Well, like most things, for me anyway, I had a repair day. Started slow but ended really hot, sweaty and tired…
First I had to wait on the Spray guy. We get our house “bug proofed” every month from April till Nov… otherwise the damn spiders and bugs would take over. They also have stuff for snakes – doesn’t kill but supposed to smell bad to snakes and keeps them away? We did it last year and after seeing several before the treatment and none after???? I guess it works… This spring we have killed two that got too close to the house… figure that is enough that we should have treated for them earlier? I also had complained that the back deck was getting really infested with spiders shortly after they finished spraying… truth might be that the last two times it rained right after they sprayed… outlook for this weekend – “rain”… left over Alex… oh boy…
Then I had to pick up the motor home at 11… when I got there at 10:30 it was still not done and would not be until maybe 1. So I came back home – picked up a box of stuff to donate and took that to the Habitat for Humanity place to sell… Then had lunch and back to get motor home. It took longer than they had figured but he stuck with the agreed price which is great for me… I might never have gotten it done?
Got it home, backed into the storage building ( Un-attached garage)… as it looked like rain already… decided now was as good a time as any to clean the carpets in there… so had to park it just right so I could run the slides out to get to all the carpet… in the trip home I noticed that the Pressure Pro had fallen off the mount (it was only on with velcro and appeared that the sun had hit it just right to cause the glue to give up? ) never did that while we were out parked in the sun but oh well…
So the first thing, get that re-mounted and out-of-the-way… will see if it stays up or we have to move up to better glue or screws? This is what it looked like when I put it up first time…
top one is what fell down.”]
I got all the slides out, got the vacuum and proceeded to give the carpets a good sweeping… then got the steam cleaner out and filled the soap dispenser part… when I plugged it in – the water just ran out the bottom? oh boy this is fun… but went ahead and used it, although I didn’t put the dispenser in until I was ready to run the unit… got all the carpets “steam” cleaned multiple directions and times as I had to move a lot to pick up the dripping water/soap mix… but figured out how to make it work ok… so now the carpets on the inside are clean and need to dry out…
At this point I had to break and go pick up Wife from work… a welcome rest from the day in the heat…
After I got home again, I decided to re-work the IC-706 in the jeep… for some reason the Auto-tuner (N2VZ turbo tuner) had quit…just before we went on vacation… I figured it to be just a fuse but had to take the whole tuner out, and pull the back to find out… Yep – fuse blown…. got that replaced and put the unit back in but it still did not tune? HUH? so next best thing is take the radio out and put it on bench to find out why…
Working under the dash of a Jeep Wrangler is the pits… you can’t see, you can’t move, you can’t hardly reach anything and when you do… you’re hung up… but I got all the units out… took to bench and found… damn not the same connections? well, lets just fix that so they are the same as the one from the motor home… so I soldered on a new plug connection for the wires – but in the interim I had blown a fuse in the power leads off the battery – sure hope I didn’t burn up something else… took about and hour and a half to get the leads all fixed and plug-in the radio and the tuner and – DAMN it works here? (well, it wasn’t really DAMN more like S _ _ T… )
So then I have to hang on my head, and solder on the proper connection to the power leads under the dash… it sure was hot and muggy in there…I couldn’t keep my glasses on or dry so I could see the ends and the soldering iron is hot (I found out several times not to touch the end)… but I got it done – took about 3 times as long as it did on the bench? wonder why that is? then I got the radio all plugged in, but not mounted, and tested again… it still works? now the harder part… putting the radio back on the mount – you see the mount is not really accessible so that you can put the screws back into the radio… at least you can’t see the holes and can’t tell if it is lined up or not… that job took 2 more hours laying on my head and on my knees and twisted into a pretzel to get under the dash and use the mirror-on-a-stick to see the holes are they lined up? which way to move it? etc… but I finally got the 3 screws back in and all the wires pushed back out-of-the-way and the tuner put back up in its place and to be sure… pulled the jeep out – put the antenna on, and tuned on all the bands… worked like a charm – except for 80 meters and that is always tricky as you have to tune the very top end then move down to the lower end or it will just miss it… so now that works again… wanted to use it last week on vacation but – oh well. then took the top stinger off the antenna, parked it and put the jeep in the shop… picked up my tools and came in for a real shower of clean water not sweat…
And that was how it went – today….