James – Life En Route

Tidy Truck Interior

by James on March 1, 2018 Comment(s)

I’ve been swamped with work and the weather hasn’t been cooperative for working on the boat, but I did take a few monents these last few days to rework the interior of the truck for the N’th time.

I didn’t take before photos, but generally, it looked like this:

I moved all the radios into the closing center console compartment, which frees up the center console for storage and allows free access to all of the accessory buttons under the radio. I also moved the CTS2 into the console using a ProMounts mounting kit I found online. The two ham radios are connected using both automotive exterior attachment tape and some scrap aluminum that I cut and drilled in order to create a makeshift mount, that is ultimately tied to a RAM mount. I can still use the storage area under the radios, but it’s difficult to get to, so reserved for large, rarely accessed items. All of the wiring comes up through the bottom and I cut out the bottom panel, which is easily replaceable if I ever want to back out these changes in the future, in order to allow the wires to pass through.

Boat Updates

Boats

by James on January 29, 2018 Comment(s)

We received the boat last Saturday, and I immediately went to work on it. It was in pretty rough shape, but that was to be expected of a boat in this price range. Some of the unexpected expenses were:

Completely rewiring the trailer and replacing all lights
Replacing trailer fenders
Partially rebuilding the Volvo Penta SX-M outdrive
Replacing the throttle/ shifter cable
Replacing the propeller (going with Powetech ELE4 Stainless 15×15)
Engine exhaust fan and hose
Lots of little $2 to $40 trim items and hardware
Probably other stuff I’ve already done and forgotten
Hull paint, rub rail, and lots of MarineTex and 3M 5200

I’m still waiting on some seals for the outdrive, paint for the hull, the rub rail, and some minor parts, but there isn’t anything major (aside from the outdrive sitting in my garage) preventing the boat from going in the water, floating, and moving under its own power.

I snapped a quick picture when I took it to the storage lot, to show the current state of the boat.

Marine Electronics

Boats

by James on January 18, 2018 Comment(s)

When I ordered the boat, it was with the understanding that it doesn’t come with electronics. Apparently that’s not entirely true: the dealer later informed me that he found a Garmin EchoMAP 70dv in storage, in like new condition. I had already bought a new (and better) unit, based on a ton of research, but now I have at least something to sell and offset the cost.

The unit that I ordered is also part of the Garmin EchoMAP series, but this one is the Plus 94sv model.

The model is at the high end of Garmin’s EchoMAP series, which is their entry to possibly mid-range product line. There are some vastly better devices out there, but from what I understand, this is great for price/performance. It comes with coastal US maps, but you can buy a SD card (I did) that includes their LakeVU HD maps for something like 17,000 interior US lakes. It is modular and supports Panoptix, which looks to be some really neat, advanced sonar technology, but at $600 to get even the most basic transducer, I decided it not worth the upgrade.

I compared Garmin, Lowrence, Hummingbird, Furuno, Raymarine, and a few others but it really looks that, for the money, the Garmin is hard to beat. A lot of people seem really happy with the units. The “Plus 94sv” is the replacement for the “94sv”, and only came out a couple months ago. It adds some useful features, but there isn’t a lot of information on it, but it builds on the 94sv and adds hybrid touch, app connectivity, and a few other niceties. For the cost difference over the closeout 94sv units, about 8%, I opted to go with the Plus. Since there aren’t many reviews on the new unit, I look to its predecessor for information, and there are a lot of really good review for it on Youtube and various websites.

Aside from a GPS/Chartplotter/Sonar combo, I really wanted marine radar. Marine radar can help you navigate at night, in poor weather, or in poor visibility through instruments only. It isn’t greatly useful on small interior lakes, but on the ocean can be the thing that brings you back to shore. A lot of people on TheHullTruth (boating) forums swear by them, and the general consensus is that most wouldn’t be caught on the ocean without them. You can use them to see what is around you, despite visual obstacles and are pretty often cited for preventing collisions. I’m not going out to sea right away, and will be spending a lot of time on the local lakes at first. Looking to complete the build only once, and not have to dive back into wiring for quite a while, I went ahead and decided to spring for the radar up front. It’s pricey so I looked at a lot of used units, but in the end decided to get a new unit from Si-Tex, the T-760. It’s a color radar with 24 mile range.

