Adventures With an old GMC motorhome.

 Adventures with an old GMC motorhome.

I bought the GMC RV 36’ Kingsley from a coworker and friend in Winnemucca. He loved it, but his wife hated it. She called it a “Twinkie” - thought it was ugly. I think I may have saved his marriage by buying the motor home. The year was 2003.

I bought it especially to carry my mother to Kansas City to visit her twin sister, whom she had not visited in about 12 years. She had a heart condition and couldn’t fly on planes, and trains took too long and didn’t go just where she needed to go. Our car was too little and cramped, so I figured the motor home would be the best bet. She could lie down for the trip, and a bathroom was just down the hall, as was the refrigerator.

I knew the GMC was getting old, and I was expecting some trouble mechanically, so I carried enough tools for an engine overhaul if necessary.

(That’s only a slight exaggeration.) 

After getting all luggage onboard, we left Winnemucca heading west. The motor home rode smooth as silk on the air bag suspension, and the 455 c.i.d. Oldsmobile engine had lots of power. I had to be careful of speed limits, as it wanted to cruise at about eighty if you didn’t pay attention. The cruise control wasn’t working when I left home, and I let it go, since I was in a hurry to get on the road.

The first night we parked in an RV park in Moab, UT. I plugged in the power and everything worked fine, lights and everything. Except the water had a leak when I hooked up a hose. Obviously freeze damage last winter, and I skipped the water hookup and advised that baths would be at the RV park bathing facility. The water was leaking from under the water inlet, so at least I knew where to look when I got a chance to fix it.

The next morning we stopped in Nucla, CO, where we had lived for nine years and visited with our friends there. 

While I was there, I unscrewed the water inlet pressure reducer and found the back of the device had split off, so I needed a new one. On a machine this old, it may be hard to find.

The first engine trouble was near the top of Monarch Pass at nearly 11,300 ft. Elevation. At first I thought it might be vapor lock, since the engine was stumbling and cutting out. It finally just quit, and I had to carefully back down to a wide pullout and park it. Since the vacuum assisted power brakes were marginal with the engine not running, I really had to stand on the pedal to keep it from rolling back too fast. When I got off the road, I put the selector in PARK, hauled back on the hand brake, and after I carefully left off the brake pedal and it didn’t move, I got out and found some big rocks and chocked the wheels.

When I opened the engine cover I was surprised to hear the gasoline boiling in the carburetor and see the vapor spewing out. It was scary dangerous for an explosion, and I didn’t think the little extinguisher by the driver’s seat would be adequate if it lit off. I’ve seen carburetors percolate before, but never like this. The only thing we could do is open the doors and windows and try to ventilate as much as we could. Then we waited for the engine to cool off and the carburetor to normalize again.

I noted on my mental list to check that the carb heat valve was working correctly when I got a chance. Little did I suspect that they didn’t design this engine to even have a carb heat valve. They must have totally depended on both exhausts balancing equally. One small leak or one small dent on an exhaust pipe and the channel under the carb becomes a path for hot exhaust gasses to pass through.

This was not engine overheating. No coolant was lost and no coolant was boiling. It was just the carburetor that got hot due to the steep climb and the high elevation, and the deficient design of the intake manifold. 

After about an hour, I decided to attempt a start. The engine started immediately, and I let off the hand brake, put the gear selector in low, and drove over the top of the pass, which was only a couple of hundred yards away.

I left the selector in low as we came down the east side of Monarch Pass toward the town of Salida. A few years earlier a school bus lost its brakes coming down that side and crashed and killed the whole football team. If you have lived in Colorado you soon learn how to safely drive over those mountains. 

We stayed overnight in Colorado Springs, and the next day we were having no more trouble with the engine. When we gassed up in Colorado Springs I calculated the mileage at 11.34 mpg, which is the highest of the trip. Of course, it was all downhill! Most of the trip it was 6, 7, or 8 mpg.

We were making good time when we stopped in Goodland, Kansas, for refreshments. I noticed the brake pedal dropped a notch as I pushed it down. I tried it again and felt the same thing - the pedal stopped where it was supposed to, but in a second or two of steady pressure, it dropped to a lower level. 

I stopped at a NAPA parts store and got out and looked for a leak on a wheel. There were none. I took the cover off the master brake cylinder, and as I suspected, the front reservoir was full and the back one was low. Bad master cylinder doing what it is made to do. Half the brakes still work when a fault occurs somewhere in the system.

 I went inside the store and asked for a master cylinder for a ’77 Oldsmobile. I knew they wouldn’t carry one for an old motor home, but I was hoping for one that fit. 

