I haven’t been motivated to write a post as we haven’t done anything too exciting lately. The biggest highlight of the past week was dinner at Olio in Mancos for Donna’s birthday. Her birthday was actually on Friday, but celebrated a day early because we couldn’t get a table reservation on Friday.
Olio is upscale dining by reservation only. The owner and chef, Jason Blankenship, prepares locally sourced dinners and the menu will vary according to what may be available at the time. The place only seats about two dozen people and the tables are reserved for the night – no rushing through a meal while people wait for your table.
They have an extensive wine list. We started with the house salad – fresh salad greens with sauteed mushrooms, marcona almonds and piave and saba cheese. Their house dressing was fabulous. I ordered a bottle of 2013 Domaine les Bastides – a blend of cabernet sauvignon and grenache from Aix-en-Provence, France. It went well with our dinner entees. Donna went for the Pan Roasted Pheasant Breast on Grilled Corn Maque Choux with Tomato-Marsala Sauce while I had the Grilled, Dry-Aged, Piedmontese New York Strip with Olio Signature Steak Sauce. We split a slice of Chocolate Silk Pie with a 5-Nut Crust for dessert. What a meal.
Our time has been mostly occupied with activities in the mornings and leisurely afternoons. I play pickleball for about two hours most mornings while Donna alternates between tennis three or four days a week and pickleball. I didn’t play over the weekend as we had high winds with gusts of 40mph. Donna has also been helping our friend, Carolyn, with chores at the Owers farm a couple of days a week.
There was a lot of turnover here in La Mesa RV Park over the Memorial Day weekend. Weekenders came in while some of the longer term people went away for the weekend, presumably visiting family. Some of the longer term people here are workers staying here while they work in the mountains. I think they’re stringing electrical cable.
We had a young couple with a baby pull in next door on Friday. They were from Kansas and came here to visit with family. They pulled out Sunday morning and had to drive 900 miles back home. Their intention was to do it in two days so he could be back at work on Tuesday. This seemed awful ambitious to me – especially towing a travel trailer in the gusty, windy conditions on Sunday.
We had a few excellent meals in the last week prepared by Donna. We started the week with grilled chicken with the barbecue sauce that Donna whipped up. She served it with crash-hot potatoes (an Australian recipe) and green beans.
Last Tuesday, Donna made lemon butter scallops served with a side of sweet potato-spinach hash. I cut the spinach into thin strips and this worked much better than preparing it with whole spinach leaves.
Wednesday night Donna made something a little different – she made salami pasta alla gricia. I chopped salami into small squares that went in with the pasta and it was topped with chopped parsley and grated parmesan.
Donna bought wild Bristol Bay salmon on Sunday and she grilled it with a dijon-brown sugar glaze. Really tasty and a simple sauce to make. The side dish was gingery bok choy.
The weather has been much cooler than it was at this time last year. A week ago Monday, the thermometer only reached 62 degrees. It gradually warmed back up into the 80s by Thursday. I already mentioned the windy weekend conditions. Yesterday we had another cool Monday with a high of 68 degrees. The pattern will continue with low 70s today and tomorrow before we reach the 80s again.
Tomorrow I’ll drive Donna to the Cortez Regional Airport. She’ll take a small commuter flight back to Phoenix, then carry on to San Diego. Her sister, Linda, will arrive at about the same time and they’ll be visiting her other sister, Sheila. Sheila’s son, Connor, is graduating high school and they’ll attend the graduation Friday. Donna will fly back here on Sunday. So I’ll be on my own for four nights.
By the way, Amazon notified me that they were removing my affiliate status. They said I violating their rules by having friends and family make purchases through my website link. Huh? I thought that was how affiliate links worked – I provide the link and people that follow my blog utilize it. Whatever. I removed the Amazon link – it didn’t earn much anyway.
Last weekend, Donna started packing up stuff that we’ll need over the next four months for our summer vacation. We moved our departure date back by one day – we learned last year that it’s too much work to try and pack four months of necessary stuff in one day. Donna obtained a two-night parking pass and I parked the motorhome in front of our park model home.
The first thing I did was fill the fresh water tank and dose it with Chlor Brite. Chlor Brite is a product from Leslie Pool that’s basically granulated chlorine. Sodium diclor is the active ingredient – it’s 99% of the product. It’s a concentrated form of chlorine and a little bit goes a long way. When used in swimming pools, as little as three ounces will treat 10,000 gallons of water. Chlorine in drinking water is at a much lower level than swimming pools use.
I mixed a fairly strong solution, filled the fresh water tank and left it in overnight. After sitting in storage for eight months, I wanted to sanitize and remove any contaminants from the water tank. Early Tuesday morning, I dumped the tank and refilled it with filtered fresh water. We use a two-canister filtration system – the first stage is a five-micron sediment filter followed by a one-micron carbon block filter.
The dump valve on our fresh water tank is relatively large and empties the tank quickly. I dumped 100 gallons and it created a small stream in the road. During a storm in last summer’s monsoon season, our neighbors told us the street was completely flooded and ran all the way down through our carport to the shed! I can’t imagine how many gallons of water had to dump from the clouds to cause that.
Most people not from the area don’t realize Arizona has a monsoon season. In central Arizona, that season usually begins around mid-July and runs through August. Flash floods are common as these storms can drop a lot water very quickly.
Our neighbor across the street from us on the 1600 lane just bought the place. Donna told him we planned to place a barrier at the shed end of our carport to prevent flood water from entering our shed. His Arizona room addition is built on a slab at the back of his carport. Last year it flooded and suffered water damage – all the carpeting had to be ripped out. He was leaving the next day to go back north. He asked me if I could put up a water barrier for him – he gave me $100 for materials.
I found a product called Quick Dam Flood Bags. These are cloth tubes filled with a gel product that swells and seals the tubes, creating a useful flood barrier. They are stackable, so I bought enough to stack two high in front of our shed and his Arizona room. When they’re fully activated, they will create a barrier six to seven inches high.
I used a garden hose to activate his Quick Dams and make sure they’ll work. Job done!
I put Midget-San up on jack stands for summer storage. Then I removed the wheels – not only will this prevent the tires from flat-spotting, it’s also an anti-theft measure. It’s pretty hard to steal a car without wheels. I fastened the car cover over it for the summer.
