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2008 Land Rover National Rally Trip
Day 22: Somewhere to Homolovi ruins in Arizona
After a map search I found out that somewhere is named Gallop, New Mexico. A very expensive KOA next to the loud highway AND very active train rails. All I can say is clean bathrooms & electricity for charging my batteries. The circuit was still not charging in the morning so I got on #40 West and tried to see how far I could get at 75 MPH. One thing I quickly noticed is that with the roof rack loaded and an open engine bay the engine sure sucks fuel at 75 MPH. But The Green Rover is stable at those speeds and felt as safe as 55 MPH.
I noticed an auto parts store as I was passing through Winslow Arizona and decided to stop to warranty swap my new alternator for another new one. Actually I'm happy I did. The didn't have the same one I had but they had one just like it with same specs but keyed differently in a way that was actually better for my vehicle. At half the price of the one I was using. I got an almost $50 refund! I installed it & it worked OK. I'm getting too good at R&Ring that alternator. I drove across the street for lunch. Having the spare tyre tied down inside next to my cooker is really cramping my lunch cooking. I fired the engine back up and the alternator stopped charging. Back across the street to the auto parts store. I removed the alternator (getting way to experienced at this) and they put it on their machine. It tested good. I reinstalled it again knowing I must have another problem in this silly 3 wire system. So I decided that there must be a reason all the auto parts stores carry replacement plugs for these alternators and installed a new one. This time I ran the red sense wire to the back of the alternator instead of my the fuse block to eliminate a section of wrapped wire I can not easily trace. I fired the engine up and the alternator was charging properly. I went over to fill the fuel tank and the alternator stopped charging when I fired it up. Grumble!
I back tracked a little to the Homolovi Arizona State park & settled into the camp ground for the night to recharge the batteries. The pattern so far is that it fails when I start the engine and stays failed until I R&R it. Then it works. The alternator seems to run hotter than it should so maybe it is pumping out all it can into a sometimes ground path? The car runs all the fuel injection stuff and the electric fan for about 4 or 5 hours so its not acting like a real short anywhere. I think tomorrow I'll clean the starter solenoid connections then tour the ruins. Later I plan to visit the meteor crater. I've passed by it twice without stopping so I figure the third time I'll stop. I've picked up a pamphlet of Arizona state parks but it looks like there are no more along or near my route home. The National Monuments & parks along the way are all places I've been to multiple times previously. I should be home nine days from now at the latest. If it weren't for the gremlins causing problems I would have hit Roswell to get a cheesy souvenirs and a picture of my truck in front of a cheesy sign, If I can fix the charging problem soon I might detour to somewhere more interesting than the direct route but for now the direct route appears to be the best bet. I hope I finally find the problem and go back into tourist mode.
Day 23: Homolovi ruins to Flagstaff
This morning I cleaned the starter solenoid connections, so I've gone through every connection between the new alternator and the new battery and assured that the connections are good and tight. There's a new ground batter connector & very clean positive connector, a new connector plugged into the side of the alternator. I've bypassed the sense wire I has and run the sense to the power out connection at the back of the alternator (A lot of people do that). Still problems. If I disconnect the circuit & clean something the alternator starts off my charging then stops charging. Only one wire left that seems to be working but I haven't cleaned or bypassed. That's the wire that goes to the idiot light. Tomorrow its time to go to an auto parts store, buy a generic idiot light and a little wire and bypass the entire existing circuit. How can something so simple be so complicated? Gremlins, gotta hate them.
Anyway, once I got my morning alternator work out of the way, along with a couple cups of tea, a bowl of cereal and a shower, I went out and toured the ruins. The park is an active research site but was a visual disappointment. They have seven villages that were occupied from around 1260 through the late 1300's, only 2 of which are open to visitors. Both are over 100 rooms and both are back filled when research digs are completed. Touring one village all you see is the outline of the top stone layer outlining 2 rooms. This village has 3 story buildings all underground. The second one has a short stretch of 4 adjacent rooms half uncovered and the inside of a rectangular kiva doug out.