I was in luck! They had two of them, but different. So we studied the one on the RV, and I picked the one that looked to be a match. They sold it to me, along with a self bleeder kit and a can of brake fluid. It took me about a half an hour to change the cylinder and bleed the brakes. Soon we were back on the road to Kansas City to meet Mom’s sister.

Frankly, if you are going to drive a 25 year old motor home across the country, you should carry lots of money, lots of insurance, or be a good mechanic. I was in the third category, but there were times I wished I was in the first category and could just hand the work to somebody else.

When we got to Kansas City, (actually Independence, Missouri) we stopped first at my cousin Jim Russell’s house, where they all were waiting for us. We had a great family reunion, and they all wanted a tour of the motor home. So we led them through from one end to the other, and they were very impressed at the lovely interior. Back then, even at 25 years old, it still looked pretty good. I didn’t go into the mechanical problems so far.

The plan was for Carolyn and I and Melissa, our granddaughter, to leave Mom to stay and visit her sister for a week or so and we would drive down to Oklahoma to visit Carolyn’s family. We stopped in Oklahoma City to visit her Aunt Laverna, then went on down to Durant, her hometown. 

Carolyn had a large family in Durant, and when they did family reunions, they had to rent a pavilion out at the county fairgrounds. 

At this point we had just over 2000 miles on the road, and no further troubles came up.

After a week visiting family in Oklahoma, we drove north to pick up my Mom. It was the Fourth of July weekend, and was pretty hot. We stopped in a really nice RV park in the town of Peculiar, Missouri, on the night of the Fourth. At sundown we were alarmed to hear explosions all around us. We went out side and it looked and sounded like a war. We found out that since we were near the border of Kansas and Missouri, the citizens of both states spent the night trying to outdo each other with fireworks displays. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars they blew up that night, but it was impressive!

After picking up my mother, we came back south to Gentry, Arkansas, where Aunt Mary Detweiler, my Dad’s sister was living on an Adventist school campus and still teaching in her eighties. We had a wonderful visit, reminiscing over the years right after WWII when all the Rogers kids (my Dad’s siblings) got out of the military and got married. 

We continued on back to Durant, where Mom got to meet Carolyn’s family, and then traveled on south to Keene, Texas, for a short visit with Darla, Carolyn’s cousin, who also taught at a school there. 

We started home again, the long way around, to visit our granddaughter Chandler in Arizona. We cruised through Monahans, Texas; Roswell, New Mexico; to Phoenix, Arizona. After a visit with Chandler’s mother Tonya, we picked up Chandler to stay with us for the summer. Then we drove north to Flagstaff to visit my brother John and his wife, Carolyn.

As we climbed the mountain into Flagstaff, we had some trouble with the engine overheating. We stopped a couple of times to let it cool off.  We were carrying water to replace the lost steam in the 35 gallon tank in the back. Since this just started, I was pretty sure it was related to the thermostat, but if I drove slower and didn’t push it up any hills, it was OK. I drove the rest of the trip through Las Vegas and Tonopah, Nevada at night to keep things cool.

When I got home at the end of the 5000 mile trip, I unscrewed the cover on the thermostat and found it stuck half open. Wouldn’t close, wouldn’t open more. That was strange - I’ve never seen that before or since. Usually they fail either open or closed. That was an easy five minute fix.

For the rest of July, 2003, I took off the carburetor, and then the intake manifold, looking for the source of the boiling carburetor. That’s when I realized the engineers who designed this engine skipped any provisions for stopping exhaust gasses from shooting through the manifold from one side to the other, roasting the paint and boiling the gas in the carburetor. I heard later from other GMC owners that sometimes the manifold actually cracked from the heat and had to be replaced. I’m sure some GMC’s burned to the ground from this design flaw.

When I removed the intake manifold, I found a huge ball of crispy carbonized oil hanging under the warped sheet metal cover over the valve train. It weighed several pounds, and I carefully lifted it out of the motor, trying not to break off and drop any pieces into the engine. I picked up any loose pieces I could see on top, then drained all the old oil out of the pan and flushed it with solvent from the top down. 

I took the intake manifold to work and in my spare time, clamped the manifold to the milling machine with the left side indicated level above the table, then I carefully machined a 1/8 “ step around the exhaust port on that side only. I made a rectangular block to put in the manifold to completely block all exhaust gasses from that side. I left the right side open so some hot gas could heat up the choke heat tube and keep the automatic choke working normally.