Last Thursday was Cinco de Mayo – our anniversary day. We planned to celebrate our 16th anniversary with dinner at Baja Joe’s. Donna wasn’t feeling up to night out after her trip back from Vermont, so I ordered take-out from Baja Joe’s. Donna had her favorite shrimp dish with poblano cream sauce. I had the chef’s special fish filet with a seafood sauce containing pieces of shrimp and octopus. It was excellent – we’ve never had a bad meal at Baja Joe’s.
Saturday evening I manned the grill and cooked a pork tenderloin that Donna marinated in her mojo marinade. She served it with Cuban rice and a steamed vegetable medley. Another nicely balanced and nutritious meal.
Donna had shrimp again on Sunday when she grilled it and served it over cilantro-avocado-lime sauce. Tasty!
We had a warm weekend with the thermometer reaching the upper 90s – it was 99 on Saturday! The temps held in the 80s as we packed on Monday and Tuesday. Packing for four months is more like moving from a furnished apartment to another furnished place. It’s not like we’re just heading out for a weekend.
We hit the road around 9:15am. Our route took us over Usery Pass to the Bush Highway past Saguaro Lake and on to the Beeline Highway (AZ87). We climbed to Payson which sits at an elevation of 5,000 feet above sea level. It was much cooler – in the low 70s there – and continued across the Sitgreaves National Forest to Heber on AZ260. This road runs through pine forest all the way to Heber – not what most people picture in Arizona.
At Heber, we turned northeast on AZ277, then AZ377 to Holbrook. The wind really picked up at Holbrook – it’s a steady 30mph wind with higher speed gusts. We’ve stopped for the night near the entrance of the Petrified Forest National Park. We stayed here last year – it’s a dry camping spot. I positoned the coach near the leeward side of a building to shelter us from some of the wind gusts. This is about the halfway point to tomorrow’s destination – Cortez, Colorado. We’ll spend a month there. Tomorrow we will go north through the National Park, then head east a short way on I-40, then north again through the Navajo Nation past Four Corners and on to Cortez – that’s the plan.
April 1st – I promise, no April Fool’s lines in this post. This is the time of year when many people pack up for the season and leave Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort, especially the Canadian visitors. I’d be willing to bet that we have only 50% occupancy two weeks from now.
Donna and I have been discussing plans for our summer season. I think we’ll need to scale back from our original thoughts. With the current price of fuel, we’ll be burning over $5 every eight miles! The current administration wants to blame the high cost of fuel on the Russians, but it doesn’t take much memory to go back two months, well before Russia invaded Ukraine, when fuel prices had already increased by 48% over a year ago.
I don’t see any real relief anytime soon and with it, inflation will continue unabated. I don’t see any cohesive plan from the White House to provide a real solution. So, I’m going to be conservative in my spending for the foreseeable future.
We’ve booked a month in Cortez, Colorado. This has been a favorite area to visit over the last few years. We also have a month booked in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’ve pretty much scrapped our original plan to head back to the Pacific Northwest. We’ll hang in the Northern Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico regions this year when we escape the heat of central Arizona next month.
A couple of days ago, I went into my geek mode and ran some tests of our stereo sound system. I found some surprising results with an oscilloscope on the output of the Elekit integrated stereo amp. First of all, looking at power output, I found that only one watt of power could bring the sound to a reasonable listening level in our Arizona room. The room is approximately 24 feet by 16 feet with a peaked ceiling and is acoustically challenging.
Nevertheless, running the power up to five watts will drive you out of the room as it is loud! My speakers have an efficiency (sensitivity) rating of 93db. The low power requirement really took me by surprise. I wish I still had my decibel meter to make meaurements of sound pressure levels, but it’s long gone.
The other thing I looked at with the oscilloscope was the waveforms creating the sound. It always amazed me how a speaker can reproduce several sounds simultaneously. I can easily separate and hear the difference between drums, bass, other instruments and vocals all at once. How can this be?
When you look at the waveform trace in the photo above, you mostly see the composite signal. The scope is set for 5 milliseconds per division, so beginning to end we are looking at 0.6 seconds of material. What’s hard to see without enlarging further is the jagged appearance of the trace. This jagged appearance is due to other frequencies of lower amplitude that are overlaid on the larger amplitude overall signal. In other words, the signal trace we’re seeing is made up of thousands of smaller peaks and troughs that make each individual sound. I don’t think I’m putting this phenomenon into words very well, but it’s a topic that fascinates me.
The past week was a little less busy than the week before. My last pickleball clinic of the season was cancelled on Tuesday when we had high wind and thundershowers. I managed to play on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday and hope to get a few games in this afternoon. Donna played tennis and had an epiphany last week. Her friend, Lorraine, lent her a racquet to try. Donna was amazed at how much easier it was to handle and how much her accuracy improved.
The first thing she noticed was the grip diameter. She has been using too large of a grip. She has small hands. Tennis racquets can be had in a variety of grip diameters that go up in 1/8-inch increments. Her racquet was 4 1/2 inches, the one she borrowed was 4-1/8 inches. We searched online and found some grip size recommendations. Using one method of measuring hand size it appeared she should be using a 4 3/8 inch grip.
I didn’t believe this was right – especially since she found the 4 1/8 to be comfortable. I ordered her a new racquet and split the difference and went with a 4 1/4 inch grip. She used it yesterday and liked it. She’s played with it again this morning and felt much more confident with it. So we made the right choice!
As I stated in the beginning of this post, it’s the end of the season for a lot of the park visitors. Our friends, Dick and Roxy, from Spokane, Washington will be leaving soon. We invited them to join us for happy hour and dinner tomorrow. Yesterday Donna stopped at Fry’s grocery and saw some Heritage duroc pork babyback ribs, but she passed on them because they were $8.99/pound.
This morning I went to Fry’s and bought a rack – playing the Fry’s VIP card game I got the ribs for $6.99/lb. I’m surprised to find duroc pork at a grocery chain like Fry’s. I would expect to find them at a specialty meat market. Duroc pigs are what’s called a Heritage breed – this is like heirloom vegetables – it’s an old breed that’s come back into favor. Duroc and Berkshire are the most popular of the Heritage pig breeds and are known for their high-quality meat. Duroc is known for juicy meats due to intramuscular fat and mild flavor. They are the second most popular Heritage breed behind Berkshire – also known for its tender, mild-flavored meat.
I’ll prep the ribs later today and smoke them for tomorrow’s dinner. Speaking of dinner, we went out to eat on Wednesday evening. We thought about Fat Willy’s but they had a 30-minute wait for a table on the patio. We went to an old favorite Thai restaurant instead – 5R Cha. We used to go there years ago when we lived here.