From what I understand, this unit will pick up birds, marine mammals and wildlife, buoys, and small objects very well when properly installed. The “proper” install on my boat will require at least a 5″ aft-leaning post for the radome (the white cylinder) so I ordered a discounted one on Ebay. I’ve read of some interesting uses for these aside from navigation and tracking wildlife, including using them to find out where other people are fishing (assuming they’re having any luck). It’ll be a neat toy until it’s actually useful, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. And I do plan on going out on the gulf at some point this summer, and am humoring the possibility of taking the boat up to Chicago, when I go there for a wedding, for the opportunity to head out on one of the Great Lakes.

Another item that I deem essential is a VHF (ship to shore) radio. I held off on buying one until I could confirm the boat has one, and in fact, it does. It’s a fairly rough looking older Uniden MC535, but I figure I’ll check it out before spending another $100 on a new one — though a new one might be more reliable if ever needed. Thoughts?

Last, and at the bottom of my electronics list, was a stereo. The boat doesn’t come with one and doesn’t have any provisions for installing. I checked photos of other boats of the same make/model for sale, and found a few that had installed two 6.5″ marine speakers just behind the seats. I was hoping for four, but decided to start with a two speaker system and expand if there is room later on. Most of my music collection nowdays is digital files – many of the songs in FLAC or other lossless formats, so that was the one requirement (specifically USB drive support with FLAC and MP3 playback) for a head unit. Unfortunately, that proved to be more of an issue than you would think. I ended up ordering a Kenwood KMR-M322BT head unit and a pair of Kenwood KFC-1633MRW speakers, along with the 5″ hole saw, wire, gimbal mount housing, and miscellaneous parts I’ll need for the install. I’ll probably stick it in the overhead box next to the VHF radio.

Anyway, it’s been a few days of lots of research and scrambling to get everything chosen and ordered for the boat. The electronics were by far the most expensive piece of the puzzle, and the addition of the radar pushed me well over budget. I understand that’s the norm with boating and boat-related expenses, though.

Boat! 2000 Seaswirl Striper 2300 WA

Boats

by James on January 13, 2018 Comment(s)

I posted back in spring that 2016 was the year I planned to buy a boat. As much as I searched, I never found the right boat, at the right time, for the right price. I ended up buying crypto mining rigs with the money intended for the boat. Now with it being winter, there are more sellers and fewer buyers in the market. I sold the mining rigs, having made a good profit, and decided to put the money from the rigs towards a boat.

I spotted a 2000 Seaswirl Striper 2300 WA on BoatTrader last month for (I think) $12,950. It was bare of electronics and, by the time I add all the needed accessories, would be above the $15K budget I want to work with. I looked at many other boats, but all of them either had issues, were sold before I could finish the deal, or simply fell through. Coming back to this Seaswirl, the owner, who is selling it through a broker/dealer in Georgia, decided to try for a quick sale and dropped it to $9,950.

I called the dealer and spent at least half an hour on the phone discussing the condition of the boat. It isn’t perfect, but for the budget, I can’t have too many qualms. It has a 3″ crack in the fiberglass above the water line on the back of the boat, and I offered them the asking price contingent on that being fixed by their fiberglass repair tech. Additionally, I asked that the trailer bearings be re-packed to ensure they’re good condition before it is towed here to Texas. They accepted and I put down a deposit on it. On Monday I’m supposed to go over the paperwork with them and finalize payment.

