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Road Trip 2002:
Not having
learned my lesson last year, I'm getting ready for another try over the
Cascades to John Day for the 4th annual SolWest Renewable Energy Fair.
This year, the Pusher is in fine shape, I have a newly rebuilt engine, a
fully-functional three-speed automatic transmission to make passing and
hill climbing a breeze, and have been experiencing no problems while
using the trailer to power the EV on trips to Portland, Woodburn and
points in between. The controller problem with the EV has been repaired
using parts with much higher voltage ratings, and I've learned from the
trip back in 2001 to not try and use regenerative braking without first
starting the electric motor.
Since I would be counting on the Pusher to get
me to the High Desert and back, I took some time two weeks before to
install a stock VW oil-to-coolant oil cooler from a 1987 Jetta GLI that
I found at the wrecking yard. I also toyed with, but did not get around
to installing a dual radiator fan setup from a Porsche 944. A trip to
Corvallis the weekend before allowed me to try out the oil cooler
installation and check for oil or coolant leaks, and to watch for
cross-contamination between the oil and coolant, a common failure of
these types of coolers.
By Wednesday afternoon, the car and trailer
were washed, packed, checked out and ready for the road. This year,
SolWest is three days, and I wanted to get an early start so that I
could arrive in plenty of time to stake out a good camping spot and rub
elbows with friends from the industry.
Uhg, the
alarm clock. Must mean that it's 5AM, and time to get up, pack the last
of my gear and try to be on the road by 7AM.
Not much traffic at this hour, I sailed through
Springfield and started my ascent up the McKenzie Highway. After
confirming that the small electric power usage on the city streets had
been replenished by regenerative braking, I shut down the electric drive
and coasted along on Pusher power alone until I reached Belknap Hot
Springs and Resort, about 60 miles from home. Got out and stretched,
walked about for a few minutes and looked into the water garden before
returning to the road for the next bit of driving.
From here,
the road gets steeper, beginning the climb over the Cascade mountain
range. Highway 126 joins 20, highway 22 merges, and then begins the
Santiam Pass. Since the Pusher has an automatic transmission, I didn't
need to get out to shift into a lower gear like I did last year, and was
able to power over the summit with he assistance of the electric drive
in the EV. As happened last year, I recovered all of the electric power
consumption on the downhill side by use of the EV's dynamic braking.
As I passed the 99 mile mark on my trip
odometer, I blew a mental raspberry at last year's failure of the
throttle servo alongside this part of the road.
9:30AM,
Sisters, Oregon. A stop for coffee and a ginger cookie. before resuming
travel, I opened the hood and checked the diesel engine on the Pusher,
looking for leaks or any other signs or problems.
On the way out of town, I drove through the
bike shop parking lot where I did the surgery on the throttle servo last
year.
Redmond
passed quietly at 10:20AM, and I headed toward Prineville. Usually, I
stop at the Ochoco Overlook above the town of Prineville for a bite to
eat, but as I am running ahead of my usual schedule, it's too early for
lunch. There is also quite a bit of smoke in the air due to the range
fires that are burning out of control in a wide area on this side of the
mountains. The pusher is running great, it's early, and I saw no other
reason to stop, so I drove through Prineville, out into the open
foothills of the Ochoco Range.
The west side of the Ochoco Divide is a long,
gradual climb. After passing a couple of slow pickup trucks and a hay
truck, I settled into a 55 MPH velocity, electric drive engaged, but not
consuming much power. Like my ascent of Santiam, I kept a close watch on
the temperature gauges for the Pusher and EV motor, watching for any
over-temperature indications.
26.3 miles east of Prineville, I drove
alongside a rock outcropping beside the road and heard the pusher making
an odd noise. A check of the temperature gauge showed that the engine
was overheated to the max! It wasn't possible to immediately pull off
the road, so I had to really hammer the electric motor to pull the car
and trailer another half-mile or so before I could find a turnout in the
highway. Even before I got the car stopped, I could see steam rising
from the front grille of the Pusher.
Opening the hood revealed a totally overheated
engine. Steam was escaping from the underside of a small hose that
supplied coolant to the newly-installed oil cooler assembly. I broke out
the tools and removed the hose, being careful to not get burned by the
steam or scorching-hot metal engine parts. A small tear had opened just
beyond where the gear clamp held it to the oil cooler inlet nipple. This
looked to be damage from using a different type of clamp than the
factory installation, and the hose had been pinched on the underside
where I couldn't see it. Used my Leatherman tool to cut off about
1" of the hose, and reinstalled it on the cooler.