While I was fixing manifolds, I noticed that both exhaust manifolds were leaking, which may have been a factor in the unbalanced flow through the intake manifold. I took both of them off and using a carbide tool on a fly cutter, machined them .005’ at a time until they were flat again. There are not nearly enough screws holding them on, and they were bowed over .030” between screws. With new gaskets all leaks were gone and the engine was much quieter and cooler

I got everything back together and running fine within the month, and then we planned a trip to Oregon for Chandler’s birthday the next month, August. 

 

  

 

Bicycles

 Bicycles

Tomorrow, if the weather permits, I’ll be riding in the Magnolia Bike Tour here in Durant, OK. This will be the fifth time, I think. I’ve also rode in the Red River Bike Tour in Denison, TX, and a couple of times in the Alfalfa Bill Bike Tour in Tishomingo, OK.

I get a lot of questions on when and why I got started on bicycle riding, and why I still do it at almost eighty years old. It’s been a life time thing.

I learned to ride on a old, ugly gimme bike. It was faded red, and worst of all, it was a girl’s bike from a neighbor, Judy Burton, out on Gerard Ave in Merced. But I didn’t complain, I just rode it up and down the road all day.

I don’t remember what happened to that bike. The next one was also a hand-me-down, but it was a boy’s bike with 24” wheels. The handlebars looked like steer horns, and the bolt that held them on was rusted tight, so they stayed that way. Sort of dangerous if you fell on them, and there was no rubber grips on them or even a chain guard. Tying your pant leg was a must if you didn’t want to skid down the road with one leg caught in the chain.

In 1956-7 I got a job as a paper boy delivering the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle to homes and businesses on the south side of Merced. I shared it with my cousin Jim Russell, who delivered on Saturday for me, since I was a Seventh-day Adventist and didn’t work on that day. 

We both delivered on Sunday because those papers ran to 400-500 pages on the Sunday editions, and we used his car on the route. He had a black Volkswagen Convertible, which was ideal for him driving and me tossing the papers. We noted on his odometer that the length of the paper route was thirteen miles.

After a few months I had saved enough money for a new bike, or at least a down payment. I went down the the Herb Brothers Schwinn bicycle shop and bought a shiny green Schwinn Tiger middle weight bicycle with a Sturmy-Archer three speed hub. I put a tandem carrier on the back for the canvas paper bags, and I was the proudest biker in the land. 

On weekdays I woke up at 3:00 AM and rode down to Schroeders’ News office and folded and loaded the newspapers on the bike, then set out on the route. For those familiar with Merced, the route included everything from 21st street across downtown to 1st street out by the fairgrounds between “A” st. and “R” street. Since it was not the local paper, it wasn’t every house, but more like a house on every other block.

There was no freeway then, and many of my customers would now be in the industrial area where Hwy 99 is today. I remember one of my deliveries was to Mitchell House Movers, who covered a whole city block.

I had to finish the deliveries by 7:00 AM so I could ride home to Santa Fe Ave. eat breakfast, and then ride to school, out on Gustine Hwy on “W” drive. 

I needed more gears for the heavier loads on some days, and for going faster when no papers were on board. I went back to the Herb Brothers shop and they showed me something from England called a derailleur that moved the chain to various sprockets to change ratios. They showed me how to disassemble the internal three speed hub and adapt four more sprockets on the outside with the new Olympus derailleur. 

Now I had 12 speeds! 3 x 4 = 12. It was a rather crude affair, since the derailleur did not tension the chain with a double idler, but merely lifted the chain off the lower side of the sprocket. Some care needed to be taken to not over stress the chain, or it would jump the teeth on the sprocket. But it worked well enough that I added another chainwheel to the front and put a derailleur there, too. That’s how I ended up with a 24 speed Schwinn.

The low gears would climb a tree, I think. It was nearly impossible to pedal fast enough to keep your balance in the lowest gear. And the highest gear could only be used going down hill. I used it once riding back one weekend from Cathey’s Valley, where I was able to pass a slow moving car on the old highway coming back to town.

Twice I led groups of kids to Snelling and back to get their merit badges for bicycling. That was for a fifty mile ride. This was for the Pathfinders, a church group similar to Boy Scouts.

I tried to ride it to Lodi Academy, 75 miles north of Merced, but I picked a day when the wind was blowing out of the north at 35+ miles an hour. I stopped in Modesto and called Mom for help. She drove up in the old green Buick and carried me and the bike to Lodi. 

When I went to Walla Walla College, I took my bicycle there and that was my only transportation during that year. I rode from College Place to Walla Walla to visit my friend Don Satterfield and his family, and on some weekends I would ride out east of town into the mountains to enjoy the scenery and get some exercise.