The boat itself is a 23′ class, 8.5′ beam with an actual LOA of 24’2″. It’s a large, heavy boat, well suited for going a few dozen miles off the coast. At 8.5′ beam, it’s as wide as you can legally tow throughout the continental US, without oversize load permits, and is the same width as our fifth wheel. Fully loaded, the boat and trailer will weigh in probably around 6,500#, which means my truck is really our only option for safely transporting it. As far as the engine goes, it has the original Volvo Penta 5.0Gi 250hp motor in it, connected to a Volvo Penta SX outdrive, both with approximately 500 hours. The motor is essentially a small block GM, at 305ci, and the i in the model number means it is fuel injected. It’s cheap to find parts for, cheap to work on, and cheap to replace if necessary. You give up a few things vs outboards, mainly deck space and the ability to store the boat in the water long term without complications (outdrive being submerged and subject to salt and corrosion), but for my use, the cost of ownership benefits make great sense. The motor was just serviced, with a few fuel items replaced (pump, lines due to ethanol), and is supposedly ready to go. It has a 26 gallon bait tank, two 34 gallon fish boxes, and 105 gallon fuel tank (should get 2-2.5mpg at cruising speed).

One of my absolute requirements, and also one that has made it extremely difficult to find a boat, is that of a hard top. The majority of WA floorplans use thin rails that can be raised and lowered, with a canvas top that spans between them. I wanted the, fairly rare, option of a welded aluminum truss system supporting a heavy fiberglass roof. They’re a few thousand dollars to add after the fact, and probably at least that from the factory, and seem to be hard to find in the used marketplace. I tossed out probably 80% of listings I read because they lack it. The downside to the fixed roof is the height of the boat – in tow, you might be looking at a 10′ or 12′ roofline, so you need to watch out and be aware of your surroundings. Being an RV owner, I’m well aware of that and it isn’t a problem. The upside is that you can mount all kinds of things to the rails – lights, speakers, fans, rod holders… and to the roof itself – antennas, more lights, and more accessories. They also stay cooler than canvas in the hot summer, stand up to a lot more abuse, and last for the life of the boat instead of needing replacement every few years.

The cuddy contains a small berth for sleeping two people, a sink, a single burner propane stove, and a toilet. It’s often used for storing all of your gear away from prying eyes and behind lock and key. The toilet, I believe, is just a porta-potty, but I won’t know for sure until it is here. A lot of these boats just have the berth, without the sink or toilet, so either way this is a plus. This cuddy layout wasn’t a deal breaker for me on any of the boats I was looking at, but I’m happier with the layout of this one than most.

Another major item I was looking for was a swim deck and ladder, or at least a good place for which to get in and out of the water. This boat has a small walkthrough door on the transom, that you can open and walk out onto a swim deck that is over the outdrive. From there, there is a 2-3ft ladder that folds down into the water. A great place to sit and dangle your legs in the water, go for a swim, or set up to ski or wake-board from. A lot of these boats don’t have such a thing, which further reduced my list a bit.

Also, a surprisingly large number of these boats don’t come with trailers. It seems that a lot of people just leave them in the water or dry docked at a marina year around. The final thing that caused a lot of issues in my search was that a lot of the boats in the price range I was looking at are Wellcraft 23WA, or Bayliner Trophy, or others with either known issues (in the case of the Wellcraft 23WA, a design flaw in the transom can lead to it taking on water – and tends to, if you read the forums and reviews) or questionable quality. The Seaswirl is supposed to be an all-around well built, great boat, especially for the money paid.

Electronics weren’t anything I was looking for in a boat. In this price range, most of the electronics I found were ten years old and end of life, so I mostly gave up on the idea of finding one with anything useful. This boat doesn’t have any at all, so I think the previous owner probably removed them to transfer to a new boat (?), and that gives me the motivation and opportunity to buy the ones that fit our specific desires for this boat. Electronics are expensive, and modular, and they seem to nickel and dime you for a lot of things. But based on a lot of research and talking to people I know who actually own boats, I decided on the Garmin ECHOMAP Plus 94SV w/ transducer and the LakeView HD map addon. The device itself is a GPS, chartplotter, and depth finder in one, with both below and side views of the boat. It is also modular and you can expand the capabilities through accessories down the road. It’s not cheap – at $1099 for the base device, which includes coastal USA maps, and another $200 (or you can get them for $160 if you look around) to add lake maps.

The dealer suggests, like most, to use UShip to have the boat transported from GA to TX. So far it looks like it’ll run me approximately $1000 for shipping, but that saves me a lot of time and headache. In fuel and hotel, I’d spend half that anyway – it’s a 2200mi round trip.

