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Old 02-27-2021, 08:59 PM   #41
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Join Date: Mar 2020
Location: Western MT
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Chassis: Crown Supercoach
Engine: Detroit 6-71TA, 10 sp.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mokibrabrant View Post
...pre-warming the engine/coolant/oil is almost a pre-requisite for even starting at all. Consider keeping the heater element and adding a circulating pump to it so you can pre-warm the engine for those really cold morning starts.
Good advice, thanks! There's a coolant heater installed, but the element seems to be burned out. The simplest solution would be to replace the element and perhaps add a circulation pump as your mentioned. Unfortunately, I can't find any indication on the heater what element is in there (how many watts). It's a Kim Hotstart heater.
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Sorry this pic is upside down. I can rotate them on my computer, but I can't figure it out on my phone.

Anybody happen to know the wattage of the heating elements in these puppies? My guess is 1500 watts, based on what I've seen for similarly-sized engines but I have no idea is there's something special about a two stroke that makes it different in this regard.

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Old 02-27-2021, 10:28 PM   #42
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Location: Near Flagstaff AZ
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Year: 1974
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Chassis: "Atomic"
Engine: DD 8V71
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tejon7 View Post
Anybody happen to know the wattage of the heating elements in these puppies? My guess is 1500 watts, based on what I've seen for similarly-sized engines
I think you'll need to un-grime the label and check. We have a few Hotstart heaters and they come in 500W, 1000W, 1500W, 1800W, and 2000W varieties. I'm not sure which ones are the 120v ones...maybe not the 1800 and 2000? But they definitely have more than one.

Before you jump on the element, make sure it's not the internal thermostat. Hotstart recommends replacement of the thermostat on a regular basis...which is years of operation...but you might be due. If your thermostat is open, the element won't be "on".

EDIT: to add a link to the manual. Is this the version you've got?

https://www.hotstart.com/assets/Inst...-Heater-EN.pdf
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Old 02-27-2021, 11:43 PM   #43
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Ooohh, good tip about the thermostat. I'll have to look up how to replace that. Unfortunately, the ID label long since withered away. Mine isn't the newer bell-shaped version in your link - it's more like an elongated aluminum housing (Kim Hotstart part # B 35676) into which you can put various heating elements.

I probably ought to just contact Hotstart and see what they recommend. If nothing else, I'll just buy a more modern and serviceable unit. For some reason, I had the impression that these things were much more expensive than they are.
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Old 02-28-2021, 02:12 AM   #44
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If you have a good meter...you can can measure your heating element in ohms. Voltage squared divided by ohms is watts.
12 x 12 =144, 144 devided by your measurement is the wattage.
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Old 02-28-2021, 03:56 AM   #45
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The block heaters I’m familiar with are all around 1000 watts . There are some aftermarket units that are 1500 but most people run them on too long or too small extension cords causing lowered voltage and breaker trips , the 1000 watt heaters do a good job of warming the engine enough to start with ease.

I’ve started a 2 stroke Detroit down I’m the 20s outside without being plugged in. It smoked quite a bit like Detroit’s do.

I’d install gauges on your bus and put the air shutters on a switch. I have air shutters on my bus and love them. I just turn them off when I’m on the freeway.
Although when travelling my most recent trip in below zero weather I had every heater in my bus turned on high, I used the shutters when I went into towns as my engine temp lowered very quickly .. of course that bus isn’t a Detroit. ( I have yet to drive my Detroit bus)
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Old 02-28-2021, 08:33 AM   #46
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Originally Posted by Rwnielsen View Post
If you have a good meter...you can can measure your heating element in ohms. Voltage squared divided by ohms is watts.
12 x 12 =144, 144 devided by your measurement is the wattage.
That's a good idea! Does this work the same if it's a 120 V heater? It doesn't look like there's enough space inside the plug housing for a converter, so I'm assuming that the element itself uses 120V. If so, I guess I'd need to measure Impedence instead of resistance, and I don't have an O-scope. But it's still a good tip!
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Old 02-28-2021, 08:34 AM   #47
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Originally Posted by cadillackid View Post
The block heaters I’m familiar with are all around 1000 watts . There are some aftermarket units that are 1500 but most people run them on too long or too small extension cords causing lowered voltage and breaker trips , the 1000 watt heaters do a good job of warming the engine enough to start with ease.

I’ve started a 2 stroke Detroit down I’m the 20s outside without being plugged in. It smoked quite a bit like Detroit’s do.

