Radiator bleeding by sunset

So...

$800 later my van is fixed. Good looking body work, paint is a bit off, and a new water pump. Yay! So apparently a car who's radiator is on the entire opposite end from the engine is a bit of a PITA when it comes to bleeding the system. Also apparently, the guy I took it to didn't know how to do it...

So...

We ended up driving to littleton, almost overheating the van, and waiting in a grocery store parking lot for my dad to come help. Eat your heart out AAA... So he and I jacked up the van and were bleeding the radiator right there in the parking lot. Good times.

Really though, God uses all things for his glory and man, did we ever see his glory in that parking lot.

And we did finally get home. 

Vanagon Update

I mentioned earlier that I hit a deer on my way up 91 in VT. It's been painful having it at the shop and I'm checking on it just about every day (it's around the corner from the Gilman site). So my super-bumpers managed to absorb most of the damage, but the deer hit at least a bit over the bumper. I'm not sure if it's because of hitting the brakes right before I hit the deer and having the nose dip allowed the deer to hit above the bumper.

Once we got it all apart it turned out I was really lucky it missed my condenser and my radiator. I took it to the Rock-n-Roll Garage in Gilman VT and they dug right in and straightened out dents. You know you're in VT when the mechanic tells you that they had your car hooked up to a tree with a come-along in order to straighten a support piece. :)

Anyway. They got the nose mostly straight now. They'll be repainting it tomorrow probably. I'll be stopping in to see how it's going. So far so good.

Day One

Today was my first day "on the job." As part of our move, I decided to put Danielson, CT at our half-way point. Danielson is home to the Quinabaug Dam (on the Quinabaug River) and the Five-Mile Dam. We were here to perform maintenance on the Quinabaug Dam, more specifically, to remove the #2 generator which had been overheating.

Phase 1 of this job involved the arrival of a huge-ass crane. With eight massive wheels this thing was going to be reaching out over the dam and retrieving a 15,000 lb. generator from inside the power house. I have to say, between the crane, which was very nice, and the operator, who really knew his shit, I could not believe how subtle of adjustments they could made to the position of the crane. "I need to take it up an inch" was not even remotely a problem. Very impressive.

So the first trick for getting a 15,000 lb. chunk of metal out of your (power) house it to remove a portion of the roof. This next picture is the section of roof we took out that just happens to be designed to be removed. This part was pretty straight forward. The next part is the tricky part. 

I can't say I've ever put any real thought into how you attach a hook to a giant generator before. It never really occurred to me that it might be a challenge. It has a couple (large) eyelets on top, just slap some hooks on them and let's go! Well, not exactly.

Turns out that our generator is at an angle, because of how the water goes through the turbine. I'm not 100% clear on why exactly this is, but it is. This means that you need to rig it at an angle and pull it very carefully so it doesn't mess any of it's connector bits up. This is very important... and we messed it up.

So there's a technique to making sure the crane is exactly above the center of what you're trying to lift. You drop the hook all the way down so it's hanging just about your target and have the operator adjust the crane till it's dead center. This way, when you lift, the target (our generator in this case) won't shift. Let's just say that you don't want a 15,000 lb. generator shifting.

So we didn't do that... Yeah, totally just eye-balled it. oops.

Thankfully when the generator shifted it only shifted a little and nobody was in the way. We recognized the problem too late to fix it but early enough to make sure nobody was nearby. You're not going to stand there and stabilize something that big. If it wants to swing over and hit the wall it's going to do that with or without you in the way. So we made sure nobody was in the way and thankfully it didn't actually hit the wall.

Once that part was done we just lifted it up and put it on a (big) truck to ship it to the factory for refitting. Things weren't very exciting after that. We did some other maintenance that need the crane (you rent it by the day) and I ended up heading back to the campground around 1:00 to make any early start on the remainder of the trip.

Quinabaug Dam

Things didn't really go the way I planned though. I had been out in the sun too long and ended up with sun-stroke. I couldn't do anything but kip-over for a couple hours to recover. The put our early start rather late. Just to make sure it stayed interesting, I hit a deer on the highway in northern VT with my van. The super-bumpers took most of the force but it still did some damage. We'll have to see exactly how much when I get it to a shop...

I'm pretty sure that was the "Welcome back to the North Country" deer, too...

Day Zero

Day Zero... Moving day. We packed up and were trying to head out to CT by around noon. It was all going well until we ran down the battery on one of the cars by leaving the doors open while loading. *sigh*. Once the city-folk (us) figured out that "non-painted metal" was absolutely critical for jump starting to work we were able to head out. It ended up being more like 3:00...

So, part of the trip involved camping in CT (halfway to NH) as sort of a semi-vacation-during-move. Our 1986 VW Camper van is awesome. Totally love it. Great car. Not really a highway cruiser though. I was really only able to do about 60 on the highway consistently and there's no cruise control. It was not bad. It's a good car and the seat is more comfortable than most cars but it's also 27 years old and was lacking a bit in power.

The slowness of the van and the standard stops needed when traveling with two kids put us into our campsite at 10:00pm... which was not very fun. Thankfully my family is awesome and we got set up quickly and we got ourselves to sleep quickly.

The next day dawned chilly, but beautiful. It's hard to describe how relaxing it is waking with your head next to a screen looking out at nature with only birds and the babbling brook as the sounds. It was so incredibly peaceful. We dug ourselves out of the blankets and boiled up some water in our new biolite stove (more on this later) and set about relaxing.

We knew that "work" started the next day so we really just spent the day relaxing. The kids played in the river a lot and we goofed around on the playground. The place was completely empty during the week and we basically had it to ourselves.

We rounded off the day by having my father join us for supper. The kids played around with him and we avoided talking about tomorrow.

I cannot more highly recommend the Charlie Brown Campground in CT. We'll be staying there whenever we go down to the site.