I’ll be posting more as I collect more items for the boat, and the boat comes into my possession in a couple weeks.

Computer Issues

Computers

by James on January 1, 2018 Comment(s)

For our consulting company, we purchased Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga laptops with three year, next business day warranties and accidental damage protection. For our phones, we don’t carry accidental damage protection, but do generally use decent cases. For my salaried income, I’ve been allocated a junky laptop by corporate that does not meet my needs, but we have corporate VM images, so I do most of my work through virtual machines running in VMware Workstation on my personal machines. I left my corporate laptop on my desk when I was last in the office – probably a year ago.

I cannot travel or be without a laptop for any extended period of time, and that is why I paid extra for the warranty coverage on my Thinkpad, and the Dell Latitude units I have had in the past. I’ve used the warranties a handful of times, and Dell has always delivered as promised, correcting any issues in, at most, three or four days if hard to find parts had to be ordered.

On November 22, my laptop was sitting on the table out in the garage and my friend and I were shuffling around in there working on something. I don’t recall exactly what the surrounding circumstances were, but it ended up falling on the floor and the screen shattered. Long story short, a month later, even with daily calls to check in with Lenovo and multiple [broken] promises, the laptop was [is] still broken.

What it came down to is that, even a month after my initial ticket with them, they were unable to source the correct replacement part. On Dec 22, the night before we were going to head out for East Texas, I still didn’t have a laptop to take with me, despite my clear instructions to Lenovo to have it fixed by that time, starting a month out. I called and complained to a manager, for the nth time, and was promised a refund of $2074.56, the initial purchase price, and emailed a return label.

On a similar note, a couple weeks ago, I was working on my truck and my cell phone slipped out of my pocket and hit the ground. I was up on a topside creeper, and the angle of the creeper was just so that it made everything in my jacket pockets fall forward and out of them. The screen was cracked so I ordered a replacement screen from Amazon. I installed the new screen and it worked fine for a few days, then separated into five layers. At this point I needed a phone immediately so I started using my backup Droid Turbo 2 for a few days, with minimal things I depend on set up (I didn’t even bother adding my email). I overnighted another replacement screen from Amazon and, three or four days later on Dec 22, it finally arrived. I tossed it in the phone, and on this screen, the backlight did not work. I loved my Blackberry Keyone, but needed a proper phone, not my aged and randomly-rebooting Droid 2 to travel with, so I decided to let it go and find a new phone on short notice.

I ended up returning both screens to Amazon, but one one of them I couldn’t get it off the phone without breaking it (used strong adhesive), so they instead credited me half of the price and didn’t require it be returned. I now have a useless Blackberry worth several hundred dollars that I’d like to eventually repair and get some money from.

At this point, it was the day before I was supposed to leave for vacation, and I still didn’t have a trustworthy cell phone or laptop. None of the local stores carry any business-class laptops eligible for 3yr NBD warranties with accidental damage protection, except for [arguably] the Apple Macbooks with AppleCare+. I ended up ordering a Macbook Pro 15 from Best Buy, choosing the same day delivery option, since I had plenty of other things to take care of and having it delivered best fit my schedule. The deadline for the delivery came and went, without a laptop, so I spent an hour on the phone with Best Buy trying to get to the bottom of it. They wouldn’t let me pick it up in store since it had already been dispatched, and processed a refund that I would have to wait another 3-4 days for. I was furious with Best Buy but, given no other choices, went to the local store around 10PM and picked up the next model down, because they didn’t have the one I wanted in stock. It’s the Macbook Pro 15″, with 2GB graphics and 256GB SSD storage. It doesn’t have the amount of storage I need – but more on that later.

While I was in the store I also looked at cell phones. The choices for nicer phones they had in stock were down to the Galaxy S8 and the iPhone 8/ iPhone X, in a few color variations. I was going to go with another Android, the Galaxy S8, but decided to give iPhone another try (haven’t used iPhone in years, because Nagios Push notifications don’t (?) work) since I was going back to a Macbook (something else I haven’t used in years). I ended up buying the iPhone 8, and Kelly the iPhone 8 Plus because she was unhappy with her Galaxy S8. Verizon offered us over $300 for the return of the S8, which we will either do or sell it on Ebay.