I’d install gauges on your bus and put the air shutters on a switch. I have air shutters on my bus and love them. I just turn them off when I’m on the freeway.
Although when travelling my most recent trip in below zero weather I had every heater in my bus turned on high, I used the shutters when I went into towns as my engine temp lowered very quickly .. of course that bus isn’t a Detroit. ( I have yet to drive my Detroit bus)
Thanks for this real-world experience. I honestly don't expect to spend much time below freezing in this bus, so perhaps going with 1000W instead of higher wattage is better. I've also started the engine cold at 20° F this winter. I only did it once, and it didn't struggle, but I'd like give this old engine as much love as I can going forward. For a Detroit, 'Love' means 'Abuse' while on the road, but I figure a little babying on cold mornings is the least I can do.

The shutters on a manual switch sounds interesting... Maybe one of those switches with a super bright red LED to remind me when the switch is 'on' and the shutters are closed.

I already have one temp gauge, which i presume is in the engine. Are you suggesting another that measures the coolant reservoir temp or somewhere else?
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Old 02-28-2021, 08:59 AM   #48
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Nice work! And good to know about priming the fuel line for the heater, I don't think I've seen that issue mentioned before. I still need to install mine, but I'm afraid the weather is warming up too quickly and I'm going to end up putting it off until next year.
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Old 02-28-2021, 09:16 AM   #49
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tejon7 View Post
Thanks for this real-world experience. I honestly don't expect to spend much time below freezing in this bus, so perhaps going with 1000W instead of higher wattage is better. I've also started the engine cold at 20° F this winter. I only did it once, and it didn't struggle, but I'd like give this old engine as much love as I can going forward. For a Detroit, 'Love' means 'Abuse' while on the road, but I figure a little babying on cold mornings is the least I can do.

The shutters on a manual switch sounds interesting... Maybe one of those switches with a super bright red LED to remind me when the switch is 'on' and the shutters are closed.

I already have one temp gauge, which i presume is in the engine. Are you suggesting another that measures the coolant reservoir temp or somewhere else?



I didnt know you had sa temp gauge.. im familiar mainly with City busses (GMC Fishbowls) when it comes to detroits.. and those busses didnt have any gauges.. just idiot light if you ran out of oil or got it hot..



my shutters in the DEV bus are on a switch such that when I turn the switch on, the shutters are in Auto mode.. they open and close based on the thermostat which i think on this bus is in the bottom of the radiator.
I used a lighted Cole-hersey toggle switch (since the rest of my switches are toggles).. so there is a bright red LED lit in the switch itself..



when I turn the switch off then the shutters are open all the time.. they are designed to fail open.. meaning no power no air and they are open.. each year I lubricate the shutter pivots and linkages and check the springback on the air cylinder..



im sure the absolute safest way is to disable them and never use them.. I just happen to always watch my gauges like a hawk anyway.. the DTA-360 is also a wet sleeve engine.. people have ruoined these engines with one single overheat to 230 degrees.. so far so good ove had this bus 5 years and driven it a ton and havent ruined its engine.. I tend to drive it in many extremes.. my most recent trip had me in northern illinois and wisconsin during the polar vortex.. (my diesel coolant heater is the only reason the bus started one morning where the actual temp was -20f).. I had trouble getting the diesel coolant heater started.. but once it did i left that thing go for an hour and the bus started with ease...


last august i was in dallas, houston, austin.. and it was between 100-105 actual temp and sunny each day.. I actually saw my temp gauge reach the 200 degree mark on that trip..
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Old 02-28-2021, 10:08 AM   #50
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Originally Posted by musigenesis View Post
Nice work! And good to know about priming the fuel line for the heater, I don't think I've seen that issue mentioned before. I still need to install mine, but I'm afraid the weather is warming up too quickly and I'm going to end up putting it off until next year.
Haha, 'afraid' warm weather is coming? Sounds like a wonderful reason to procrastinate to me! Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?

I watched a couple YouTube videos about setting up the heater. There are lots of good ones available, and they all talk about priming to some extent. The thing that I screwed up was that I primed the fuel line until I saw diesel reach the heater, but didn't make sure that ALL the air bubbles were out of the line.
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Old 02-28-2021, 10:12 AM   #51
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Cadillackid - your approach sounds good to me. Should be pretty simple to wire up one switch. And my shutters currently work fine, so it'll be a simple extra safety measure without doing any major bus surgery. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm adding that to the list.
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Old 02-28-2021, 12:26 PM   #52
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Another progress update catch-up

Battery trickle chargers

This is not really a major milestone, but I thought I’d share my experience with battery maintainers/trickle chargers. The bus has been sitting idle through the winter, and I’ve been using the coach batteries to run the diesel heater. I was occasionally using a cheapo Black and Decker charger to bring them back to full charge, but I was never confident that it was doing a good job. It was just a hunch, but I thought that a trickle charger might be a better permanent solution.