I left that bicycle at my mother’s house when I went in the U. S. Army, and when I returned from Okinawa, my mother had moved in with her sister near Atwater, and the old house was empty. Never saw that bike again.

While I was stationed on Okinawa, I bought a red Fuji Feather bicycle - the first real racing road bike I owned. It was extremely light and easily rode at over thirty mph. For fun I would pass the police cars, since the speed limit all over the island was 35, and I could reach that if I pushed it. They would just laugh and turn away. That bike was a wreck before I left the island. It just couldn’t hold up to the rough roads and salt air.

From 1967 - 1972 I had no bicycles. I owned two CB160 Hondas and then a CL450 Honda. Commuted on motorcycles for a couple of years in southern California, from Huntington Beach to Downey, then a year in Woodland, CA and Silver Springs, NV.

I bought my next bicycle in Nucla, Colorado, where I worked in a coal burning electric generation plant.  It was the most expensive Schwinn available without a special custom order. My boss thought I was nuts for paying $300 for a bicycle. 

Our home was on a hill, and the plant was down in the river valley, so the bicycle commute was wrong way for sure. I could coast downhill to work. Then after a hard day’s work I would have to grind up some steep switchback roads to get home.

 My bicycle was a Schwinn with 12 speeds, I think - two in front and six in back. The shifters were a couple of friction levers on the frame below the fork. No numbers or detents. Fast and accurate shifting was impossible. But it was simple and reliable.

The local clinic sponsored an MS Bike-a-thon one weekend, and both my wife and I decided to ride our bikes. I was for fifty miles, from Naturita to Bedrock, Colorado, and back. First prize was a new bicycle nearly the same as mine. That didn’t interest me, of course. But I went to work with a signup card and got several people to agree to pay me $0.25 a mile for the fifty miles.

The weather was perfect and I was feeling good, so we all started riding together with the group. Soon it was just me and one young boy, who stayed with me as long as he could, but was soon nearly in tears. I realized he wanted that new bike, and thought I was going to win the race. I slowed down and I assured him that the bike was his if he beat everybody but me, because I already had a new bike and didn’t want another one. He got a lot happier.

I sped away and returned to the start well before noon. I asked it it would be OK to do the ride again for 100 miles. They agreed, and gave me a place to check back when I returned to get my card signed. So I passed the rest of the crowd coming back as I rode the course a second time.

The young boy won a new bike, and I was in trouble at work. When I showed the hundred miles on my card to my coworkers they were pissed! They had expected only fifty miles. I calmed them down by explaining that I only signed them up for fifty miles and I wouldn’t hold them to any more than that, but after all, It was me that worked hard for the charity. They were mollified a bit, and eventually they all paid for a hundred mile ride.

When I moved to Winnemucca, Nevada, I kept that bike and maintained it through the years, replacing cables and spokes and bearings and tires as needed. 

In 1984 I took flying lessons and rode my bike to the airport once, 12 miles away by road. In the winter, I could have walked there quicker, I think, because my home was about a mile and a half north of the airport on Jones Ln. If the winds were from the north, I turned crosswind over my house when practicing in the pattern.

When I retired from Sierra Pacific Power Co. in 2006, they gave me a catalog of gifts to peruse, in lieu of just the old gold watch. One of the pages showed a Trek Mountain Bike, so of course, that was my choice.

Winnemucca has a lot of surrounding mountains and several good trails to ride. One on the south side of the high school is called Bloody Shins Trail, and people come from out of town to test themselves on it. It is several miles of rough riding. 

There is also a trail now to the top of Winnemucca Mountain. Unfortunately, when they finished the trail, I had started to show signs of aging. I still had the strength, but was getting short on stamina and balance. The trail is narrow and is on the side of a steep slope. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor, they say. I’ve been about halfway up.

In 2014 I won a gold and silver belt buckle for finishing first in my class (plus 65) in the Stewart Ranch sesquicentennial celebration bicycle poker run in Paradise Valley, Nevada. The last mile or so was a fast dash between me and the overall winner (25-65). We were going well over twenty on our mountain bikes. I just beat Maxl Willis, my flight instructor and friend.

When I moved to Durant, OK, I bought a racing road bike from the bicycle shop in Denison TX. They had to show me how to shift the “slap shifters”. The brake calipers swing sideways to shift the derailleurs. Far faster and more sure than even the “trigger” shifters on my mountain bike.