These are about the only un buried walls there. Rich sites for archaeologists but not much for tourists
All the rest of it has been back filled and is underground for maximum preservation and possibly per an agreement with the Hopi. What I found interesting is that the Hopi oral history remembers these villages as part of the migration to today's Hopi mesas and that the wall construction looks nothing like Chaco canyon, Salmon or Aztec ruin wall construction. This area along the Little Colorado river may have had the largest cotton fields under cultivation in the South West. Cotton and products woven from cotton were the primary trade goods from these villages.
After leaving Homolovi ruins I drove out to the meteor crater. Wow that wanted $15 to see a big hole in the ground! Well they did have a nice museum there as well and safe overlooks, and it is on private property and all but I thing the admission price was a tad steep. But it was going to pay the upkeep of a private museum and was educational. It is an impressive hole in the ground though. Around 50,000 years ago a meteor about 150 feet across hit here at about 26,000 MPH.
The crater is about 700 feet deep and 4000 feet across
It was getting dark when I hit Flagstaff and there was light rain so I headed for the nearest camp ground. Another expensive KOA. But there is a power outlet. I sure miss my ability to boondock camp and having my spare in the back against the stove is ruining my tendency to cook lunch. As they say, its not a matter of if I'll make it home, just a matter of when.
Day 24: Flagstaff to Kingman
I've pretty much decided that I've seen most of what I came to see on this trip, and my electrical problem seems to be getting worse. I'm getting fewer miles out of a battery charge and the problem has become more of an emotional drain than the pleasure of revisiting favorite spots and seeing new ones. I have decided to cut my trip short and limp home as best as possible. At home I can open up wiring systems without the need to button things back up to be mobile the next day and I would have access to additional tools Also the costs of using camp sites with power is cutting deeply into my trip money. There are some sights in the area that I wish to visit, but those will be for another trip.
I got up this morning, had a leisurely breakfast, stopped at Safeway to pick up more groceries the went off to the auto parts store for my ritual attempt of trying to fix the electrical problem. So far I have replaced the alternator, twice, the battery, the alternator connector, a battery connector, cleaned all connections between the battery and alternator and bypassed the alternator sense lead circuitry. This morning I'm bypassing the idiot light circuitry. I bought an indicator light and a roll of wire and ran a wire from the alternator output, through the indicator light to the excite wire on the plug. I'm using a connector to simulate the ignition switch. The alternator circuit can't get much more simple than it is. And still the darned thing doesn't work! Kingman was as far as I could get before the batteries gave up the ghost. I stopped at the local Checkers and purchased a small gas generator that has a battery charge output. I spent some time in the parking lot trying to charge the battery. It was getting dark so I went across the street and spent the night in the Wallmart parking lot. There have been several times I have taken advantage of their policy to let travelers overnight at the far edges of their lot. There were 5 other RV/trailers doing the same. I ran the generator for an hour after setting up camp.
Day 25: Kingman to Needles
This morning I went over the pathway between the battery positive and alternator output line looking for high resistance shorts that might be pulling both all the alternator's output and the battery. Nothing. Whatever it is the alternator seems to work for a couple seconds than the voltage level drops to around 12V. When it reaches around 10V the fuel pumps stop pumping reliably. Just for the fun of it I pulled the alternator (I'm getting very fast at this) and had the auto parts store check it on their machine. Still says its working fine. When I got dressed this morning I noticed that I was out of clean underwear, my usual signal for laundry time. This time I decided that getting home was more important so purchased more underwear.