The engine needed to cool down before any water could be put into the
cooling system, so I made a sandwich and ate lunch alongside the road.
Several cars passed by, and one slid to a stop and backed up in the
gravel. The car was a late model Cadillac, and the driver was a late
model business type, who thought he was on the road to Portland. Showed
him my map, turned him around to point the right direction, and sent him
back the way he had come. The day was heating up a bit, but the tree I
had parked under provided welcome cover from the sun.
The one gallon container of filtered water that
I had brought for cooking went into the coolant reservoir, and left room
for more. I made my way through the knee-high underbrush, watching as
carefully as I could for snakes as I headed for the creek running
alongside the road. Refilled the gallon container and went back to the
car. Most of the second gallon also went into the reservoir.
I knew that I would probably need to carry more
than one gallon of water with me to refill the reservoir, so I took the
5 gallon fuel container of Biodiesel that I had stowed to use on the
trip home from the car, and poured it into the Pusher's fuel tank. It
took all of it, and I did some quick mental calculations, realizing that
the fuel economy on this trip wasn't very good, about 25 MPG. After
shaking out all of the Biodiesel, I rinsed the container as best I could
using the water from the one gallon jug, pouring the residue onto the
gravel away from the stream. Thank goodness Biodiesel is biodegradable,
I knew the small amount I was pouring out would be gone in a few weeks.
Took the containers back down to the creek and filled them both with
water, lugging them back up the hill to the car, and loading them in
with the rest of my stuff.
Starting the engine was difficult, which is
unusual, it usually fires right up with a single press of the starter
button. This time it took quite a lot of cranking before it would catch
and run. Going back to the trailer, I found the coolant pressure relief
cap on the reservoir venting a lot of air. This could only mean a couple
of things, neither of them good. A blown head gasket, or a warped or
cracked cylinder head.
Sat down to roll and smoke a cigarette and
consider my options, turn around and head back to Prineville, or try and
make a few more miles toward John Day and see what happens.
After
getting a nice nicotine buzz (the first cigarette of the day does that),
I made up my mind to go forward towards SolWest, at least as far as the
rest stop which I know is a few miles up the road. If the Pusher is
kaput, it's downhill back to Prineville and the small added distance
isn't going to matter much. If the trailer is functional, I'll be that
much closer to my goal.
Pulled into the road at 12:35PM, put on some
speed and kept a wary eye on the temp gauge. At the rest stop, I got out
to check the engine, There was still water in the reservoir, so I
decided to move forward some more and see if I could get over the Ochoco
Divide.
I don't actually remember seeing the summit of
the Ochoco where I stopped to take a photo last year. I do remember
being relieved that I could now throttle back the Pusher and put a bit
of a charge on the batteries on the downhill grade. The temp gauge was
reading high, but not in to meltdown range as before when the engine was
without coolant.
My next log entry says "Mitchell", so
it looks like I made the 27 miles on one reservoir fill-up. I stopped at
the fuel station where I loaded the EV and Pusher onto the trailer
during last year's salvage operation, and looked into the engine
compartment. The reservoir was still full. This is good. I decided to
remove the pressure cap to see if it had been holding normal pressure.
The water in the reservoir suddenly drained into the engine, where it
made a huge boiling sound, with accompanying roiling and belching. The
water then began to blow out the cap along with searing hot steam. The
leaking head gasket was causing a vapor lock which was preventing water
from reaching the cylinder head and engine. This is bad.
While I was nursing some water from my
container back into the reservoir and dodging steam bursts, a
rancher-looking fellow sitting in the passenger side of a pickup being
filled at the station remarked "I know what that is! That trailer
pushes your car!!" He got out and came over to inspect it more thoroughly.
When I explained my problem, he wrote down his name and telephone
number, and told me to call him if I needed a tow, he'd come along with
a car trailer and tow me to John Day, or home, or wherever I wanted to
go. This was just the beginning of many kindnesses I experienced this
weekend. Thanks Joe.
Back on the road, I knew that the next bit
would be difficult. The Mitchell Grade is long and steep, and I'd need
every bit of power that the EV and Pusher could manage just to crest it.