I bought a NOCO Genius 2-amp charger/maintainer because it had good reviews and claimed to maintain any size of battery. The short story is that it didn’t work. Even if I fully charged my two 8D batteries with the cheapo charger before hooking up the maintainer, the NOCO would perpetually stay in bulk charge mode and never show ‘fully charged’. Oh well… I guess I’ll put it on the Honda Civic.

After doing a bit more research and contacting NOCO about my problem, I bought one of their Genius Gen2 2-bank 20-amp chargers. It is normally over $200, but they just came out with a new model and I picked up this older one at a steep discount. This is definitely a proper charger. It is also fully waterproof and can be permanently installed. Anywhoo… the moral of the story is that you’re in the market for a battery charger/maintainer, you should probably do a little more research than I did the first time around.

Progress: Floor coving removed
Useful Tools: Strong hands, warm weather, and a long straight edge

Crown put in a large-radius rounded coving where the floor meets the wall of the bus. This seems like an excellent feature for a school bus, but I needed to remove it so that I could put square-ish stuff like cabinets and refrigerators closer than 6” from the walls.

The rubber flooring is 1/8” thick and the stuff on the coving and lower wall was in really good shape. It just so happens that Crown also used 1/8” rubber for the draft stoppers at the base of the windows, which the school children had completely destroyed by shoving Nutri-Grain bars and Ramen into the window cavities. So… I tried my best to salvage the coving rubber to redo the window seals.

I first cut the rubber about ¼ of the way up the coving with a razor knife. I just eyeballed it, but the hope was that I would leave enough rubber so that it would lay down flat and hit the wall after the coving was removed. I used a long metal ruler and razor knife thingy from ‘Foam Werks’ that is made for cutting foam board. I think a long piece of metal and a utility knife would work just as well.

Next, I pulled up the rubber. The rubber is glued down using an adhesive that was developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works program in the late 80’s and was credited by Mikhail Gorbechev as having directly caused the breakup of the Soviet Union. Not really – but it is crazy sticky.

I started pulling up the rubber on a ~20° F morning before I had the diesel heater hooked up. It was hard work. Once I got the bus up to ~55° F (about the hottest I can comfortably work with my winter-thickened blood), the adhesive started letting go with noticeably less effort. Don’t misunderstand me – it was still extremely hard work, but slightly easier than in sub-freezing conditions. I tried various tools to make the job easier, but hand pulling was the only way I could avoid tearing or puncturing the rubber.
Beneath the rubber is curved sheet steel, screwed in on top and nailed at the bottom. This came up easily.
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Progress: Window rubber replaced

As I mentioned earlier, I saved a bunch of 1/8” rubber from the floor coving to re-do the rubber draft stoppers at the base of the windows. I only had one original, intact rubber window seal. From this, I made a template out of aluminum. With the template and a sharp knife, I made all new window seals in a few hours.
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One tip if anyone tries this – I cut all the interior corners using a hollow hole punch from a grommet kit. I chucked the punch into my drill and it quickly cut perfect small-radius curves that should be more resistant to tearing/cracking than a sharp 90° corner would.
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Here's that hollow hole punch
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And the finished product!
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Old 02-28-2021, 01:37 PM   #53
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I hadn't heard the term monocoque before, so I looked it up. I guess I've learned my one new thing for the day and can take the afternoon off!

I completely agree with you that the stock riveted skin on a school bus increases the overall structural strength. I'm just not convinced it's by a significant amount. I even consulted a retired engineer about this (who has no 'skin' in the game, as opposed to Bluebird or Thomas engineers that some folks have contacted about this and who justifiably tell random Joe-Blow skoolie converters not to alter the original design). With the lattice of high-strength steel arched ribs every 17.5" and longitudinal steel strapping every 24" to support the ribs, this thing could survive being dropped from an airplane, with or without the inner and outer skin.

Again, I'm not arguing that the aluminum panels don't add strength, it's just a matter of what your priorities are. What's most important? Structural strength, insulation value, mold remediation, mitigating condensation, time/effort...? For us, strength wasn't priority #1, since this bus will be vastly stronger and safer than any RV. For us, the pros of our method outweigh the cons.

If I was advising somebody at the beginning of a Crown conversion, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that they follow our example on this. If your goals are the same as ours, then sure, tear that ceiling down! But each person has to determine their priorities and do what works for them. One thing that should definitely go on the 'cons' side of the list is time/effort required to do what we did. This project required hundreds of man-hours of work. If we hadn't ripped out the ceiling, we'd be much farther along on our conversion by now. If I could go back, I'd still do it, but man was it a tiring slog!