I didn't get all that far out of town when the battery voltage dropped below critical for the pumps. I got out the generator and as I was standing next to it I made an interesting discovery. I learned that this 10 amp DC charger has a circuit breaker that has been breaking the charge current after about 15 seconds of trying to charge the battery. This sucks! I have to wait for about 3 minutes for the breaker to cool down enough to be reset for another 15 seconds of charging. So all that time I thought I was charging the battery I wasn't. It took me 2 generator stops of frequently resetting the breaker to get into needles. I stopped at a service shop to have them put a commercial charger on the battery. Need I mention that the temperature inside my LR was reading 120 degrees F. About 5 PM, I tried a run West only to have vapor lock problems less that 5 miles out of town. I turned back and found a camp site for the night with an outlet to keep the rear battery charged and the food cold. I sat up camp,stood in the sprinklers and have been drinking iced orange juice. As I type, it a a little after 6 PM and the inside Land R0ver temperature has finally dropped to 99 degrees. A far cry from my end of December visits. This temperature is with the top erected, the roof vent open, both doors open, scuttle vents open, tailgate dropped and my 12V van mounted at the rear door switched on high speed (connected to the rear circuit that is on mains power). These doesn't seem to be an auto parts store in Needles so I have no excuse to fiddle about in the morning. My plan is to miss tea & breakfast and be on the road as soon as it gets light enough to drive without lights. The hope is to get at least to Barstow and purchase a battery charger to use with the 120V circuit on the generator. My original plan was to get home between the first and fifth of October. Tonight is the 29th. Usually home is a very long day's drive. I hope I make it by the fifth. I have a lot of hot country to travel through.
Day 26: Needles to Tahachipi
I was told it would be light enough to drive by 6:30 AM. I thought that since I tend to get up around 5ish I could make first light. Of course this is the day I slept in until quarter after six. No tea, no breakfast, just break camp and load the stuff into the back of the LR. I hate to admit it, but even without taking the time morning grooming and to put on sunscreen it still takes me at least 30 minutes from wake up to being on the move when I try to rush. During the night it had cooled down to 70 degrees A common summer high where I live. Actually most of the summer it doesn't get that hot. Considering how long the battery has been lasting I decided my goal would be to make Barstow. That's about how long the battery charge lasted. I purchased a battery charger there to use with the generator. I gave the battery an hour charge in Barstow and another one at the rest stop a little East of Mojave. That got me into the town of Tahachipi where I got another hour charge and a banana split. It was heading towards dust so I decided to settle into a camp ground for the night hoping to let the battery charge all night.
I got to a private RV campground and soon after I parked I got thrown out. The owner said that my Land Rover was not the kind of vehicle that she lets stay in her RV park. It wasn't up to her standards & would be an eyesore. She was driving a new Hummer2 so it may have been just a hummer owner sort of thing. I ended up in a sparsely populated campground next to a lake and have been listening to the lake birds talking among themselves as dark hit. A MUCH better place to stay then where I first stopped. I have both batteries on their own charger for overnight. Who knows, maybe I'll make it home tomorrow, It stopped being fun when the charging troubles became my primary focus and I decided to head straight home from Flagstaff instead of North to revisit some more ruins. I'm ready to hit home and starting replacing the main battery cables and systematically going through the electrical system. When I find the problem I'll try to remember to ad an addendum to let you know what it was.
Day 27: Tahachipi to home
With the battery charged to 100% and a lot of time driving at or close to 75 MPH to get in as many miles as possible before the battery discharged I made it home around 3:30ish PM. For the first time I cut a trip short and felt relieved when pulling into the driveway. I had originally planned to be out another 4 to 5 days. The stress of bringing home a crippled vehicle is lifted and now I can go after the problems with all my tools and supplies and the leisure to open things up and not have to have the vehicle on the road within a couple hours. I also intend to patch a few little nagging problems while I'm at it to bring my vehicle back into top shape.
I have started unloading and have my first load of laundry going. How would I judge this trip? Maybe it is to early to put it into proper perspective.
Addendum, one month later
A month has gone by now. I started getting cabin fever about 2 weeks after I got home. Wanting to be out on the trail again. This time up the coast for a completely different experience.
It took me a while to find the charging problem. I replaced all the primary battery, starting and charging wiring to no avail. I replaced the starter solenoid that sits right behind the header on the thought that there might be a high resistance short. Enough to draw a fair amount of current but not enough to turn the starter motor. I separated as much of the vehicle electrics from the charging circuit as I could, connecting the EFI electrics to the rear battery and disconnecting the front and rear batteries. Still no luck. It appears that the problem was a poor alternator ground. My alternator is grounded through its mounting bolts. Evidently part way along the trip there was enough lube, dirt & other substances to degrade the electrical connection enough to keep the alternator from kicking in. And I exacerbated it by switching to a different alternator designed for a newer vehicle. The new alternator is metric. The bottom mounting hole is sized for a slightly larger diameter metric bolt. So my dirty old bolt had even less contact with the alternator. Amazing what a new properly sized metric bolt can do. I'm going to add a ground wire from the alternator ground lug to the frame to make sure this doesn't happen again. This sure didn't occur to me earlier. I've had a Delco alternator in my Land Rover for about 25 years without a separate ground connection nor an alternator ground path problem. I've seen hundreds of these Delco conversions and have never noticed one with a ground wire. To my mind, a good ground connection through the mounting hardware was a given. Not anymore.