 I still try to keep in shape, but it’s getting tougher. My heart has electrical trouble, but not plumbing problems, according to my cardiologist. He brags on my bike riding to his staff, and says he is going to get a bike when he retires. 

Hey, there are worse things than being an inspiration to someone.  

Is it Socialism or Communism?

 I just finished a book that is surprisingly funny, enchanting and educational. The title is “SOCIALISM…SERIOUSLY” by Danny Katch.

All my life, it seems, I have been trying to find good concise definitions of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Anarchism,etc. I must say that the author of this book doesn’t help much at all in that respect. He isn’t too sure what he is himself at the end.

But the book got me to thinking. I think that every government can be classified as either Socialist or Communist, if the terms are broadened out to their most macro meanings. Let me try.

Socialism could be any government whose primary focus is on people. The society is all about people. There are many variations, from authoritarian oligarchy, where one or a few people amass all the wealth and leave the rest of the people destitute, Or a social democracy, where ideally all people are equal and there are no rich or poor people.

Communism is focussed on property: land, money, etc. No ownership of property is allowed. No country on earth has ever accomplished communism in the long term. It has been tried countless times, and it always devolves back to some form of capitalism. People want to own things. 

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics transformed a backward, uneducated country into a world leading power of industrial production and space exploration. And then it collapsed into the worst kind of capitalist oligarchy which is unable to recapture its earlier successes and only expands its reach by invading its neighbors.  

Chinese communism overcame the corrupt capitalist oligarchy of the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek and instituted a brutal communist government on the mainland after they drove Chiang onto the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). Somehow, between then and now, the government on the mainland of China still calls itself communist, but they have all the capitalist trappings of the US, including privately owned companies with a stock exchange and rich oligarchs.

I served in the Far East in the U.S. Army between 1965 and 1967. From my safe engine overhaul facility on Okinawa I got to meet and socialize with many soldiers from the conflict in Vietnam. One thing was immediately apparent to me was the propaganda bulls—t that the U.S. Army was putting out in the “Stars and Stripes” had no relationship to what was actually happening on the ground in Vietnam. Although the U.S. military had the advantage in technology and equipment, the glowing reports that Gen. Westmoreland put out were pretty much the opposite of the truth. The truth was that no matter how many thousand communists we killed, there were always many more to take their place. Few countries have fought so long and hard for the freedom to choose their own form of governance as Vietnam.

No, they weren’t dying to have our capitalistic government foisted on them. They were dying to found a new communist government that would feed them and house them and keep them alive and well.

The screaming irony to me is that many, if not most, of the career military men were in the military for the very same reasons. The Army owned the barracks, but you always had a place to sleep there. The army owned the kitchen and the food, but you were always welcome to eat there. If you got injured or sick, the medical corpsman was right there to assist you. And I thought the free U.S. Army uniforms were much better looking than the Communist ones.

I don’t know if the present government of Vietnam is communist or not, but I am gratified that we are developing a trade relationship with that country that we fought so hard to destroy.

I lived for nine years in a little town in Colorado, named Nucla. Say “New-Kla.” It was founded by a group of people from the East who were willing to invest in the Colorado Cooperative Company, move out onto barren mesa land with no water and accept the right to grow crops there after a ditch was dug 16 miles up the San Miguel River to provide irrigation to the land. If I remember the story, they started digging in about 1895.

The people were active and hopeful as long as they were digging on that ditch every day for over ten years. There were great celebrations on the day the water first flowed onto the top of the mesa. The land was parceled out to each family, and each was given a task or a crop to raise. Some raised cows for meat and dairy, some raised wheat or corn or other crops. It was supposed to all be gathered together and distributed in equal shares to each family from the Co-op building, which still stands on Main Street today.

As soon as the first crops came in, the arguments started. Everybody was loath to surrender their hard earned crops to give to the other families. The enterprise soon dissolved and the forty acre plots of land were deeded to each family. Descendants of those pioneers are still living there today.

Seems to me they went from communism while they were digging that ditch, to socialism, when they were supposed to be sharing all the crops, to capitalism, when they each got deeds to the land. Seems to be a pattern there.

If I liked cold weather more than I do, I might think of moving to one of the Scandinavian countries, who better than most seem to have mixed up the best combination of capitalism and socialism. You can own land and your own company there, but you are taxed to a level where you can’t get too rich, and everybody in the country has a roof over their head, enough food to eat, and warm clothing to wear. Medical is free or cheap, and education is free through college or university. Maybe they believe having a smart, educated, healthy populace is conducive to a great society.

I’m just not ready to learn to speak Swedish yet.