I went for the old standard – chicken pad thai. Donna was more adventuresome and ordered a green curry with fish. When she asked the server what kind of fish they used, she just said it was a white fish. Hmm, sounded a little shaky to me. Donna went for it anyway. She’s sorry she did. She had an upset stomach Thursday morning and it persisted all day. I suspect the “white fish” was probably swai. Swai is a fish that’s farmed in Vietnam and it’s not the healthiest fish option. It’s sold under many different names – it used to be called Asian catfish, but that name is no longer allowed in the US as it’s misleading. Anyway, I’ve heard and read many reports of people having digestive disorders after eating swai. We won’t be going back to 5R Cha.
We haven’t had any complaints about Donna’s cooking. Last Sunday, Donna prepared chile-glazed pork tenderloin with a sweet potato-spinach hash.
Monday I made my almost famous – well it’s famous among immediate family members – Japanese fried rice. Donna grilled shrimp to serve with it. Japanese fried rice is always labor intensive for me. I cut the ingredients carefully, trying to keep things uniform. Donna laughs at me for using four different knives during prep. I use the Japanese method of selecting the proper knife for each task – traditional Japanese kitchen cutlery is very specialized.
As I mentioned earlier, Tuesday was a rainy day. Donna kept it simple and made a beef ragu served over angel hair (capellini) pasta for me and spaghetti squash for her.
Last night, we ended the month of March with blackened tilapia. We are always careful when buying tilapia – some parts of the world are known for shady fish farming practices while others have better regulation and use acceptable modern methods. This tilapia was purchased at Costco and came from Costa Rica.
Last Sunday was warm and the high reached 93 degrees. The stormy Tuesday was only 66 degrees. We reached 81 yesterday and will probably hit 83 degrees today. The forecast looks good for the week ahead – maybe on the warm side by the end of next week. Long range, April looks to be comfortable temperature wise.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
In addition to all of her usual activities, Donna had a busy week as we had visitors. On Monday, Martha and John Bergquist came by at noon. I had just returned from a couple of hours of pickleball when they arrived. Donna knew Martha from our time in Michigan and they were visiting Arizona, staying down in Tucson. Their home is in Wisconsin now.
Martha really wanted to see wild horses, so Donna invited them to come up and hike at Coon Bluff to see if they could locate some horses. They lucked out and found a herd of about 30 horses along the Salt River. I was beat from pickleball and wasn’t up for the hike. They went for a late lunch at Saguaro Lake. It was after 5pm before Donna made it back home.
Yesterday we met up with more friends from Michigan. Gary and Cheryl Bida were out here visiting their son in Scottsdale. It was a rainy day yesterday when we met up with them for lunch at Fat Willy’s. Lunch on the patio was out of the question with the cold, windy and rainy weather, so we dined indoors. We had a good time talking and visiting for a couple of hours. It’s been at least 10 years since we last saw them. I neglected to take any photos.
My last post rambled on about my stereo system. I have to say, we’re really enjoying it and have music on for hours every day now. It has rekindled my interest and love of music. I’ve always had an eclectic mix of recordings – everything from Mozart to Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix. Lately, I’ve been expanding my CD collection with new material that I’ve largely ignored over the years.
I’ve added three discs by Diana Krall. Diana is a Canadian jazz singer and pianist and I love her voice, even when she’s singing some sappy song. Her piano playing is exquisite – she started studying piano at the age of four! He parents were musically inclined too. Her husband is none other than British recording artist Elvis Costello.
I recently “discovered” Tom Waits. I don’t know how he flew under my radar all of these years. Tom is from southern California and was a regular in the San Diego folk music scene in the 1960s. I wasn’t into folk music at all back then, so maybe that’s how I missed him. He moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and was already established as a singer/songwriter by then. I didn’t know it until recently, but he penned the Eagles hit Ol’ 55. You might remember their version of this song:
Well, my time went so quickly I went lickety-splitly Out to my ol’ 55 As I pulled away slowly Feeling so holy God knows I was feeling alive
Now, the sun’s coming up I’m riding with Lady Luck Freeway, cars and trucks Stars beginning to fade And I lead the parade Just a-wishin’ I’d stayed a little longer Oh Lord, let me tell ya that the feeling getting stronger…
Tom Waits is quite a character. He spent a lot of time in San DIego and LA hanging out in diners and dive bars with his notebook, picking up snippets of conversations around him to inspire his song writing. His early recordings in the late 60s and early 70s reveal a soft voice. By 1980, years of cigarettes and whiskey changed his voice to a gravelly rasp.
I’ve also added a couple of discs recorded by John Mayer. I knew of John, but didn’t have any of his recordings until now. He attended the Berklee College of Music and is probably the most famous student of guitar great Tomo Fujita. I like his songwriting and singing as well as his excellent guitar playing.
I also found a CD called On Every Street. Recorded in 1999, it’s the last album Mark Knopfler recorded as Dire Straits – by then, only he and the bass player remained from the original band. All of his work since then is under his name as a solo artist – he is an absolute guitar god.
I mentioned in my last post that Donna is back to following the Bright Line Eating plan. This doesn’t mean we have to curtail fine dining. She just has to be selective in the mix of protein, carbs and fats she eats and she weighs everything she cooks.
Last week, she made a lentil soup with duck sausage and it was delicious.
Saturday she grilled a wild caught Alaskan salmon and served it with a citrus-chile topping. Another hit.
The citrus-chile sauce was so tasty, she used again on Monday over grilled chicken thighs and wings. It works as well on chicken as it does on salmon.
We’ve had a strange weather pattern over the last couple of weeks. Last week, it was cold and wet on Wednesday but warmed back up to the upper 70s by the weekend. This week, the temperature only reached 66 degrees on Tuesday and Wednesday was rainy and only 52 degrees! Average highs at this time of year are 72 degrees. The overnight low last night was down to 33 degrees and we had overnight showers. This left snow on the Superstition Mountains east of us here at Viewpoint – we can see them out our front window.
We can expect another cold night with the low in the mid-30s, but we should warm up to the 70s for highs this weekend. The forecast calls for highs in the 80s by next Tuesday.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
FedEx was on schedule and delivered the Elekit TU-8200R stereo integrated amplifier kit I ordered from Tube Depot. Elekit is a Japanese company that’s been in business for about 40 years. They are well-known in Japan for the science project kits they sell to high schools. High schoolers in Japan build projects like robotics and other electronic devices with the Elekit supplied parts and manuals. They are also well-regarded for their audio gear.
