Postcard from Arizona- 4

Posted on Tuesday, 29 November 2011 by bruce10b

29 November 2011

Looks like Lawley Ford in Sierra Vista is going to get very, very high marks once the truck is back in our hands. I received a call this morning and learned that they were in the process of replacing the high pressure fuel pump on our truck. That fits with information I’ve read on the ‘net about failure code P120F so I have high expectations that they have it right. Yee haw!

I got the call at about 8:30 this morning and they were already working on the truck. The first step is to lift the body off the truck so they can access the pump… I wonder what genius thought that was an OK way of doing this replacement?! Even with that huge extra step, it appears they should finish in one day. This repair will be done under warranty except for anything they have to move out of the way that is related to our Banks equipment. The estimate is somewhere around 2 hours of labor… about $250. I see it as penance for having installed the Banks equipment, but $250 is a huge difference from paying the whole $2,500 that it would cost if the warranty didn’t cover the work.

I had been stewing about this for all the weeks since the pump started failing. Needless to say, this is a huge weight off my psyche. If all goes as planned we’ll be RVers again by tonight (without a truck we’re just campers!) and we’ll be raving about what a great dealer Lawley Ford is! 🙂

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Postcard from Arizona- 3

Posted on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 by bruce10b

23 November 2011

Internet

We’ve spent way too much time fussing with internet access including activating the 3G network on our iPads. The iPads are fine for many things, but it’s just not a direct substitute for our laptops. During those times we’re in Benson, we’ve acquiesced and are using the $30/mo WiFi service available to the park. It’s provided by a local company and signup is online via credit card for a day, a week, a month, or 6 months. No router permitted and you’re able to have unlimited internet access except they measure bandwidth and cut you off if they think you’re abusing their service. Hmmm… unlimited access but you can’t use it excessively? I’ll have to think about that.

Sick Truck

I said earlier we have a problem with our Ford F-350 truck. The day we arrived in Benson it started running rough (feels like a misfire). Now it has greatly reduced power. Just to eliminate one possibility I wanted to remove the Banks tuner module in order to satisfy myself it wasn’t the culprit. In the process of unwinding the Banks-installed equipment I found the engine wiring harness is missing the back-shell, perhaps broken a long time ago, or possibly broken at Banks when they did the install. Dunno. But that back-shell is important for more than being a dust cover: it contains the cam surfaces needed to disconnect the engine wiring harness. I feared I would probably break the connector if I tried to pry it off so I put it in the too-hard-to-do pile and looked for help.

It was clear we needed to get someone involved with the right tools and the know-how to troubleshoot the engine and do the repair. I asked around and was warned away from the local (Benson) Ford dealer. But I wasn’t finding a reasonable alternative till Celia asked someone in her line dance class. They have a Freightliner and recommended the repair place they use in Willcox (30+ miles East). Unfortunately they turned out to have repair capability for only small trucks. Anything newer than a 2002 Ford exceeds what their test equipment can interpret (there are a lot of the older 7.3 Liter Ford trucks out there accumulating hundreds of thousands of miles each). We ended up calling the Ford dealer in Sierra Vista (30+ miles SW). It’s also a Lawley Ford dealer (same name as the dealer in Benson) and have a good reputation. And they didn’t seem to have an issue with having Banks equipment installed. So we dropped it off last Saturday.

When I picked it up Tuesday it ran perfectly… for about 15 miles. Then the same nasty P120F fault code raised its ugly head again. The tech found a problem with a Banks connector, plus they did the update & re-calibration of the PCM (a firmware change done as a recall; I’d put this off for several months). They were sure it was fixed and as I drove away I was equally convinced. Sadly it needed to go back and we did that today, the Wednesday before Turkey Day. From what I’ve been able to read on the internet, P120F doesn’t go away permanently till you replace the high pressure fuel pump, but that seems to be a step Ford is reluctant to take as part of warranty repairs. So we’ll have to see what happens next.

Holidays

Last year we got into some bad eating habits during our stay in Benson. To the tune of almost 20 lbs. for me by the end of summer. We had way too many meals out with fried food and big desserts, then we continued to eat that way once we left Benson. We hope to not repeat that experience this year and will pass on the big Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners they have here.(and Taco Night and Fish Fry Night and the Dessert Auction… sigh).

