2009 Road Trips - Page 12

CrawfordGene · 01-29-2009, 01:32 PM

It's dream and preparation time here in the mountain country.

We're thinking about a trip to the upper Midwest and JC for some work on the Safari. Neither of us have been to Michigan or Wisconsin and I've never been to Minnesota. When we bag those states, that'll mean 49 states, 10 provinces and 2 Canadian territories. I'm too lazy to count Mexican estados. I want to see the northern, more remote places in those states. We are thinking about Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's home in SW Wisconsin, but I thought they might be closed for renovation. I e-mailed them a couple of weeks ago and they never responded, so maybe it is. We'd like to see more of Manitoba and Saskatchiwan, but I think this is getting out of hand for a 3 week trip. That would be a trip in May.

Maybe in April a trip to the dealer and/or NM. Not sure about that one. Then in early July, the 100th birthday celebration of Barb's grandmother in Angel Fire and Wagon Mound, NM. There's a Forum rally in early August in Northern California that sounds good. What else? Well, there's a blues festival in Helena, Arkansas in early October (not sure this year if it's in October) that we've wanted to go to, but I have had to go to an annual meeting of a nonprofit at the same time for years, but that obligation is ending.

Preparations are the main focus right now. After I learned the subwoofer was on all the time, I decided to put a switch into the circuit. I don't know how many amps (probably very little) the subwoofer consumes while idling, but in my pursuit of cutting power consumption when boondocking, this seemed a good idea. Given the subwoofer's reputation of making bad noises when DVD's and CD's are played, I wanted to be able to just turn it off. The volume and "frequency" controls are impossible to reach unless the subwoofer is moved out, so an on/off switch is a good option.

The photo shows a rocker switch mounted under the curb side dinette seat above and outward from the drawer under the seat. You can see the drawer bracket behind it. It lights up when the subwoofer is energized, but it's upside down because there was no way I could tell top from bottom, and once I snapped it into the mounting bracket, prematurely as it turned out, I couldn't get it out and turn it over. Maybe another time I'll get it turned over.

All this stuff is plastic and seems cheap to me, but that's what I found at the auto parts store. The instructions were unclear, so it took some screwing around with it to get it wired correctly which included blowing a few fuses when using my multitester and managing to short the circuit twice.

Gene