to survive until I can get proper repairs in place.
Drip drip drip
This morning on the way out of the campground I dumped the black tank and the gray tank. Curiously the tank level indicator for the black tank didn't return to zero as expected. I have a feeling there's a clump blocking the outlet keeping it from draining completely. An old buildup probably broke loose and blocked the outlet.
At my first stop today, for a late breakfast at a small town restaurant, I glanced under the rig when I came out to see if my attempt at patching the leak held. Nope - it's dripping very slowly. Darn.
Night camp
Site A2 - Buck Creek Campground, Rathbun Lake, Centerville IA
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - good signal & a fast connection
- Buck Creek (Rathbun Lake, IA) COE Campground Reservations
- Locate Buck Creek Campground on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Interior of a Settled Korak Yurt
The interior of a Korak _yurt_--that is, of one of the wooden _yurts_ of the _settled_ Koraks--presents a strange and not very inviting appearance to one who has never become accustomed by long habit to its dirt, smoke, and frigid atmosphere. It receives its only light, and that of a cheerless, gloomy character, through the round hole, about twenty feet above the floor, which serves as window, door, and chimney, and which is reached by a round log with holes in it, that stands perpendicularly in the centre. The beams, rafters, and logs which compose the _yurt_ are all of a glossy blackness, from the smoke in which they are constantly enveloped. A wooden platform, raised about a foot from the earth, extends out from the walls on three sides to a width of six feet, leaving an open spot eight or ten feet in diameter in the centre for the fire and a huge copper kettle of melting snow. On the platform are pitched three or four square skin _pologs_, which serve as sleeping apartments for the inmates and as refuges from the smoke, which sometimes becomes almost unendurable. A little circle of flat stones on the ground, in the centre of the _yurt_, forms the fireplace, over which is usually simmering a kettle of fish or reindeer meat, which, with dried salmon, seal's blubber, and rancid oil, makes up the Korak bill of fare. Everything that you see or touch bears the distinguishing marks of Korak origin--grease and smoke. Whenever any one enters the _yurt_, you are apprised of the fact by a total eclipse of the chimney hole and a sudden darkness, and as you look up through a mist of reindeer hairs, scraped off from the coming man's fur coat, you see a thin pair of legs descending the pole in a cloud of smoke. The legs of your acquaintances you soon learn to recognise by some peculiarity of shape or covering; and their faces, considered as means of personal identification, assume a secondary importance. If you see Ivan's legs coming down the chimney, you feel a moral certainty that Ivan's head is somewhere above in the smoke; and Nicolai's boots, appearing in bold relief against the sky through the entrance hole, afford as satisfactory proof of Nicolai's identity as his head would, provided that part of his body came in first. Legs, therefore, are the most expressive features of a Korak's countenance, when considered from an interior standpoint. When snow drifts up against the _yurt_, so as to give the dogs access to the chimney, they take a perfect delight in lying around the hole, peering down into the _yurt_, and snuffing the odours of boiling fish which rise from the huge kettle underneath. Not unfrequently they get into a grand comprehensive free fight for the best place of observation; and just as you are about to take your dinner of boiled salmon off the fire, down comes a struggling, yelping dog into the kettle, while his triumphant antagonist looks down through the chimney hole with all the complacency of gratified vengeance upon his unfortunate victim. A Korak takes the half-scalded dog by the back of the neck, carries him up the chimney, pitches him over the edge of the _yurt_ into a snow-drift, and returns with unruffled serenity to eat the fish-soup which has thus been irregularly flavoured with dog and thickened with hairs. Hairs, and especially reindeer's hairs, are among the indispensable ingredients of everything cooked in a Korak _yurt_, and we soon came to regard them with perfect indifference. No matter what precautions we might take, they were sure to find their way into our tea and soup, and stick persistently to our fried meat. Some one was constantly going out or coming in over the fire, and the reindeerskin coats scraping back and forth through the chimney hole shed a perfect cloud of short grey hairs, which sifted down over and into everything of an eatable nature underneath. Our first meal in a Korak _yurt_, therefore, at Kamenoi, was not at all satisfactory.