Mr. Yoshitsugu Fujita is the Chief Engineer and designer for Elekit. His audio circuits are brilliant. Unlike most boutique stereo amplifiers, which rely on circuit designs originally developed in the 1950s and 1960s, Fujita-san designs outside of the box everyone else is stuck in. His audio gear is vacuum tube driven, but he has no qualms about using solid state devices in the power supply stage. If a DB107 solid state bridge rectifier creates a cleaner power supply, that’s what he uses. He also incorporates transistors in circuit protection schemes, but the signal path is all analog tube driven.
I got to work right away after the delivery came at 1pm. Everything was well packaged and sorted into plastic bags.
One of the key elements of this kit is the R-core power transformer on the left in the photo above. The two output transformers – also very key components – are in the left center of the photo. Once I inventoried all of the parts to ensure nothing was missing, it was time to populate the main board. Over the next five hours or so, I soldered over 200 points on the main circuit board. There are seven boards total to make up the amplifier. These are high-quality printed circuit boards (PCB) with thick fiberglass plates and copper traces on both sides that are well proportioned and 70um thick. The through holes are copper plated.
I finished the main board around 7pm and knocked off for the day – I was getting tired and I didn’t want to make an error in the build. Building a stereo amplfier is like building two amps at once. Each channel (left and right) has it’s own, separate signal path. Only the main power supply is shared in this amp.
Saturday morning after breakfast and coffee, I got back to work around 9am. Assembling the rest of the boards was straight forward. I had to knock off at 1pm to have lunch before going to Donna’s concert. The Viewpoint Concert Band had their first performance of the season. They have fewer musicians than in years past due to covid and other reasons – they’re down by about 30 performers. They sounded great though and put on a good show.
Before I started building this amp, I went Michael’s craft store and bought a pack of craft sticks. These look like a popsicle stick but they’re larger – about 3/4″ wide. I glued two of them stacked together to make it 1/8″ thick, then I cut down the width on one end to make it 3/8″ wide. This was my jig for bending the leads on resistors and setting them precisely 1/8″ clear of the board. I did this because resistors get hot and keeping them up from the board would allow air to circulate around them. I wanted a uniform height for aesthetic reasons. This would be an issue later.
There were a couple of places where PCBs are joined perpendicular to each other and tricky soldering was required. The PCBs had copper pads on each board that aligned with each other but didn’t make contact. I had to solder a triangular fillit that joined the copper pads. This was tricky because both pads needed be simultaneously heated to allow the solder to flow and adhere properly.
After the concert, I got started on the hardware mounting and had everything put together a couple of hours later. Total time spent on the project was around 12 hours at this point – eight hours or so with a solder iron in my hand.
I put tubes in the sockets and it was time to fire it up. I plugged in through my my bulb limiter connected to the APC Line R voltage regulator. It was a disaster. I had a loud hum. I switched it off and looked everything over. I tried switching tubes but the loud hum persisted. I tried a few tests and found the noise was unrelated to the volume control – no matter where the volume control was set, the hum level was the same. I also found that touching the volume control or the input jacks changed the hum – it was lower volume when I touched them.
This made me believe the hum was from a ground loop. I put a jumper from one input jack to a ground point on the chassis and it killed the hum. I hooked up the CD player for a test – no sound output. Bummer. Up to this point, I thought this was the easiest amp I’d ever built. The kit was high-quality and everything fit well. The instructions were good. Somewhere along the line, I must have been a little over-confident and made a mistake.
I pulled the boards out and reflowed the component solder points. I couldn’t see anything wrong. I put it back together and had the same result. I was getting frustrated and tired. It was past 7pm by then and Donna had dinner waiting. I decided to give it a break and think about it for a while.
I thought about it while sipping a Scotch on the rocks and finally gave up for the night. I woke up at 4:30am Sunday morning and thought about it some more. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up as quietly as I could and went back to the amp at 5am. I reconfirmed all of the component locations and values. I can’t tell you how many times I took things apart and checked them – I wasn’t getting anywhere.
I had to take a break at 9am to meet Mike Hall at our coach – he was going to look at the damaged body panel that I temporarily repaired while we were traveling through Utah last summer. He came up with a plan for a permanent fix.
Then Donna and I drove to Scottsdale to meet Alana and Kevin at Merci French Cafe and Patisserie for brunch. Kevin and Alana had left the Painted Mountain Golf Resort in Mesa on Saturday and went to Alana’s mother’s place in Wickenburg – over an hour away. They made the trip back to Scottsdale to spend a little more time with us before flying back to Washington on Tuesday. We had an excellent brunch on the patio at Merci – eating out again for the fifth time in eight days. I was a little distracted, thinking about the amp problem.
When we got back home, I finally wised up and quit looking for a visual clue. Instead I measured voltages throughout the circuit. The schematic identifies 29 points to take voltage readings. All looked perfect until got to number 29. The reading was impossible. I should have had around 6 volts for the heater filaments, but I found -30 volts. What? How could I have negative voltage there?
Looking at the schematic led me to the solid state bridge rectifier. It was installed properly, so I scratched my head again. I was using a headset that resembles the one used by dentists to magnify things in front of their eyes. The one I bought had five different lenses with magnifying powers of 1x – for eye protection only, 1.5x, 2x, 2.5x and 3x. I used the 2x lens because it allows greater depth of field than the stronger magnification – above 2x, you have view from a precise distance or things get out of focus. It also has an LED lamp to make me look like a cyclops while lighting up the working area.
With this headset on, I was searching the board around the DB107 rectifier chip when I saw something reflect a tiny bit of light. There was a fine line of solder – no thicker than a strand of spider web – across two terminals of the rectifier chip. Bingo – this was enough to short the rectifier. I used a braided copper solder wick to clean it up the solder joint. That should take care of the lack of sound and the voltage issue, but it didn’t explain the hum or ground issue.
I traced the ground circuits and resoldered the triangular fillits where the grounds went from one PCB to another. Then I put it all togther without the top plate on the chassis. I plugged everything in and it was silent – no hum. I turned the CD player on and I had sound. Hooray, I fixed it. All along, Donna kept reassuring me by saying, “You’ll find the problem, I have no doubt.”
