Pilgrim Days

[Frochevy]

Your bus is looking great! I think we have the same reading lights and love them. Just don't let your kids grab one and yank on it. It doesn't hold up to that very well.

I can't wait to see your hearth completed. What kind of wood did you use for your posts for the hearth? What kind of wood stove are you going with?

[DrDanger]

Originally Posted by HazeltheMooseWagon

It’s looking great! I really like that dark blue and I think the primer was a good idea. Several Skoolies I follow on Instagram have been painted over the past couple weeks. I hope I can paint mine before it gets cold here.

Thanks! Since we went with equipment enamel we had to choose between Kubota orange, John Deere green, or...International blue! It seemed fitting since we have an International and we wanted blue anyway. Good luck with the paint job!

[musigenesis]

Everything is looking fantastic. Love the paint job and the hearth, in particular. And you're in the butcher block club!

[DrDanger]

Originally Posted by Frochevy

Your bus is looking great! I think we have the same reading lights and love them. Just don't let your kids grab one and yank on it. It doesn't hold up to that very well.

I can't wait to see your hearth completed. What kind of wood did you use for your posts for the hearth? What kind of wood stove are you going with?

The posts are birch which I salvaged from my dad's annual pruning of his property. It was a bit fiddly to cut two parallel ends on a log but I eventually got it! My stove is a Tiny Wood Stove 4K. I bought it in 2019 and still haven't installed it yet "I'm sure I'll get it in there in no time, how long could it possibly take?"

[DrDanger]

Originally Posted by musigenesis

Everything is looking fantastic. Love the paint job and the hearth, in particular. And you're in the butcher block club!

Thanks! I am really looking forward to getting the stove in there before fall (fingers crossed)

[DrDanger]

I finally got around to getting the shower plumbed. I made it hard on myself by dropping the floor down 4in in hopes of not having to stoop down in the shower. Anyway, this is the inelegant solution I came up with:

The shower goes into a catch tank first. This will allow me to hook up a pump later if my gravity feed doesn't work. In the mean time, the shower tank will fill to the level of the gray tank.

[DrDanger]

I debated between tile and solid surface for the shower walls and decided to go with tile in the end (cheaper but not easier).
I started by pre-sloping the shower pan with concrete, installing a PVC shower pan liner, then topping with another 2in of concrete



Then I installed the cement fiber board on the walls and painted with Red Guard waterproofing.

...and a million years later...

Seriously though, tile takes time, especially if it is your first time doing it (like it was for me) and if you have a lot of silly edges to work around like I did. The little step on the side there about a foot up from the floor is actually a chase where my main waste water drain goes to the gray tank. Up above, just below the window, is the wire chase. In hind sight, I would find another way to do the chases.


I still have to finish with the silicone caulk and grout sealant before I can finish installing the hardware and test it out, but it is really close to being done. Now if I can just figure out why my water heater isn't working...

[DrDanger]

My water pump (shurflow 4048, 4gpm) is cycling on and off when I am using the kitchen faucet (could be the accumulator tank pressure or the bypass adjustment on the pump). Every time it cycles on the lights flicker. Could this be due to my voltage converter (24v to 12v) not keeping up or is there another possible culprit?

[Ronnie]

Has it always done that? If so the startup load maybe a bit much for the converter, or the wire size to the converter as well as the pump might need to be larger.

By the way we are very near Fredericksburg, at least when we are home

[DrDanger]

Originally Posted by Ronnie

Has it always done that? If so the startup load maybe a bit much for the converter, or the wire size to the converter as well as the pump might need to be larger.

By the way we are very near Fredericksburg, at least when we are home

Not always. It definitely does it when I have other larger loads (e.g. running the Webasto heater). I'll try up-sizing the wire, but from what I remember when I wired it I just matched the gauge of wire coming out of the unit itself (it is one of those sealed units with pig tails coming out of it).

[DrDanger]

I bit the bullet and got the 70A Victron voltage converter and that has solved the voltage drop issue with my 12V system. It really had become an issue in the last month or so as my Webasto has been running pretty much 24hrs a day. Any time I used the water pump while the Webasto was running the voltage would drop which caused the Webasto to restart. Kind of annoying when you are washing dishes. Oh well. At least it matches all the other blue equipment in my electrical box

[DrDanger]

Back in October we were getting ready to finally kick off this big adventure and hit the road full time. I went to the gas station to make sure we started with a full tank the next morning and on the way home the engine died again. I was driving about 50mph and it just stopped running. Thankfully I was able to coast to the side of the road to a really nice spot where I was out of the way of traffic. I was very upset at the time because we had spent a fair amount of money on it over the summer when it died in the same manner in the middle of Nebraska. The Nebraska mechanics never found a definitive cause so they took their best guess and replaced the IDM relay and the crank position sensor. That got me from Nebraska to Virginia and then all around the mountains of Virginia for a week or so. But just as we were ready to head north the same problem came back. I was super frustrated so I decided to pony up the extra money to have the tow truck take it to the International dealer in Richmond.

Thankfully this happened about a week before Good Sam decided to stop covering skookies. Maybe the $1600 bill the tow driver sent to Good Sam prompted them to cancel all of us. If so, I apologize.