I have not yet got my engine mount moved so I can reinstall my old cast iron exhaust manifolds. I decided to chase all electric gremlins out of the system first. Along the trip I noticed first one then the other rear turn signal lamp stop working. The fronts were working, I had good connections at the instrument panel area and the lamp bulbs were good. The problem was the circuitry somewhere in the rear harness. This is a harness that had been tapped into several times for ad-hoc trailer light connections and had been cut & spliced 30 years ago when I moved the rear lights back into their proper locations. I decided to replace the rear harness when I got home. I ended up replacing the rear harness and the rear light assemblies. Even the license plate was deeply coated in corrosion. White and green depending upon the metal and reaching into the space between the wire and connector. One of the turn signals had failed because the ground connection within the lamp socket had broken off. The other because a trailer splice broke the wire conductor. While I was replacing the rear lighting I decided to go ahead and install a rear fog lamp that I had purchased new 12 years ago.
All the furniture to the rear of the wardrobes needed to be removed to gain access to the tail light area, so the cabinets are in the process of being refinished. They had lost a lot of paint chips during the last 10 years exposing bare metal.
It has been 11 or 12 years since I last replaced the window channels in my rear side sliding windows. They badly need replacing. Since the furniture has been moved away from the windows, this seems like a good time to replace the channels as well. I often forget how long it has been since I replaced something so don't inspect it because I had already replaced it. I have to remember a lot of that stuff was replaced 10 to 30 years ago and not a couple years ago.
My master brake cylinder developed a slow leak around Bryce. I replaced it right away after returning from this trip. Money to buy parts & for the labor of moving the engine mounts & re-plumbing the front of the exhaust is a gating factor determining how quickly everything gets fixed. With luck I'll have both major problems addressed and the little things taken care of by the end of November. I wonder if it is too early to start planning another trip?
Addendum, one and a half months after the trip
The frame engine mounts have been relocated and cast iron exhaust manifolds have been placed back in my Land Rover. Putting steel exhaust headers in a tight engine compartment was a costly mistake. The new rear harness has been finished. I ended up putting all new lamp assemblies in the rear. The rear fog lamp has been installed along with a new switch on the instrument panel. I should be a lot easier to see from the rear in a fog. I went ahead and wired in a new trailer harness to keep rental folks from splicing into my new rear harness.
I ended up repainting all the rear area furniture while everything was out. It was showing 11 years of hard use and having the spare tyre in the back during this last trip didn't help. Hammerite paint needs 10 days from spray to full cure. I want to touch up a corner of one of the wardrobes & the lid of the refrigerator. While the rear interior is out I have access to the rear side sliding window hardware for the first time in 11 years. I've decided to take this opportunity and renew the sliding tracks. With luck they won't be accessible for at least another 11 years, hopefully longer.
I took delivery of new Defender front door seals a couple days ago. They will soon find their way onto my Land Rover. I installed new genuine Land Rover door seals back in '96 and never got a good leak & dust resistant seal out of them. I've been thinking about converting to the new style door seals for about 10 years now. Since I seem to be in a fix & upgrade everything mode and winter is coming, I thought this would be a good time to actually do it. I always seem to be a lot more energetic about maintenance & upgrades during and right after a long trip. Especially if something doesn't work as it should during the trip.
I'm still on track to have everything fixed/ renewed/ upgraded by the end of November. I should be able to get in a short semi-local weekend trip in during December but I don't think I'll be able to afford more of a trip than that. Those repairs & upgrades took a hefty bight out of my reserves.
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