I took the amp back to the bench and put the top and front cover plates on. I plugged everything back in and put on some music. Oh, no! Now I had nothing coming from the left channel. I took it apart again and traced back from the left channel input jack. Fujita-san cleverly marked all of the left channel components with odd numbers and all of the right channel components with even numbers. So I went to the resistor R1 to start checking and I found it bent with the lead touching the lead of R3 mounted perpendicular to it. This shorted the signal path to ground. Remember how I set the resistors all 1/8″ high? When I put the chassis back together after I fixed the original problems I must have accidently pushed R1 over onto R3. Problem solved.
This stereo sounds fantastic. It’s unbelievably good. Donna doesn’t exactly share my passion for chasing tone and good sound. When I say something like, “Listen to that bass and how clear the highs sound,” she usually says she just wants to enjoy the music, not dissect the sound. But when she heard this amp for the first time, right away she said, “That really sounds good!” The amp looks good to me in a simple, somewhat industrial way.
Tube amps do sound good. I know, I’m a retrograde analog man in a digital world. But vacuum tubes naturally create an emphasis of second order harmonics – that is, they accentuate the octave above the fundamental frequency. Acoustic instruments naturally do the same thing. It’s a euphonic response and people find the tone pleasing. Solid state amplification creates higher odd order harmonics – the 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc, of the fundamental which most humans perceive as harsh or even unpleasant. Solid state designs require complex circuitry to try to work around this.
In my last post, I mentioned my concerns about the future availability of CD players. I decided to buy the Cambridge Audio AXC35 player after thinking about it for a day. I went online to Crutchfield and found out they had sold out since I last saw it the day before! Luckily, I found it on Amazon for the same price and placed the order. I went with the Cambridge Audio unit which is made by a company based in London, England because of the Wolfson Digital to Analog Convertor (DAC) in it. The Wolfson DAC is made by a company in Ireland and is a very good DAC. The DAC is a key component of a CD player.
Information stored on a compact disc can’t be amplified directly into music. The information is a series of microscopic pits in the disc separated by lands. These become a series of zeros and ones. The DAC takes this information and converts it to a waveform that represents the frequencies of sound. This waveform can now be amplified and sent to a speaker. Magic!
The Cambridge Audio CD player arrived on Monday. Now my stereo system is complete – new CD player, new amplifier and new speakers. It sounds so good, I can’t put it into words.
Enough stereo talk – let’s get to the food. Thursday night, Donna made garlic butter chicken with riced cauliflower, mushrooms and asparagus. She seared the chicken thighs on the stove top, then baked them in the oven
Donna is back on the Bright Line Eating plan, which means I’m sort of on the plan. But I get to cheat some. Monday she grilled wild caught Alaskan salmon and served it with Brussels sprouts in bacon horseradish sauce.
Last night ,she made lemony shrimp and bean stew – this was a new dish for us and really tasty.
Alana and Kevin picked a great week for their visit. The temperature was around 80 degrees everyday. Early this morning, that changed as rain moved in and we’ll be lucky to see 60 degrees today. The forecast looks good though, as we should be in the 70s by Friday.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
We’re ten days into February already. My perception of time gets more and more skewed as I age. We’ve been set into daily routines for most of the past week with a couple of exceptions. I haven’t been on the pickleball courts as much as I would like for a couple of reasons. First is the club’s scheduling – I can’t make much sense of how they are scheduling the courts for different levels of play. Most of the 3.5 play is 8am to 10am – I don’t play my best first thing in the morning. The other issue is wind – we’ve had a stiff breeze most mornings and I find outdoor pickleball in gusty wind to be an exercise in frustration. It becomes a game of chance, not so much skill.
A few weeks ago, we had visitors for happy hour. I had music in playing on the stereo at low volume for background sound. My friend commented that it sounded so clear and detailed. This was before I started upgrading my system and I wondered what he meant – it seemed pretty average to me. I thought about it later and came to the conclusion – it’s the general dumbing-down of sound quality.
My friend is used to streaming online music sources or MP3 files on an iPhone. These sources are so compressed that the music lacks the original detail and dynamics. He probably hadn’t listened to a compact disc in years. I read recently that last year (2021) was the first year to post a year-over-year gain in CD sales in the last 15 years! In fact, during that period, sales of vinyl records exceeded CD sales. Maybe people started to wake up and forgo the convenience of music files versus high-quality recordings. Nah, I doubt it – in the end, convenience wins.
My new Klipsch Reference R-51M bookshelf speakers arrived last Saturday. After about 12 hours of break-in and careful positioning, they sound great! The bass response is a big improvement over the Celestion DL4 speakers I had. To be fair, the Celestions are about 30 years old and the crossover network could probably benefit from fresh capacitors. But there’s no denying the bass reflex design with a rear firing port on the Klipsch speakers allows a much deeper and more powerful bass response. In fact, my Nobsound vacuum tube stereo amplifier sounds better than I ever expected it would. There’s no turning back now.
Like the Celestion speaker, the Klipsch R-51M is a two-way design, meaning it has a tweeter for higher frequencies and a woofer for bass and mid-range controlled with a crossover network. Their designs differ though – Klipsch is famous for horn designs and this bookshelf speaker uses a 90-degree tractix horn tweeter and an injection-molded graphite spun copper woofer. I’m really happy I went for them.
Hopefully I’ll receive a package from TubeDepot tomorrow. I’m going to build another amplifier. I ordered the Japanese Elekit TU8200R kit. I think this will become my main stereo and I’ll set up my old speakers and the Nobsound amp in my ham shack.
I’ve read some alarming reports predicting the demise of CD music players. Here’s the situation and possible outcome. First of all, CD sales have been slow although they picked up a little steam last year. Right now, there’s a worldwide shortage of integrated circuit chipsets. This has impacted most consumer goods – everything from cars to cell phones. With CD players now a small player in consumer electronics, manufacturers aren’t prioritizing CD players for their precious chipsets – they have other goods to manufacture that are in higher demand. This in turn means that manufacturers aren’t buying the disc transport mechanisms that load CDs into the player – which means the companies that usually supply these components are moving on to other goods.
I looked at Amazon and Crutchfield and my findings seem to support this theory. Crutchfield lists 12 different CD players in their catalog, but 10 out of 12 are out of stock with no date for resupply. I have a lot of music on CDs and would hate to lose the ability to play them. Our Pioneer CD player is about 30 years old and sometimes can’t decode a disc that has dropouts. I think I’ll buy a new unit and relegate the Pioneer to the ham shack.