A little after 11PM, we left the store with a Macbook Pro 15 with AppleCare+, an iPhone 8 in silver (I would have preferred another color, but they were out of stock in everything), and an iPhone 8 Plus in gold (Kelly’s preferred model/ color). So I had a new laptop and cell phone, and Kelly got a new cell phone, which wasn’t necessary but something she wanted, and it didn’t cost us much to do.

I was up until about 4AM trying to get everything configured the way I needed it, and finally went to bed exhausted and ready to get up in a few hours to drive the RV to East Texas.

Even though we spent a ton of money at Best Buy, I am hoping to break close to even after all of this.

For the phones, we added about $30 to our cell phone bill because mine was out of contract, and replaced Kelly’s Samsung line with this one, which is at least on a monthly basis, a break-even. I will be dropping one of the hot spots we’re not using from our cell phone plan, which will reduce the bill by $20/mo. That brings the net increase of the bill to around $10/mo. Aside from new cases, the cell phones can really be considered a wash. Interesting enough, a mix-up on Verizon’s part had us send in the old Droid Turbo 2 instead of the S8, and pay $100 to upgrade. Not bad. We triple checked with the store and Verizon that this is the case, and it is, so works out in our favor. Once we sell the S8, we should easily cover the cost of the cases, that fee, and year or two of the monthly bill increase.

I paid $2179 for the laptop and $375 for AppleCare+, plus tax. That’s about $2765. Apple is sure proud of their laptops. This one was usually $2399 but I had them price match B&H. Lenovo is sending me a check for $2075, making us upside down $700 on this. Now, the laptop requires new software and miscellaneous cables, adding another $100 or so. So -$800.

It only has 256GB storage, which isn’t enough to put my work VM on, so I need an external SSD to work off of. Samsung makes a USB type-C 500GB SSD, for $169. A case for it is $11, bringing the total for that to $180. So -$980.

But there is an upside here, and a contending factor for my choice to go with the Macbook Pro and 15″ size. It can power two of the 4K displays on my desk with a dock, and replace my desktop. The dock to utilize this runs around $300. That brings the total loss here to $1280.

A conservative estimate of what I can sell my desktop for is $700. It’s a Intel Xeon 1231v3, with 32GB RAM, dual 256GB SSDs, a 1TB magnetic drive, and NVIDIA GeForce 980Ti. I expect to sell it for more, but we can start with that number here. I had to give up one of my 4K displays, and opted for my Phillips BDM4065UC to be the odd man out. It looks like those are going for $400 used on Ebay, so lets assume I can get $300 for it on Craigslist. We’re now only down $280. Finally, I found that the Kinesis Advantage2 QD works far better with OSX than my custom Dactyl, which will clear that $280 easily on the used market. So it looks like I will be able to break more or less even on this fiasco.

In the end I have a new laptop with the warranty and protection plan I need, that will hopefully actually be honored if ever needed. It will replace both my existing laptop and desktop. It will reduce the amount of work I have to put in to keep both my laptop and desktop in sync with all the settings, since they will now be the same machine. It’s not really a performance increase over my desktop (less RAM, if anything, with only 16GB) but is a decent increase over my laptop which would struggle with some VM tasks. I was able to clean up my desk a little bit and hopefully come to break even on it. And it’s kind of nice to be back on OSX and not using Windows anymore. My SecureCRT, Bria, and Office licenses moved right over, and corporate provides licensing for VMware Fusion. For the phone, the iPhone does everything I need and Nagios notifications can be made to work, but they have to go through a third party service. It’s not as clean as aNag on Android, but functions just fine. My other complaint is that none of the SSH software for the phone provides automatic configuration of bastion hosts like JuiceSSH, which is a feature I made heavy use of in the past, but I rarely work on servers from my phone nowdays. That’s what I carry laptops for, so I can probably live without it. The integration between phone and laptop for hotspot use is excellent, and I used it a ton while we were in East Texas.