To get things going in the right direction we’ve started eating according to the Admiral’s favorite eating program: Weight Watchers. If we do everything right we can expect about 1 lb/wk weight loss and that’s what’s been happening. It’s a good start and we don’t want to get derailed with the large-group eat frenzy that goes on here during the winter. So instead of the big dinners at the Club House and the Leftovers Dinner the next day, we’ll be going to a restaurant instead. No doubt we’ll go over the daily limit, but we’ll be back on track the next day without the temptation of great tasting leftovers.

Anyway, hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. And wish us enough luck to see the San Francisco game on Thursday. Go Niners!

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An Experiment

Posted on Saturday, 5 November 2011 by bruce10b

5 November 2011

We’re struggling with connectivity. When we arrived in AZ we suddenly started getting billed for data at a rate 3-4 times what we’ve had for the last nearly 2 years. We tried a different Verizon air card to no avail, so that was returned and we closed that particular Verizon line (one of 3). Sadly there’s no way to tell anyone why we bailed out after 2 years of being happy customers. Sales apparently is tasked with blocking venomous vitriol from the unhappy masses.

We have unlimited data and messaging on our grandfathered-AllTel phones (recently upgraded to iPhones), but Verizon won’t let us use the bandwidth as a personal hotspot to connect our laptops. Yes, it’s physically possible to create the hotspot, but they block users from doing it themselves. Instead we have to change our plan which means we would lose our unlimited data/messaging which would be replaced with a 2 GB limit instead. Worse yet, we would lose our free roaming and free long distance on the phones.

So, after fighting it since early this year when we received our then new, hot-off-the-press iPad 2 tablets, we activated the 3G network for both of them. The cost is close to the same as the base rate of the air card data plan, there’s no router required anymore since we operate separately, and bandwidth seems to accumulate accurately.

There are limitations using the iPad as the sole net access and maintaining this blog is only one. For instance I have to move photos from the laptop or camera onto the iPad. Can’t use Picasa or Flickr as this would accumulate large bandwidth usage. And my first try using Google’s Blogger to create a post from PHX airport exposed the complete inadequacy of that piece of Google software. What looks like a proper post in Blogger turns into a run-on sentence. And there’s no means of controlling style beyond the template, e.g. no font controls like underscore, bold, etc. Looks like I need another editor, so…

This is my $3 experiment using BlogPress as an iPad app. BlogPress is a WordPress product my son suggested a year ago. At this point I’ve stumbled my way thru getting a post created, but so far I haven’t discovered how to access previously published posts with BlogPress nor how to publish. And I don’t know what a post looks like once it gets to the server. So the jury is still out.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Tamarisk Ln, Benson, AZ
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Postcard from the road

Posted on Monday, 17 October 2011 by bruce10b

17 October 2011

I’m stuck in PHX waiting for US Airways to clone an aircraft. Oh joy. I’m bored out of my mind so I thought I’d whine.

I’m on my way to Albuquerque for regular doctor & dentist appointments and, more importantly, to retrieve our Highlander. The truck is sick and we rented a car from Enterprise which we’ll return when I get the Highlander back to Benson. The KIA Soul was a nice car, but we’d have liked it better if the suspension had springs with more than 4″ of travel and mileage better than about 30 mpg. Guess it’s not for old toots like us.

The airport delay doesn’t threaten tomorrow’s appointments, but it does mean I have to reschedule the shuttle. Bummer. I’m assuming all will go OK… this is my first time to use Sandia Shuttle Express. They don’t take you to your home, but they stop at all the Roadrunner stops and there’s one near the house. A 1 mile walk after sitting for way too many hours sounds just fine.

What a pain not having the truck! We’d planned to drive from Benson to Santa Fe so we both could have our teeth cleaned. Without the truck, we couldn’t both fly because one of us had to stay with the dogs. Since the Admiral can’t drive more than 30 minutes without falling asleep, that meant I was a better choice to fly, then drive back to Benson. Not bad duty since I enjoy driving anyway.

19 October 2011

The Sandia Shuttle Express turned out to be a great choice: $27 from the Sunport (ABQ) to the Railrunner South Capitol station in Santa Fe. I could have chosen any of several non-neighborhood drop off locations.

Been to the doctor (good for another 6 months) and to the dental hygienist today (yup… still got all 8 of ’em). Barbara has been cleaning my teeth for a few years now and we always take a few minutes to talk about photography. She’s a really good photographer who has recently started doing weddings. She has a few prints hanging around the office. I especially liked the shot off the back of the Amtrak… Wow!