Donna’s golf game is improving quickly. Last week, she played her fifth game ever on the nine-hole course here at Viewpoint Golf and RV Park. She hit a bogie on one hole, made par on another and birdied a hole!
Last Sunday, we had a delightful brunch at OHSO Brewery in Gilbert with our friends Sara and Howard Graff. After brunch, we strolled the streets of old downtown Gilbert. It’s a fun place – I can remember when it was a one-horse town that was little more than a water tower and crossroads. I neglected to take photos.
On Tuesday, my daughter, Alana and her husband Kevin (collectively known as Kevlana) flew down from Washington. We had a cold one on our deck along with my middle daughter, Jamie. Then we piled into Jamie’s Passat and went to dinner at Alessia’s, an Italian restaurant a few miles from here.
The food was excellent and we thoroughly enjoyed the time together. Yesterday, Kevin and Alana came over to golf the nine-hole course with Donna. Kevin and Alana are avid golfers and Kevin is quite good at it. Afterwards, we enjoyed lunch at Fat Willy’s, the restaurant here at Viewpoint.
Last night, we went out to eat with Kevin and Alana again at the Zushi Japanese Bistro and had Japanese beer – Kirin for me, Kevin and Alana, Asahi for Donna – and enjoyed miso soup and a platter of sushi.
Speaking of food, Donna came up with a couple of new dishes for us last week. She’s been meaning to try her hand at pizza for a while and finally got to it using the method her parents use as well as one of their old pizza pans that she brought back from her last visit.
The pizza was good, but she thinks she can improve the crust. We both thought she could use a little less sauce, but that’s just our thoughts – there wasn’t anything wrong with it.
She also made a chalupa dish by slowly cooking a boneless pork shoulder with dry pinto beans, green chiles and spices for about five hours on the stove. It was very tasty but made enough food to feed a football team. She served it over corn tortillas fried in olive oil and with a topping of tomato chunks, red onion, cotija cheese, cilantro and lettuce.
We vacuum packed the leftover and put two packages in the freezer – enough for two more dinners and two more lunches – a total of eight more servings.
Kevin and Alana picked the right time for an Arizona visit. It was cold last week by local standards with highs of only around 60 degrees. But that changed by Tuesday when we had upper 70s and hit 81 degrees yesterday – making an enjoyable, sunny morning on the golf course. The forecast calls for daily highs around 80 degrees for next week.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
I’ve always said RVers have to be flexible. We planned to leave here tomorrow and spend one night at the Northern Quest Casino in Airway Heights outside of Spokane. Then we would head west to Twisp for a night on the Methow River before continuing west to Mount Vernon, WA.
We will leave tomorrow and go to Northern Quest Casino so we can join our friends Dick and Roxy Zarowny for dinner. But we won’t be going to Twisp. The North Cascades Highway (SR20) is closed west of Winthrop, WA due to forest fires. There isn’t any way to detour around the closure, so we can’t cross the mountains on the North Cascades Highway. We had reservations at Riverbend RV Park which we cancelled. They don’t usually refund cancellations but under these circumstances they refunded our payment.
We’ll be crossing the Cascade Mountains on US2 over Stevens Pass instead. We’ll spend Sunday night somewhere between Wenatchee and Leavenworth before climbing over the pass.
We played pickleball Monday morning at Memorial Park. Tuesday we played pickleball again and then had rainshowers in the afternoon. Wednesday we drove up to Priest River to join Cindy and Jim Birditt for lunch at Mi Pueblo – a Mexican restaurant in town. We lingered for about an hour and half catching up. Jim was concerned about a 30-acre wild fire burning about three miles north of his place.Thursday we were back at Memorial Park for more pickleball.
Donna had a mysterious problem with the rear tire on her bike. When we arrived here in Coeur d’Alene, her tire had gone flat. Last week we stopped at a bike shop in town but they were out of patch kits. The gal at the shop gave me an old inner tube and said I could cut it to make a patch and use super glue. I found a hole in the Donna’s inner tube – it looked like she must have picked up a goathead sticker.
I roughed up her inner tube and the makeshift patch with sandpaper and fixed the flat tire – or so I thought. The next day her tire was flat again. I pulled the tube, which I had put Slime in – it’s supposed to fill any holes in the tube. I found another hole in the tube with slime oozing out of it about two inches from the original hole. This was puzzling – I had checked the tire carefully the first time looking for anything that could cause a puncture and didn’t find anything. The tire held air fine after I patched it and pumped it up. The bike hadn’t been ridden at all. So, how did it have another puncture?
I made another patch and put it back together. Again it pumped up fine and held pressure. The next day the tire was a little soft – there was a very slow leak. I pumped the tire and Donna went for a ride Sunday morning. A little over half an hour later, Donna phoned me to tell me she her tire had gone flat. I drove down in the truck and picked her up at the Hampton Inn in Coeur d’Alene.
I picked up a new inner tube on Tuesday and this morning I installed it. Again, I looked closely at the tire and didn’t find anything to cause a puncture. Donna rode for over an hour this morning with no issues.
The daily temperatures were warm all week with highs in the low 90s. Today the temperature is expected to reach 100 degrees and the forecast calls for a few degrees hotter tomorrow. Western Washington will be cooler – we can expect the daily high to be around 80 degrees there.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
Last Wednesday was our 15th wedding anniversary. We married on the fifth day of May back in 2006, here in Arizona – at Watson Lake Park near Prescott to be precise. We usually celebrate our anniversary by treating ourselves to a nice dinner – since it’s Cinco de Mayo, we’ve often chosen Mexican cuisine. This year was no exception. We went to Baja Joe’s Mexican Cantina where Sinaloa-style seafood is their specialty.
Many people in this country misunderstand the Mexican Cinco de Mayo celebration. It’s not Mexico’s independence day like so many people think. Instead of being the equivalent of our Fourth of July celebration, it commemorates a military victory over French forces at Puebla in 1862.
We started our dining experience with margaritas on the outdoor patio – a skinny margarita for Donna and a Cadillac-style margarita for me. We went with Baja Joe’s strength and ordered seafood entrees. Donna went for shrimp in a poblano cream sauce while I ordered sea bass a la Veracruzana. The entrees were delicious.
We don’t dine out often, but when we do, we like to make it a memorable experience. The excellent fare at Baja Joe’s was well worth it.
