Too Much Work, Too Little Time

[kevin_standlee]

It has been an excessively interesting day, but if I'm going to get any sleep tonight, I won't be able to write about it in the detail it deserves.

Lisa spent more than six hours working on the Big Orange Van, replacing a kinked fuel tank vent hose and a split fuel line, and at one point briefly set the van's engine on fire. (Fortunately, she has a small halon-type extinguisher and no harm was done.) While the vehicle still needs lots of work, at least it's moving again. Because of how badly beat-up her hands got after that, she's postponed work on the small pickup for a few days.

We took the rental van into Reno and closed out the Moana Lane storage locker. Turns out they refund the unused rental days, so I'm only actually out a few extra days' rent and the $10 key deposit for having lost the original key. We pulled everything out and hauled it to Fernley. The garage/workshop is now looking very full of boxes. I'm glad we had the rental truck for this because I don't think we could have fit the locker's entire contents into my van, even with all the seats but the two forward ones removed.

Finally getting back to the trailer in Fernley, I checked the train status, and as of late Tuesday night, it was still looking like my 8:36 AM train out of Reno would be here about that time. Seeing me fret over schedules, Lisa suggested that we go into Reno, drop off the rental truck at the Budget night drop, and spend the night at Circus Circus, which is walking distance from the Amtrak station. This option looked even better after I called CC Reno and found they were offering $32 rates. We packed up again and Lisa and I convoyed into Reno. I got the rental truck dropped in the last available night space, we went to CC Reno, had a very annoying experience getting Security to let the Big Orange Van into the over-height vehicle lot, and after checking in to the room went for a late dinner at the Eldorado.

And believe it or not, the above really is the digest version. Good night!

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

It's one of the perils of owning/operating older vehicles, whether you put high mileages on them or just leave them sitting is that you spend your life fixing them up as stuff wears out or just ages and decays.

At one point in my life I owned seven vehicles; a van, a car and five motorbikes. I spent pretty much every weekend fixing something that had broken and at no point were all of them roadworthy at one time. I also spent a fortune on parts and fuel shuttling them around to carry out repairs and I never actually had the pleasure of using them much. Eventually I thinned the herd and bought newer cars and vans rather than getting them cheap and repairing them myself as life is too short.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I expect one of the reasons Lisa won't buy anything newer is that she'd have to spend at least as much time and effort modifying them to suit her. It's not a winnable situation.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

My older vans were heavily modified by me but the mods didn't affect their running or general operation -- stuff like the telescopic antenna mast, the RV battery set and charging circuit, sleeping bunk, roofbars, winch etc. were all transplanted from one van to the next as the original van wore out or rusted out under me. What I should have done was to drop a chunk of cash on something newer and more reliable, did all the mods I wanted to that and used it for several years afterwards with the expectation that when I got in it and turned the key it would start and go rather than every morning being a new adventure in fault diagnosis and rectification. I ended up spending the cash and more trying to keep something that was basically worn out on the road and I spent several hundred hours of my own time fixing it too (usually in the rain or snow...)

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

You have some idea of the work that goes into the Big Orange Van, then. I won't go into details, but it's heavily modified in a number of unusual ways, some of which are very similar to the examples you give above.

Starting over de novo would be daunting, and not that far removed from building a vehicle from scratch; short of finding something very suitable and/or exotic, keeping the BOV seems to be the least inconvenient answer.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

There's a term of art in the collectible car business Over Here in the UK, "numberplate jacking" -- in the US it would be "license tag jacking". What you do with a big renovation job is you take the car being renovated, jack up the numberplate and roll a brand new car underneath it. Eventually everything on a car/truck/van wears out and it's usually easier to replace it all in one go rather than bitsy-bitsying it at the side of the road on fifty different occasions over a period of years. See Vimes Theory of Boots for the definitive SFnal example.

If Lisa doesn't want to spend her declining years extinguishing engine bay fires and rewiring the BOV or the little pickup every time it gets dark and she needs the lights to come on then she either needs to jack up the tag or look at what she's got and reinstall what's worthwhile into a Mark 2 version in a new(er) chassis. My most complex van setup had waay too many toys that were either not used much or didn't work too well when push came to shove -- the motorbike hoist for example. The next van used a ramp to get my motorbikes in and out of the cargo box. It was simple to ship and unship and it worked even on sloping ground unlike the hoist. Ditto for the pneumatic antenna tower which required the electric compressor to work which needed a 24V contactor set to provide enough juice to run it and which blew lines and joints on a regular basis and... I went back to a manual lift system. Etc. etc. The toys were nice but KISS came back and bit me in the bum too many times.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Heh! Yes, a friend-of-a-friend did that once, when stuck with a company vehicle where buying a new car would involve a preposterous amount of paperwork. After the car demolishing accident, he took a cutting torch to the beam holding the VIN plate, welded said beam into an intact vehicle of the same model, and declared the original fixed. Legally, this was the case.

Lisa's pickup is approaching the Vimes' Boot/George Washington's Axe level, as she's commented occasionally.

Lisa's BOV isn't nearly that complex a situation, but nothing made at the moment offers enough to make the switch tempting.