We’re going to try and sell Kelly’s Lenovo Thinkpad and buy a cheaper Macbook to replace it, for the sake of consistency. We carry tons of spare power adapters, with many of them hardwired (we have hardwired laptop power in both home and RV couches, for instance) and having multiple power requirements has issues with that. She doesn’t need anything nearly as big or as powerful, so we’re going to try and get a Macbook Air, MacBook (non-pro), or MacBook Pro 13″ (used or overstock 2016 model), for whatever we can sell her Thinkpad for.

Hawkins Lake RV Park

Park Reviews

by James on December 26, 2017 Comment(s)

We’re spending the holidays at Hawkins Lake RV Park in Hawkins, Texas. It’s a small lakefront park that is close to relatives and just short of a five hour drive from home. Having lived in the area for several years in the past, I’ve visited the lake several times, where a public beach is within sight, and a two minute walk, of the park. I’d seen the park several times over the years, but never stayed here.

We called and booked a place several weeks ago. Probably a little before Thanksgiving. The lady on the phone took the normal information – the size of our rig, the days we wanted, and held a reservation under our name without any card or down payment.

About a week before we headed out, we received a follow-up call to double check the length of our rig and our site requirements. We were informed that the city had some work they wanted to do to the park over the holiday that would prevent access to the larger sites with septic hookups (what we requested), but after confirming we were indeed planning to come and wanted such a site, we were told not to worry, that she would make sure the city would postpone their work. I’m not sure what ever came of that, specifically, but we arrived to a clean, easy access site, with all the amenities we requested (50A, water, septic) without issue. Our stay is for eight nights, and the fee was $200 – $25/night. I don’t think we even asked when we booked, but those rates are very reasonable for sites with full hookups. There aren’t any daily use fees tacked on and, once again, the lady we spoke with was very helpful. We were not asked for license plate information, which we usually are, but no complaints about that. Things seem pretty relaxed around here, which is the way we prefer them.

Some of the sites have a nice view of the lake. All are in close proximity.

We haven’t set foot in the restrooms, but they look nice enough from the outside.

The sites are well spaced and the drives are big enough to fit large rigs through. The trees are adequately cleared away, even though they feel a bit claustrophobic to tow a trailer through at night. I’d definitely prefer to get my rig in during the day, where I can verify for sure where I am going.

Our site has ample room and full hookups. Not only is the pad large enough to fit truck and trailer, the site itself is one of the largest in the park. It’s number 28.

Plenty of areas to walk, and trash cans are plentiful and easy to get to. Also, each site has a nice (uncovered) aluminum picnic table.

A few more of the sites.

Truck Tweaks Since Last Post

Truck Mods

by James on December 26, 2017 Comment(s)

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted, and we’re out enjoying a stay at a RV park, so with the welcome downtime, I decided to post an update. I’ve made several small adjustments to the truck, and a few major ones, since last posting.

Among those changes were tuning the engine and transmission, and changing the fuel pump from a CP4 to a CP3 unit, which is much more reliable and doesn’t grenade when it fails, taking out the entire fuel system. There is a lot of information to cover about those upgrades, so I’ll save them for another post one of these days. In summary, though, I swap out tunes depending on what I am using the truck for, and have about 400rwhp for towing with some towing-specific parameters (“heavy tow”) and a 550rwhp tune I drive daily with – the tunes burn clean, with no black smoke (maybe a tiny bit for a fraction of a second at wide open throttle) and are a great improvement over stock. Those changes took about twenty hours to complete, mostly due to the complexity of the fuel pump swap. The mods are listed over on the Our Rig page, in the Engine & Performance section.