I was out of the chair at 1500 and on the road headed South on I-25. Stopped in Socorro for the nite, and tomorrow will take NM-26 from Hatch to Deming in order to bypass Las Cruces.

20 October 2011

I was awake at 0430 so I thought “What the hell? Might as well get going.” I was on the road by 0500 and had an easy time getting to Deming on I-10 with nearly no traffic. Stopped in Lordsburg for gas and breakfast (Kranberry’s… excellent fresh biscuits, but to my mind sausage gravy is supposed to have some sausage in it; still tasted good), then back on the road. I was at the Dog House by 10ish thanks to the time zone difference (AZ doesn’t use daylight savings time). I was starting to fade as I got near Texas Canyon about 20 East of Benson, but the boulder-strewn landscape near the top of the pass is gorgeous and I was quickly alert again to finish the ride.

Tomorrow the KIA goes back. And it was a good thing we rented it. Not only did Celia use it to get me to the Tucson airport (TUS), she had to get Annie to the emergency vet in Tucson at 0100 on the 19th. The Admiral was afraid Annie might have bloat, a very real possibility with berners. It can only be corrected with surgery to remove the twist in the bowel. Turned out she had bad gas (Maalox with Simethicone did the trick), probably from the mesquite berries she sneaks while walking. The Admiral explained it was a $300 fart (cost of X-rays and exam), but better safe than sorry. With bloat you have about an hour to get to the vet for surgery or you’ll lose your best friend.

iPad 2 and Google’s Blogger editor

I started this post at the PHX airport using my iPad 2 and their WiFi hotspot. I could enter and save text to the blog OK, but it appears the Blogger editor is buggy in its iPad version. Everything was a continuous sentence with no line breaks, and it was like pulling eye teeth to get Blogger to edit what it had just saved. Disappointing. Come on Google… you can do better than that!. I’ve seen reference to an editor used by Blogspot bloggers traveling with their iPads and had thought it didn’t apply to me. Oops! Guess I’d better track it down.

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Postcard from Arizona- 2 *

Posted on Friday, 7 October 2011 by bruce10b

7 October 2011

Benson, AZ
Back in 1965 when I was working at UTC Div of United Aircraft (now Chemical Systems Div of United Technologies Corp), I worked with a guy named Jerry Yaezel. Jerry was a very calm individual who always kept his head and never said an angry word (are there still people like that?!). UTC built rocket motors and we tested samples at the Coyote, CA facility where I worked. Working with rocket motors, whether solid or liquid, there were always opportunities to get really, really, really excited. Like when a motor blew up (which happened with alarming regularity with experimental motors). Jerry kept his cool through all these things. The foreman in the test bay was Frank Reed and he was not put together with the same DNA as Jerry. Frank liked to tease Jerry and one day claimed he heard Jerry so upset he said “Hell, damn, poop!” Somehow I doubt that ever happened, but I never forgot the story and wondered if I could ever take things as calmly as Jerry always did. Well, yesterday, 46 years later, I had a hell-damn-poop moment.

Recall that we had the great bad-injector-debacle on Monday. Then a neighbor suggested it might be the air filter, so I had a go at cleaning it. I simply blew out the air filter with the compressor, then tried the truck. It ran OK, but the drive to Safeway was short and the truck never got up to operating temperature. I had significant reservations that things were really fixed, so yesterday I took the truck onto the I-10 and drove about 20 miles. Well… hell, damn, poop. The truck runs like a champ.

In the process of getting the filter out of the housing I managed to damaged the screening which covers the paper pleats. Now I have to get a replacement plus some of the spray-on cleaner and the oil (?) that’s to be applied after cleaning (it attracts dust to improve cleaning). The filters are expensive ($200? more?) but it’s a damn sight cheaper than having injectors replaced!

12 October

Benson, AZ
It’s official… fussed with the antenna today and got it working OK, but only OK. But it was enought to log the first QSO (contact) with KZ7ZZ near Seattle, WA on 40m. Then I tuned up a little and listened to Roberto/I2VRN near Milan, Italy. Yikes! He created quite a jam with a bunch of retired hams who don’t have to get up in the morning clamoring to be heard. You’d think it was a contest!

So I guess the antenna is going to be at least OK. Mrs. Bowman’s little boy is grinning from ear-to-ear!

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