The International dealer determined that the IDM was getting irregular voltage, but since the other mechanics had already replaced the relay they started looking at the rest of the system. Their manual told them to replace the IDM itself to the tune of $1500, but the service advisor knew better and checked the rest of the wiring. As it turns out it was just the relay harness terminals getting loose/worn. They replaced the harness terminals and all has been well. It even sounds like it is running better than it ever had.



Now I am thinking I should go ahead and replace the harness to the ECM as well (I think that may be the cause of a very intermittent "fuel filter" light). Perhaps it may be better to heed the warning not to fix things that ain't broke.

[DrDanger]

As per usual, I buy certain items I am excited about using LONG before they are actually needed. Case in point: our tiny wood stove. I bought the Tiny Wood Stove (TWS) Dwarf 4K in spring of 2019 and have dragged it from Kentucky to Michigan to Washington to Virgina. Now, at long last, we have it actually installed in our bus!


I built the hearth with 3/4 plywood and birch logs. I covered the base with tile.

Then I built a heat shield with a 1in air gap behind and underneath it and covered that with the same tile.


Looks like a nice spot for a wood stove


Next I had to drill some holes for the bolts that would secure the stove to the hearth.


My dad just so happened to have these scrap pieces of 1/4in steel lying around so I snagged them to make pads for the stove feet to sit on.

Looks pretty good so far, eh?

Next step: install the flue. I looked around to find cheaper options than the kits that Tiny Wood Stove (TWS) sells, but it was pretty hard to find some of the pieces needed since it isn't a standard residential size. I bought the Skoolie/RV kit and an additional section of insulated pipe to give a bit more clearance above the roof and solar panels.



I discovered during installation that while I had accounted for the position of the solar panels themselves, I had not accounted for the location of the frame I built for the panels. This meant that I needed an offset from my stove to the flue exit location. I ordered two 45deg elbows from TWS, but as usual, they were on backorder. I didn't want to wait any longer (and we needed some heat since we were heading north), so I found some 4in elbows on Amazon. They have worked OK, but they don't look as nice as the ones from TWS.

We have used it quite a bit over the past few months. I wouldn't say we are masters of fire, but we have learned that it isn't as simple as you might assume. The moisture level of your wood REALLY matters. Not every bundle of "camp wood" is equal. I bought two bundles at a campground in PA that were totally unusable. Turns out they were 40% water still! But, if you have decent wood, it keeps the bus very toasty (actually, it is hard to keep the bus from getting uncomfortably warm while maintaining a good flue temperature). We got an Ecofan heat powered fan to distribute the warm air toward the rear of the bus. It can't quite push heat all the way back to the bedroom, but it works pretty well to distribute the heat in the living room and kitchen.

The stove also provides additional benefits such as reheating my coffee in the morning (we don't have a microwave so instead of taking 45 seconds it takes 45 minutes [to get the fire going and up to temp]).


All in all we are really glad we decided to install a wood stove in the bus.


I mean come on, look how darn cozy it is

[rossvtaylor]

That's pretty fantastic! I'd love to hear/read more about that tile. Did you have to cut brass insert strips or are those part of the tile?

[s2mikon]

Let me say something positive before all the negative "can't have a wood stove" crap starts. That looks very nice and I like it. I'm sitting by my wood stove here in the house now as I type this. I like wood stove heat even if it is messy at times. Bacon and eggs taste better cooked on the top of a wood stove too. Even Jagermeister tastes better in front of a wood stove More pictures please.

[DrDanger]

Originally Posted by rossvtaylor

That's pretty fantastic! I'd love to hear/read more about that tile. Did you have to cut brass insert strips or are those part of the tile?

The little metal pieces are basically thin caps glued on top of a smaller tile underneath. Like most of my cuts on mosaic tile, I used the angle grinder with a diamond cutoff wheel. It worked pretty well, had a few of the metal pieces come off while cutting and just reattached them while grouting.


That particular tile was relatively expensive, but it fit my wife's design eye, so we went for it (plus it wasn't a very big area, so the total cost wasn't too bad).

[DrDanger]

Originally Posted by s2mikon

Let me say something positive before all the negative "can't have a wood stove" crap starts. That looks very nice and I like it. I'm sitting by my wood stove here in the house now as I type this. I like wood stove heat even if it is messy at times. Bacon and eggs taste better cooked on the top of a wood stove too. Even Jagermeister tastes better in front of a wood stove More pictures please.

Thanks! I understand that wood stoves are a polarizing topic, but I am not sure why. I suppose like most things we presume we have all the right answers and everyone else is an idiot. Well, let me be the first to say that I am an idiot more often than not (but I do usually think I'm right )

[DrDanger]

Originally Posted by s2mikon;461882e

More pictures please.

Ask and you shall receive. This is admittedly more of a coffee picture than a stove picture, but I did use the stove to heat the water.

[plfking]

I always liked your idea for the 'doggie window'.......looks like someone's taking advantage of it.

[Dbacks2k4]

Originally Posted by DrDanger

No, it is actually right next to the front door on the right side. I have seen some buses that have the fuel tank in the back, but not me. Maybe it depends on the length of the bus.

I've enjoyed reading over your build. I plan to build with a very similar bus model as yours so seeing some of your plumbing issues and solutions has been very informative.

I can tell you on that model of IC bus the ones with the 40 gallon tank are side-mounted near the entry door. The districts that opted for the larger 100-gallon tanks are center mounted behind the rear axle.