Earlier in the day, Donna had a visit from an old friend, one she hadn’t seen since high school. Tim Murphy and his wife Mary were in the area for a family wedding, they’re from New Hampshire and it was their first time here. Donna went for a drive with them and showed them the Salt River at the Coons Bluff and Goldfield recreational areas and they also made a stop at Saguaro Lake.
Saturday evening we met our friends, Howard and Sara Graff at The Monastery – a unique bar and grill next to Falcon Field here in Mesa. The Monastery is a bit quirky. Most of the seating is outdoors in a large, open area. It has a sand volleyball court in the center.
We found a table outside and Howard and Sara joined us shortly after we arrived. They were serving a limited menu – half a dozen appetizers and maybe a dozen entrees. You can order burgers from the kitchen or you can order burger patties with fixings and grill it yourself at one of the outdoor barbeque grills. Their specialty burger from the kitchen is $12, the patty you grill yourself is $7. We ordered food from the kitchen. They had a band playing outside Saturday night.
The band was okay, but I didn’t like their sound system. All of the instruments were plugged straight into a board that fed the PA speakers. The sound reminded me of an old portable transistor radio. The guitar tone was so buzzy, it was fatiguing to listen to. It made me think of the time when the guy that replaced me in the band Backtrack and I had a conversation about guitar tone. He said no one in the audience cares what your tone sounds like, they just want to move to the music. I don’t believe I’m the only one listening to a band that cares what the instruments actually sound like, but maybe I’m wrong about that.
We had a fun time although the conversation was somewhat limited by the sound level of the band. I wish we would have gotten together with Howard and Sara more over the winter, but it seems our schedule didn’t line up.
We had more fun on Sunday as we were invited to join a Mother’s Day celebration at Mike and Jodi Hall’s place. Jodi grilled burgers and also made a fruit salad. Donna brought a warm bean dip she made and somebody brought cold shrimp for shrimp cocktail. Mike and I enjoyed a cigar and conversation on the back patio by their koi pond. I neglected to take pictures of Howard and Sara and at the Hall’s also.
Of course we also had home cooked meals last week. Friday night, Donna grilled chicken and served it with roasted baby potatoes and creamed peas on the side.
The weather has remained very warm with daily highs in the mid to upper 90s. Even the nighttime temps are warming up with lows in the mid 60s to 70 degrees. We plan to head out for the summer on Thursday – the forecast calls for 100 degrees on Thursday afternoon.
Our tentative plan is to meet up with Frank and Kelly Burk and Mike and Jodi Hall near Woods Canyon on the Mogollon Rim – six or seven thousand feet above sea level. We’ll dry camp through the weekend and figure out our next move from there.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
We had more good company this week. On Thursday, we met up with Deb and Jeff Spencer at Fat Willy’s for lunch on the patio. The last time we saw Deb and Jeff was in Kanab, Utah in September. We’ve met up with them several times over the years in various places – that’s how it often works with fellow full-timers.
Fat Willy’s is a pub/restaurant and also has the pro shop for the golf courses at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort. As I mentioned, we took a table on the back patio overlooking part of the 18-hole course. I shot a photo of the view, but neglected to get a people photo.
The photo above illustrates Arizona winter grass. The grassy areas surrounding the course appear to be Bermuda grass, which goes dormant over the winter. Bermuda grass goes dormant and doesn’t produce chlorophyll when the soil temperature drops into the 50s. It will recover in the spring with an application of fertilizer. The fairway is green – presumably it was overseeded for the winter with a rye grass variety. I don’t know what type of grass is used on the greens.
After a couple of hours of pickleball in the morning, I took care of a small project on Friday. Our new-to-us Nissan Frontier had some deterioration of the acrylic headlight covers. This has been a common problem for cars built with this type of headlight over the last 20 years – especially in areas with abundant sunshine. The acrylic covers are coated with a UV inhibitor, but over time, it breaks down – especially here in the desert.
Our Nissan Frontier was originally sold by Peoria Nissan on the west side of Phoenix and has been in the valley of the sun ever since. Our headlights weren’t in really bad shape, but once they start to degrade, it doesn’t get better.
When this happened on our Alpine Coach, I polished the lens covers with a product from Meguiar’s. The problem was, the Meguiar’s polished out the haze, but it also removed any remaining UV inhibitor and within a year, the headlight covers were in worse shape than ever.
After looking around a bit, I found a product made by Sylvania that not only polishes out the imperfections, it includes a new clear lens coating with UV inhibitor! I ordered a kit from Amazon – it was only $19.99 – to give it a try.
The kit included detailed instructions – it’s broken down into three steps. First you clean the cover and spritz it with a liquid etching solution. Then you wet sand progressively with 400 grit, then 1000 grit and finally 2000 grit sand paper. I used a spray bottle to keep plenty of water on the acrylic cover while sanding with fairly light pressure. You sand until the surface is smooth with each grit. At this point, the headlights look really bad – they are completely clouded from sanding. After rinsing and drying, you apply the etch again, rinse and dry again, then apply the clear coat with the UV inhibitor. The results were amazing.
The whole process took about an hour. I’m pleased with the result. Now we’ll have to see how it holds up to exposure to sunlight.
Speaking of sunshine, we have plenty in the forecast. After having daily highs in the mid-60s all week, the forecast calls for 75 degrees today – and we’re well on our way there – and mid to upper 70s for the week ahead with clear skies.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
Totally frustrated. I’ve spent the last hour putting together a post for this blog and poof! It disappeared. The entire content gone. I don’t understand what happened. Usually WordPress auto-saves several times as I write, so I don’t worry much about it.
On Tuesday, after I wrote my last post, we started clean-up from the wind/dust storm. Donna vacuumed the sliding window sills on the coach at least three times and she’s still finding dust. Dust storms with high winds means dust finds it way into every crack and crevice. Donna also vacuumed the interior of Midget-San while I dusted the exterior, blew out the engine compartment with compressed air and wiped everything down. It’ll take a lot more before it’s really clean again.
The weather was agreeable for our last week at Pleasant Harbor RV Resort. The highs were around 70 degrees on Tuesday and Wednesday and in the low 80s for the rest of the week.