It appears you did a good job not damaging the aluminum skin when you first removed it. I personally did not think it was worth the man hours to prevent damaging the skin. I also was unconvinced that the aluminum skin ceiling that WAS in my bus adds much structurally to the roof. If someone is that concerned they could weld in more steel ribbing or something. Although, I was careful not to damage the curved rear corners so I could use them as templates for their replacements.
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Old 02-28-2021, 02:23 PM   #54
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It appears you did a good job not damaging the aluminum skin when you first removed it. I personally did not think it was worth the man hours to prevent damaging the skin. I also was unconvinced that the aluminum skin ceiling that WAS in my bus adds much structurally to the roof. If someone is that concerned they could weld in more steel ribbing or something. Although, I was careful not to damage the curved rear corners so I could use them as templates for their replacements.
I was extremely careful, but I still bunged up the edges of several of the panels. When I put them back up, I switched the way they overlap each other to hide most of the dings. In other words, the edge that was underneath and not seen is now on top.

I'd love to see pics of whatever you ended up using for the ceiling! Luckily, my wife and I both liked the look/feel of the aluminum panels - I was not excited about trying to re-create those curved rear sections out of any other material.
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Old 03-01-2021, 06:48 PM   #55
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Progress: Lower side walls framed and insulated, windows insulated too
Useful Tools: Large framing square OR a perfectly level bus

Crown walls lean inwards a bit (~2 1/8 inches from floor to above the windows on my bus), so my goals in framing the walls beneath the windows was partially to make a cavity for foam board insulation, but also partially to square up everything so that cabinets and appliances would fit better.

First, I removed the silver flashing beneath the windows. I’ll flip this over and re-attach it later as an accent piece above the windows. This is where I encountered the dreaded Gulmite screws. There were 5 of them holding on the flashing in the very back of the bus. Two of those five took more time to remove than the hundred other Phillips screws on the flashing. For anybody whose bus was ALL Gulmite screws… yikes. I feel for ‘ya.

The wood framing is 2x2’s and 2x4’s. It works out nicely that a 2x2 (actual dimensions 1.5” x 1.5”) mounted just beneath the window allows for an almost perfectly vertical wall from the floor to ~59” high, where the ceiling curve begins. My bus isn’t perfectly level, so I used a framing square to make sure the walls are square to the floor. I have a standard 16x24 framing square, but a larger square would have been nicer. The framing is screwed into the floor, the window frame, and occasionally into the chair rail.
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I had a really hard time choosing foam board insulation, but eventually settled on EPS (the cheap, white stuff composed of tiny foam pellets and usually with a foil layer on one side). When looking at advertised R-values, I initially wanted all Polyiso (also has foil on one side, but is more 'crispy' and easier to cut cleanly than EPS). Then, after a little digging, I learned that it’s fine in the heat, but absolutely terrible in cool-to-cold weather. So Polyiso was out, and I basically had EPS or XPS to choose from. I fancy XPS (the pink/blue/green stuff), since it’s so easy to work with and has slightly higher R-values. Again, a little digging revealed a not-quite-so-rosy picture. Over time, the inert gasses that fill the little XPS voids are slowly replaced by regular air, which reduces the R-value to essentially the same as EPS. Plus, the XPS is twice the cost AND is vastly worse for the environment. I didn’t dig too deeply into the environmental claims – I was already leaning toward EPS at this point because while its performance specs aren’t the best, at least it’s being honest about how marginal it is
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So… I know I just ranted about how bad Polyiso and XPS are, but… I went ahead and bought 1” XPS for insulating the windows. As a reminder, we’re keeping all the original windows because we like the look, but we’re insulating and blocking off half of them. The reason I went with XPS for windows is because: A) I don’t want a thousand tiny white EPS foam pebbles stuck inside the windows, B) XPS is way easier to cut, and C) I want to paint the foam a dark color so the windows look blacked out, and I don’t think the plastic/foil exterior of EPS would paint well.
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I’m waiting for slightly warmer weather to paint the window foam, but otherwise it’s done.
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Old 03-07-2021, 09:17 PM   #56
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Originally Posted by Tejon7 View Post
I was extremely careful, but I still bunged up the edges of several of the panels. When I put them back up, I switched the way they overlap each other to hide most of the dings. In other words, the edge that was underneath and not seen is now on top.

