It is always something....

I was gone all day this past Saturday and only left the 6500 btu window AC unit running.  With the temps here in Texas close to the century mark, I knew the Old Girl was gonna be hot when I got home.

I was right about that!  The inside thermometer read 94 degrees when I poked my head inside the door.  Regular readers will know that I only have 30 amps available here in Calvert and because of that I can only run one of the rooftop AC units at a time.  Even with the assistance of the window AC unit, it still takes time to cool off the inside of the Fish Bus.

So the smart thing to do was fire up the Generac propane generator and run both rooftop AC units and the window unit to cool the innards of the Old Girl.  After all, it had been awhile since I had exercised the generator so this would work out perfect.  I pushed the dash start switch and the generator immediately roared to life …. and then it ran wild!   Wide open throttle screaming away!  WTF???  I shut it down quickly and then re-fired it with the same results.   Well, you know it is always something.  I just had to figure out what the problem was.

I took the front cover off and started the diagnoses.  I had a hammer and gently tapped the regulator.  Obviously

The problem discovered

the problem was not with the generator starting and  running but with the fuel metering or fuel system. Not successful. Now I pushed the Stetson back on my head for some good old head scratching. What could it be?? Once more I traced the fuel lines and when I peered behind the oil filter, I saw the problem. It was my old nemesis again — the dastardly Dirt Daubers! The had built a nest right over the throttle linkage.  That explained why it was running wide open and would not settle down to the normal rpms.   It was a quick fix to knock that mud nest off the linkage and get the generator running.

And while we are on the subject of it always being something….. I know alot of you enjoy my End Notes and I enjoy listening to my Zune whenever I get a chance.  Lotso music equals big hard drives and it wasn’t long before the hard drive on my laptop was groaning under the load.  So I bought a 500 gig LaCie so all my music files could live there.   I bought the LaCie drive because my daughter said the Air Force uses them and they passed some stringent DoD testing and were built to survive a fall from 4 meters or something like that.

Well, all I gotta say is the LaCie drive failed the Fall-Off-The-Dinette-Table-in-the-Fishbus test.  It scrambled its’ little brains or something.  I mean all the stuff is still there but LaCie can find it sometimes -and sometimes not.  So I have reformatted it about 4 times and checked the bad clusters and all that computer nerd stuff and it still suffered from some kind of  branio infarction.  I am gonna give up on it and send it back to LaCie.  And then today after lunch, I fired the Zune up and got ready to push some dirt.  Only one earbud was working and then it started losing songs.  I took the rubber case off of it tonight while I was watching the Evening News and it was pretty disgusting.  Sand and grit and red dirt and lint boogers.  Looks like the Zune has a branio infarction as well.  It is sitting on the corner of the table now – the screen flashes on and off weakly because I cannot turn it off.  Reminds me of a dying lightning bug. I guess the battery will run down in a day or so. Luckily it is still under warranty and Microsoft has already told me to send it back in to them.

So for the time being, no more End Notes, no more passing the time listening to music while I push dirt — just pretty much sucks.