We had plans for Wednesday. Donna wanted to hike the Beardsley Trail in Lake Pleasant Regional Park to the Maricopa Trail which would lead her back to Pleasant Harbor. It’s a little over seven miles. I had an appointment at the Ben Avery Shooting Facility. The plan was for me to drive Donna to the trailhead, then return to our site and load my gear. I had to be at Ben Avery by 10:45am for the 11:00am scheduled range time. I figured if we left around 9:15am, we would have plenty of time.
When I turned the key in the ignition switch of the Midget, nothing happened. Silence. I popped the hood and checked the battery terminals. No issues there. I retrieved my Fluke multimeter and found 10.3 volts at the battery. Oh no! Dead battery. I connected my little Schumacher battery charger and crossed my fingers. Twenty minutes later, I had enough juice to crank the engine and it fired up!
It took about 30 minutes to drop Donna off at the trailhead and return to our site. Another 10 minutes and I had my gear loaded up. It was about a 15-minute drive to the Ben Avery Shooting Facility. I made it with about five minutes to spare.
The Ben Avery Shooting Facility is one of the largest public shooting ranges in the country. It was opened in 1957 and originally was called the Black Canyon Gun Range. It’s on a 1,650-acre property and operated by the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AZGFD).
It has ranges for pistols, rifles, shotgun, archery and more. It even has camping with full hook-ups for up to 14 days. The target ranges offer distances from five yards to 1,000 yards. I think it’s the nicest shooting range I’ve visited. When I checked in at the main range, I noticed an array of antennas. The AZGFD headquarters in located on Carefree Highway west of the Ben Avery Shooting Facility. Personnel at the headquarters communicate with rangers and range masters at the eight ranges via radio.
I had a great time shooting there. All range time is allocated by appointment and a 90-minute session costs $7.50. It was well worth it.
I invited a kid that our neighbor, Roger, introduced me to earlier to come over Thursday afternoon. He’s 12 years old and holds a General Class ham license. He’s saving his pennies to get a HF antenna and get on the air. His name is Raymond Anderson (N7KCB). He’s really involved in radio and has several goals. I gave him the microphone and he took over my Yaesu 991A and worked the 20-meter and 40-meter HF bands. I also gifted him a KB9VBR J-pole antenna. He lives with his father and sister four days a week on a boat at Pleasant Harbor – the rest of the time he and his sister are with his mother in Phoenix. He only has handheld radios at this point – given to him by Roger. With the J-pole antenna, his handhelds should hit repeaters in the area and allow him to reach out.
On Friday, we drove back to Lake Pleasant Regional Park for lunch at the Scorpion Bay Grill at the marina. They call themselves purveyors of fresh food and cocktails. We found seating outside on the deck and enjoyed lunch – I had the fish and chips while Donna went for fish tacos. We washed it down with a couple of Four Peaks First Wave amber ales. Excellent!
I had a concern about firing up the Cummins ISL diesel powerplant in the coach when we left on Saturday. Earlier, I’d discovered a problem. There was a slow leak of diesel fuel coming from the passenger side of the engine block. It would form a drop every couple of minutes. It appeared to be near the lift pump. The problem was, I couldn’t get to it without some heavy lifting. I would have to remove the big starter motor and a few other items for access. I set an appointment with Rocky Mountain Cummins in Avondale for 7:30am Monday morning.
The engine fired up without any issues and we were soon on our way. We headed south on Loop 303 to I-10 west. We found the Leaf Verde RV Park in Buckeye around 12:30pm and were directed to a long pull-through site. After we set up, I checked the engine for the leak and found it to be dry – no fresh fuel leaking, just residue.
Later, we drove to the other side of Buckeye to my middle daughter, Jamie’s, house. She and Francisco bought a house out here this past spring. It’s new construction in a nice neighborhood. Her mother – my ex-wife Luann – and her husband Jerry were also visiting. The plan was to dine on tacos and hand out Halloween candy. The number of kids in costumes was surprising – Jamie handed out 20 lbs. of candy in one hour flat, and they still kept coming!
On Monday morning, we were up at dark-thirty. I wanted to have our wheels rolling by 6:30am to head over to Rocky Mountain Cummins in Avondale – about 20 miles away. I had no idea of what the traffic on I-10 would be on a Monday morning. It turned out to be a breeze and we were in their driveway just after 7am.
Three hours later, they confirmed a faulty lift pump and had to order parts. They expect the parts to be there by Wednesday and we set another appointment for Thursday morning. Hopefully they can complete the work in one day.
When we got back to our site, I had another pressing matter. I had to buy a new battery for Midget-San. I dropped Donna off at Walmart then went across the lot to AutoZone. I wanted to order an Optima Yellow Top spiral wound AGM battery – they aren’t cheap but they are very high quality and have long life. The size I needed wasn’t in stock and the distributor showed them as back-ordered. I couldn’t wait indefinitely, so I opted for an off-the-shelf Duralast AGM battery.
I charged the new battery overnight – this isn’t really necessary, it would start the car off the shelf and charge while driving. But, charging it gently and letting it trickle charge overnight is easier on the cells and gets a new battery off to a good start. As always, changing the battery wasn’t as easy as it seemed. On the Midget, the battery is located in the rear center of the engine compartment behind the heater box. This made pulling the old battery out and installing the new one a bit of a wrestling match.
I thought the old battery might have been damaged when the voltage regulator on the the old alternator went kaput. It was overcharging the battery and probably cooked it. When I removed the old battery, I saw the date stamp was March of 2016 – so it was at the end of its usable life anyway.
Although the old and the new batteries are both Group 51 batteries and dimensionally identical, the poles of the battery posts are reversed. Positive is on the left rear of the new battery while it’s on the right rear of the old one. This just meant I had to flip the battery around so the positive post was by the positive cable and the negative post was by the negative cable.
When you change a car battery or any big battery, you should always disconnect the negative terminal first. This way if you accidently ground your wrench against the car body or chassis while removing the positive terminal, it can’t short circuit. Likewise when you install the new battery, it’s positive terminal first, then negative terminal.
I have a quick disconnect fitting on the negative terminal. This allows me to disconnect the battery electrically from the vehicle if it’s going to sit unused for a lengthy period and can also act as an anti-theft device.
It’s been very warm and breezy here in Buckeye. Donna didn’t let the heat and wind stop her from playing pickleball this morning while I changed out the battery. I’ll probably join her on the courts tomorrow. The forecast calls for highs in the 90s until a cooling trend arrives on Saturday. They say we’ll have highs in the upper 60s and low 70s for the next two weeks. I’ll believe when I see it.