Photo of the Day

Page Nine

January 27, 2005: For the last week I've been feeling very energized and have begun putting some time in on my Crown project, installing the electrical wiring rough-in. Here's some photos of that process:

Two routers that I set up to carve dados in the rigid insulation to make channels for house wiring.

The router on the left is set up with a ¼" drill bit that has had the end ground off. It's used to rout out the space in the insulation for the electrical fixture enclosure box. The depth of the bit is calculated to just allow the box to nest in the insulation. A plywood template is screwed to the framing and the router moved around inside it until the hole is cleared. You can see one of the resulting holes in the insulation above the router bit.

The right hand router has a frac12;" cutter that is used to rout a narrow channel in the outside layer of insulation for the Romex wiring to run from a chase in the top of each wall to the individual device enclosures.

Both routers have had the tool area enclosed with sheet aluminum and a vacuum attachment fitted so that I can catch all the insulation dust as the holes and channels are cut. Insulation dust is full of static cling, and once it gets spread around, it's miserable to clean up. This way all the dust ends up in the shop-vac. I've also duct-taped the intake vents for the cooling fans to lessen the airflow through the motors. This makes the vacuum more effective at pulling dust out of the shoe.

Between the routers is a lamp-dimmer turned speed control. Neither of these router motors needs to run at full RPM, so I slow them down so that they don't have all that crazy gravitational inertia so that they are easier to handle.

Here's three circuits being installed, kitchen, bath and laundry. The laundry has the wire and box installed, while the bath outlet is merely routed. The kitchen is about to be routed, with a particle board guide used as a fence to keep the router running straight.

Note that the inside layer of insulation and furring strips have been removed so that I can work on the outer layer of insulation. Once the inside layer is replaced, the wiring is sandwiched between the two layers.

Another view of the kitchen after some routing. There is going to be another outlet to the left of this one, so I am routing a channel for the wire to run under the window. This required me to make another template to get the correct radius on the wiring.

The foil facing on the insulation doesn't rout very well, it kind of tears, which makes it look really ragged in this photo. I haven't found a good way of cleaning this up, so I'm just ignoring it...

An image of the load center. I'm using a three-phase breaker panel with two phases dedicated to shore power (240 volts) and the third will be switchable between shore and inverter power.

A run of Panduit arches at the ceiling, a neat way to manage all the wiring into one package with a cozy cover to hide much of it.

March 26, 2005: OK, so what have I been doing for the last two months (two months!!!??).

The electrical rough-in is now finished. Of course, it took longer than expected, but it's done, and then I moved along to the next bit of building.

Here's a nice mess of spaghetti being sorted out at the front of the right wall. Although I installed the wiring one strand at a time, and in order (front-to-rear), it required some bundling and organizing before it made the transition to the front wall.

The various colors are a pretty good indication of the wire's function. Yellow for AC supply, Grey for control, alarm, and audio, Orange and Black for DC lighting, Dark Blue and Red for DC electronics supply, Black for CATV coax, and light blue for network/telephone.

I'm about a third done with the bundling in this shot. It took an entire day to get things put into shape, wrapped in wire ties and put properly into place in the chase at the top of the wall.

Here's the reason that there's so much wire. I went overboard nearly everwhere.

This is the termination behind my desk. There are two AC circuits (one on the living room breaker for lights and another dedicated circuit for the computer), four CAT5e network cables (computer network, telephone, etc), two two-pair balanced/shielded audio cables, a 25 conductor multi-conductor (switches, indicators, low-power control voltages, etc), positive and negative power cables to supply direct current from the batteries, and a run of RG-6 coaxial cable.

This is kind of a lot of one desk, but I have a use for most of it without exercising my imagination. Other wiring terminates at the cabinetry the refrigerator will be mounted in (and which will also contain the computer printer and most of the entertainment equipment), as well as several network/telephone wall plates in the living room and in the downstairs guest room/entry area.

Anyway, in the end, I managed to get it all stuffed into the chase, made a graceful exit into the Panduit along the top of the front wall, and coiled it all neatly along with the other wiring from the left wall.

I spent a while removing knockouts from the AC load center, stripped the sheath off of the NM-B cables for the AC and inserted the wiring into the load center.

The loom clamps are installed to hold the AC wiring in the box, and labels describing what each wire is are affixed to the load center's interior.

Another few hours and the ground and neutral conductors are neatly routed and connected to their various terminal blocks.

A couple of days were spent going backwards/forwards taking up the flooring (again) to install supply plumbing for the shower. I had thought that I'd run the pipes through the wall, but after seeing how crowded with electrical the front wall will be, I relented and managed to find room for the plumbing in the maze under the floor (no pics of this - boooring).

So, the last two weeks have been consumed building the sleeping loft and stem wall at the rear of the bus. This required lots of welding, metal fabrication, painting and such. Once I began putting the wall in, I realized that I had not completed the end of the floor, and needed to figure out how that would interface with the wall. After spending a couple of hours trying out various ideas inside my head, I pulled up a section of sub floor, only to find that I had left myself places already fabricated for angle steel when I finished out the framing under the flooring. This was back in 1998, so I didn't remember it. More amazing is that I was thinking ahead that far when I did the work back then.

After installing the angle and some fabricated brackets to hold the rigid insulation under the floor, I was able to complete the steel work of the loft. This required me to completely cover the back door and windows to prevent them from being damaged by welding spatter. Large sections of cardboard served the purpose for this, and an old bathroom exhaust fan was screwed to the roof to remove any welding fumes or paint vapors.

The stem wall is held in place by machine bolts so that if necessary, it can be removed. It wouldn't be a fun task, but it can be removed. The back door is the widest in the bus, and I'd hate to not be able to get furniture, cabinetry or appliances into the bus because the wall was welded into place.

Enough talk, here's the finished product:

There will be a set of stairs leading down the well on the left and a fold-out ladder to make getting into the loft a bit easier as I age.

April 13, 2005:Here’s a short update on what’s been going on for the last two weeks:

Much time was devoted to building the front wall of the bus, including deciding how wide to make the door, laying out the steel, insuring that the frame is square, and assembling it a stick at a time. It’s built in two parts that screw together so that it could be taken outside to be welded and painted. The steel behind the driver’s seat is heavy gauge and fastened into structural members in the floor and wall. I don’t want to be sharing the cab with all of the furnishings from the living space if the bus is ever in a collision.

Access opening are provided to the AC load center and above the door for installation and maintenance of wiring and equipment. All of the wiring that supplies the living space will need to pass through this wall behind the driver’s seat, so conduits must be installed to deliver the wiring into the service panel area.

Next up is the bulkhead between the bathroom and the kitchen. This will be a fairly simple, flat wall, without so many details to work out, so I'm hoping that it goes together faster.

December 25, 2005:So, what's this, some progress on Christmas Day??? Yes, and no. A tiny bit of progress, but it's actually from last weekend.

Sunday last weekend was a small ice storm, so I stayed home and tried to catch up on a few houshold chores, which isn't all that productive without water. The plumbing, you see, was shut off and drained because of the freezing weather.

Anyway, one project I have on my plate is a small electronic construction for one of my radio station clients. Since the Housetruck was all closed up and I really didn't want to produce any solder smoke inside, I thought that I'd heat the bus and work out there. Since last winter, the front wall of the bus has been open to the cab, as I had taken down a couple of curtians of sheet plactic to work on the wall and electrical. I considered trying to put them back up to help the bus heat faster, but a better plan would be to install the insulation in the wall that separates the bathroom from the rest of the bus. Took me about an hour and a half, after which I got distracted by someone towing their broken down car over to my place to get help having it fixed, but what the hey, it's movement forward.