I'd love to see pics of whatever you ended up using for the ceiling! Luckily, my wife and I both liked the look/feel of the aluminum panels - I was not excited about trying to re-create those curved rear sections out of any other material.
You are actually much farther along than us. We have not really done anything with the interior yet. The roof was raised and have some of the sheet metal up. Progress has been rather slow this past year for various reasons. We kept certain things we thought would be useful as templates and the rear corners were one of those things.
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Old 03-07-2021, 11:39 PM   #57
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Year: 1990
Coachwork: Crown, integral. (With 2kW of tiltable solar)
Chassis: Crown Supercoach II (rear engine)
Engine: Detroit 6V92TAC, DDEC 2, Jake brake, Allison HT740
Rated Cap: 37,400 lbs GVWR
I'm following this thread closely. There's not many of us doing serious conversions of Crowns, and I may be the only fool / Crown nut doing so to a Super II. My conversion after twelve years is approaching completion, but the wise old farts on the BCM forum always say that bus conversions are never truly finished, so maybe I'll be busy with it until the day I cark.

I left all my ceiling panels in place because A) I'm too lazy to take them all down and/or put them back up afterwards, and B) I don't plan on being anywhere brass-monkey cold or fry-egg-on-sidewalk hot. That's what wheels are for. I will cover my ceiling with white FRP with a half-inch of polyiso behind it, to give a modicum of insulation and to make it look nice without needing to be painted (I just HATE painting!). Together with the magic pixie-dust I mixed into the roof paint that may help slightly (or maybe not), and the fact that the entire roof is shaded by the walkway between the roof hatches and by the eight big solar panels, even on a hot SoCal day the ceiling inside never gets much over ambient temperature. If it's crazy hot, I'll go north or higher, and when it gets cold I'll migrate south or lower - easy!

It's good that other Crown converters are encountering all the little vicissitudes and hiccups that I've encountered! At least now I know I'm not alone in my misery. Rubber flooring, check. Remaking the windows' inner seals, check. Making side walls perpendicular to the floor, check. Dealing with the simple fact that nothing, and I mean nothing at all, is truly and perfectly square, flat, aligned or consistent - check. Crown did a fine job of making the best damn school buses in this spiral arm of the galaxy, but you can't blame them for not envisioning that some fools would want to make something else of their buses! Add to this the inconvenient fact that my bus leans like a drunken sailor because the RV storage yard's ground isn't level and my bus has two fewer leaves in its right rear spring than the left, and that makes a spirit level useless to determine true vertical or horizontal. Just another little challenge.

I recently put the first of my two Chinese diesel air heaters into service, and I'm very impressed with it so far. I did however slightly increase the fan's minimum speed setting to get a cleaner burn, and after last weekend's trip to my friend at almost 4000 feet ASL it didn't produce any soot buildup in the exhaust after two nights' continuous use. One day I'll properly fine-tune it with a CO meter, but I think I've got it pretty close so far. It will probably never be stoichiometric, but as long as there's no carbon buildup I'm happy. When both those CDHs are running I hope to not need my 12K minisplit's heatpump function, but it's always good to have a Plan B just in case.

If any other Crownaholics are in the Socal area I'm always more than happy to give tours of my work in progress - just PM me if you're anywhere near Orange County.

John
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Old 03-07-2021, 11:51 PM   #58
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That's a good idea! Does this work the same if it's a 120 V heater? It doesn't look like there's enough space inside the plug housing for a converter, so I'm assuming that the element itself uses 120V. If so, I guess I'd need to measure Impedence instead of resistance, and I don't have an O-scope. But it's still a good tip!
I could be wrong but...I've never needed a scope to measure a heating element. A decent meter but not a scope. You can't try to measure them with a field type meter, you'll need an old school Fluke or something similar that will actually measure ohms.
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Old 03-08-2021, 12:33 AM   #59
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Posts: 1,951
Year: 1974
Coachwork: Crown
Chassis: "Atomic"
Engine: DD 8V71
Quote:
Originally Posted by Iceni John View Post
If any other Crownaholics are in the Socal area I'm always more than happy to give tours of my work in progress - just PM me if you're anywhere near Orange County.

John
I would love to take you up on that. I have two trips to that neck of the woods planned in the next couple of months...one to pick up the 10-speed Roadranger I'm putting in our Crown (to replace the 5 speed).
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Old 03-08-2021, 01:18 AM   #60
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Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: Bly Oregon
Posts: 535
Year: 1986
Coachwork: Crown
Chassis: Supercoach
Engine: Cummins 350 big cam
Rated Cap: 86 passengers?
If you wish to install FRP on your ceiling maybe consider the following insulation:


US Energy 5mm reflective foam core insulation.


It is advertised with an R value up to R15.62 (1 layer)
It is spendy but for your ceiling, glued and covered with FRP it could work, and not lower your ceiling much. I got that for my conversion.
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