The truck is filthy now, as we’re camping and tracking mud in and out of the truck, and the dogs have shed all over it, but I did purchase new floor mats. I’ve had WeatherTech liners in the past, which are considered the best of the best, but wasn’t real happy with them and wasn’t sure I wanted them for this truck. I looked at the Husky liners but wasn’t terribly impressed with them either. I ended up buying the Aries Styleguard mats, which are amazing. Here is the driver’s seat floor mat:

The driver’s mat is the only one I wasn’t happy with as they shipped. The mats are all designed for specific make/model vehicles, but the fitment of the grommets that hold them wasn’t right. They didn’t grab onto the factory pieces and floated loosely in the floorboard. I ended up swapping the OEM grommets from the factory mats onto these, which took just a couple minutes to do but yields much better results. These don’t come up as far as the WeatherTech or Husky mats, but come up far enough, and have full coverage under the gas pedal as well as over the door jam, and have a very premium feel to them. The backing is almost like velcro, and seems to work better than the underside of the WT or the sharp plastic cleats on the Husky mats that tend to damage carpet over time.

Also, I moved the aux light and air bag switches out of the path of my legs, in case of an automobile accident. They fit really over the bin on the wall of the center console.

The new device under the grab handle is a Edge Insight CTS2, which is essentially a bunch of digital gauges to let you know where various parameters of your vehicle are sitting. It has some accessories you can add, such as an external EGT probe, which I opted for. I added the probe pre-turbo on the passenger side exhaust manifold, which required drilling and tapping.

You can see the back mat here, which is full coverage including under the seat. I added Du-Ha tool storage under the seat, which helps organize my mess and allows me to reclaim the floor space that was taken up by my Makita tool bags sitting in front of the seats.

With the seats down, I have fully functional back seating now and manageable storage.

For the outside of the truck, I decided to try adding some in-channel EGR visors. Driving with the windows down on this truck is a pretty loud and annoying experience, and I’ve never had them before, so I figured I’d give them a try. They really seem to work well, and look nice. They are the SlimLine series, and the install took less than ten minutes. I read that the OE visors they sell are rebadged EGR, and that played a role in my decision to purchase these over the WeatherTech ones.

Last, I lowered the front end of the truck approximately two inches to try and ease suspension wear and increase fuel mileage. I had to get an alignment afterwards, but aside from that, there is little to the process (just turn the torsion bolts). On this trip, we have averaged 9mpg with the trailer and 17.5mpg unloaded according to the DIC. My speedometer seems to be reading about 7% low, something I need to contact my tuner about, which means my mileage may be up to that much higher, assuming the DIC is close to accurate.

Spare Tire Installed

Truck Mods

by James on November 2, 2017 Comment(s)

I had to move some wiring and airlines out of the way, cut the heat shield, and hand guide it into place to clear everything which almost makes it a two person job to get up there, but I now have a spare tire.

I wasn’t thrilled with the stability of this setup, so I fabricated a mount to hold the back of the compressor box to the side of the pickup bed as well, so it’s now mounted to both the bottom, wish six bolts, and the side, with two.

Air System Relocated

Truck Mods

by James on October 31, 2017 Comment(s)

I spent most of yesterday evening relocating the air compressor, dryer, and 3 gal tank to the bed of the truck. I had to fabricate some mounts but didn’t have many scraps to work with, so they didn’t turn out very pretty, but they’re functional and I can always replace them later.

Clearance should be okay with the fifth wheel, but I need to test it to be absolutely certain.

The underside of the truck used to look like this:

But now has what I believe to be room for the spare tire:

I’m a little concerned that the sway bar won’t clear the spare tire, but think that, in the worst case, I can probably let the air out of the spare tire to make a little extra room, and air it up if needed with the onboard compressor.

Also, I added this little switch panel for my front and rear light bars, which gives me two spare switches for future accessories:

Rear Light Bar

Truck Mods

by James on October 30, 2017 Comment(s)

The headache rack I bought has a notch in the top designed to house a 14″ light bar. I bought an inexpensive bar when I bought the rack, but never got around to installing it. While working on my truck this weekend, I went ahead and threw it on.

I also took the time to wash and wax it, and glad to see it still can have a mirror finish. The paint has a lot of rock chips and I have far more small dents than I expected on the truck, though from what, I have no idea. I suspect a possible hailstorm, since a lot of them are on the roof of the cab and on upward tilted body panels (though none on the hood, which is odd). I applied some touch up paint to some of the rock chips to keep them from spreading.

The new light creates a ton of light, as you would expect from new LEDs. I have it on a separate switch from the front, and it’s a lot of light for around $20.