The temperature gauge of the pusher was
climbing fast, and I had my foot in the EV's electric drive hard, trying
to make things easier on my overheating engine in back. About 3/4 of the
way out the hill, I saw the red temperature warning light for the
electric motor illuminate. In 3½ years of driving the EV in all kinds
of conditions, I've never seen this light come on. I pulled the the side
of the road immediately, shutting down the drive motor and Pusher, but
leaving the electric motor's cooling blower running to bring down the
temperature. Went back to the Pusher to check out the cooling system and
again found the water backed up into the reservoir, and a steam
explosion lurking when I loosened the cap.
After getting water back into the engine, I had
the idea that perhaps leaving the coolant pressure cap loose might help
prevent this backup of water in the system. I used some masking tape to
secure the cap so it wouldn't rattle completely off, then went to the
car to start the engine. Big mistake. Boosh! All of the water in the
engine hit the pavement at once. Alright, back to plan
"A". The electric drive cooled down after 10 minutes or so,
and I got back to the road.
Finally, I made the top of the hill, pulled
over and put the Pusher into neutral. I then coasted down the six miles
from the top, charging the batteries as hard as I could with the regen.
Things were
beginning to look pretty bleak. I still had a long way to go, and the
distance between water stops was getting shorter each time. I was now
using the water in the 5 gallon container, and I had only three gallons
left.
Another push forward, and down the long and
winding decent from Table Mountain. I could see the creek bed in the
gulch to the right of the road, but it was very far down in most places,
so I gritted my teeth and focused on getting to Picture Gorge, where I
knew that the John Day River was just a few steps down from the road.
Although the temp gauge on the pusher was only indicating
"hot", I now knew that there was no water in the cylinder head
to make the gauge read properly, and that I was probably causing serious
damage to the engine. During my last few stops, I had noticed that the
oil pressure light was flickering when the engine was idling. This is
not a good sign of engine health.
At Picture Gorge, I breathed a sigh of relief,
the last of the hills was behind me, but also felt a growing
discouragement, John Day was still 38 miles away, and the valley through
which I was about to pass was almost completely developed with ranches.
There would be few opportunities to access the river to refill my
containers without climbing over stock fences and trespassing deeply
onto private property. Added to this was the mounting damage that I felt
that the Pusher engine was being subjected to by attempting to press it
further without adequate cooling.
The first turnout on my side of the road was
occupied by a truck, so I continued another quarter mile to the next
wide apron, stopped the car and crawled down a steep rock slide to
refill the containers from the river.
After filling the containers and returning to the car, I saw the truck
in the first turnout pull onto the highway. As it approached, I saw that
it was a freaking car carrier semi truck. There was one car on
the front, one in the back and one-and-a-half car lengths of empty
space in the middle!!! Not knowing what else to do, I stuck out my
thumb as if to hitch a ride. Damned if this rig didn't pull right over
next to me and stop!!!!
Turns out that this truck was delivering a new
Mercedes Benz SUV to Idaho, and the driver had stopped to pick up a SAAB
that had overheated on the road. I asked if I could get a tow into John
Day. Jim (the driver) said "no problem", but that the SAAB
would need to be dropped off in Mt Vernon, about 30 miles ahead, and
that we should take it off and put my car and trailer in the middle. He
also mentioned that if he had some tools, he could remove the defective
thermostat from the SAAB and let the woman who was driving it resume her
trip, and not have to reload her car after mine was loaded. Since I had
a full set of metric tools and 6 gallons of water from the river, this
is exactly what we did. The SAAB's owner (dang, forgot her name) had
left San Francisco the previous day and had two cats in the car which
were not benefiting from the heat. The first thing she did after we got
her car running was to turn on the air conditioning.
After giving both Jim and myself a big hug each, she drove off, not to
be seen for the rest of the trip.
I drove the EV and Pusher onto the middle of the car trailer and Jim
secured it with chains and binders. The cab of the truck was air
conditioned, which was quite welcome. The day had become hot, and I had
expended a lot of stress and effort making it this far. Jim and I
exchanged introductions, and I learned that he worked for a large regional
car dealership which operated the truck he was driving.
Not long after we got under way, the skies
darkened, and rain fell intermittently. A low-hanging dark cloud bank
hovered over the Strawberry Mountain Range, punctuated by streaks of
lightning. Although the rain took the edge off of the desert heat, I
knew that the lightning was likely to cause additional range fires, and
make the firefighter's work that much harder.
We pulled
into John Day and Jim looked for a good place to offload the car. He
ended up finding six parallel parking places right on Main Street, and
so we filled them up with the truck and put down the ramps.
Once the car and trailer were back on the
pavement, I asked Jim what I owed him for the trailer service, and he
replied "nothing". I pressed him again and he replied that he
was paid my the mile, the SUV he was delivering wasn't due in Idaho
until Saturday, and that he like helping out people who had car troubles
on the highway. While he was busy putting away the chains and loading up
the ramps, I folded a $20 bill behind one of my "business
cards", and handed it to him, telling him to check into my web site
when he got the chance. Of course, he felt the bill under the card right
away. "Keep it" I told him, "you just saved my butt back
there, and I do appreciate it." Jim fired up the truck to continue
his journey across Oregon, and I drove the three blocks to the Grant
County Fairgrounds, arriving finally at 5PM, after 10 hours on (and off)
the road.
I checked
into the SolWest office at the fairgrounds, and gave Jennifer, the
fair's organizer the short version of my day's tale, then went out to
the Orchard to set up my tent. I wasn't sure how frequent or lengthy the
rain showers would be, and wanted to have my ground cover down and rain
fly up in case of more precipitation. Actually, I had thought before
arriving at the site that I might just go ahead and pitch the tent
inside the arena building like I did last year when it began to rain,
but once I had arrived, I found this to be impossible, as the old
building had been demolished, and a new, bigger building was in the
process of being built.
At any rate, when I went back to the
Orchard to set up camp, I found quite a few tents already occupying the
space under the trees where I'd camped the previous two years. After
checking in with several nearby campers, I selected a spot nearly
exactly where I pitched the tent last year. Unloaded the car and
trailer, put up the portable dwelling, and filled it with the contents
of the car, organizing things along the back wall, opposite the entry
flap.
With the camping area secured, I drove the car
and trailer up to the exhibition area to charge for a while. The
batteries had taken a bit of a beating going over the two final passes,
and were about 50% depleted. I plugged into one of the 15 ampere
outlets provided on a utility pole in the middle of the grounds, and then
wandered over to the open-air classroom to attend Energy Outfitters'
unveiling of Outback Solar's new sine wave inverter series. Pleasantly
enough, a free buffet-style dinner was provided, so I had one less chore
to be concerned about, and filled the empty pit that substituted for my
stomach. The last meal was on the Ochoco grade, and I had not stopped to
snack since.
While we were eating, Andy came up to me and
mentioned that he had heard that I had some car trouble, and there and
then, he called his brother-in-law to alert him that he might need to
haul the car trailer over from Sweet Home so that I could be towed home
if necessary. I hadn't been on site two hours, and already the help was
beginning to come pouring in!
Nicked back to the tent with some ice stolen
from the lemonade punchbowl, mixed up and knocked back a bourbon and
soda to calm my nerves. Also took a few minutes to inflate the
ThermaRest mattress and make a bed while it was still light, and while I
still had some energy.
After eating (and thanking our hosts), I packed up my
backpack and headed over to Darren's motel room over at the Dreamer's
Inn to catch a shower and re-freeze one of my ice packs for the cooler.
Darren was busy watching the Discovery Channel, some docu-drama about a Russian
nuke submarine that had a core melt down or some such. I provided live
dialog to accompany the video, substituting my experiences of the day.
"Captain, all of the reactor coolant has escaped, we're in danger
of a warp core breach! Ahooga! Ahooga! All hands on deck! Locate the
nearest auto parts store." Etc. (Guess you had to be there!!)
After washing off the
day's sweat and dirt, we headed down the balcony to the Home Power suite
and hung around talking with Richard and the HP crew, enjoying a
dark brew and smoking the occasional had-rolled (tobacco) cigarette.
Things started to wind down about 10:30PM, so I rode my bike the three
blocks back to the fairgrounds, unplugged the car (which was still about
25% discharged), and returned to the tent.
Since this was unfamiliar territory, with unfamiliar
sounds, I screwed in a set of ear plugs to keep the decibels at bay, and
collapsed into bed. Since I had no reason to awake early, and wanted to
catch up on some of what I had lost the previous night, I expected to be
able to stay in the sack until the sun was high enough to warm the tent
tomorrow morning. The night was quite warm, enough to not need covers,
and I eventually drifted off to fitful sleep.
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