Not much has changed on the Jeep recently, except some needed maintenance to the roof rack and rear bumper. The roof rack uprights were showing signs of rust, with some pitting on the front ones. And the paint on one corner of the rear bumper was starting to bubble as well. So, a little sanding and painting took care of it for now. I'm happy to report that my under-hood air compressor can drive a grinder for short bursts, which is long enough to grind away pitted rusting steel.
On the trailer side of things... I've been working on an Australian-style stone guard (mostly to protect the fridge from dust, etc.), that involves several components. I plan on stretching a thick canvas cloth over the fridge and out to the corners, closing the bottom gaps as well. I added some extra insulation beneath the fridge cover so the stretched canvas doesn't crush it too much. Then I also added some front mud guards. Everything is done, except for the canvas stone guard.
Here's picture of the front mud guards. The center one actually continues up behind the fridge, to keep dust from making it's way between it and the spare tire.
You can't see the extra foam insulation for the fridge because it's under that blue cover.
You can make out the (three per side) canvas tie-down points though, but it might be difficult to visualize the design just from this. You can also see the new LED side-markers. I chose ones with a protective stainless steel cover (goes around top, back, and bottom) to protect the marker from hits on the trail etc. They came with a foam backing, which I suspected was to protect the wires from the too-small opening behind it, so I tossed it and drilled the hole bigger.
I also replaced the rear tail-lights with LED models -- an easy swap on those. At the same time I ordered several different waterproof LED light bars for interior and exterior camp lighting, but the installation of these (and in fact re-wiring the whole trailer), will probably wait until this winter (around November up here)...
The hot water unit (an OME 506) was mounted within a stainless steel box, with a lid that flipped back when in use. The lid would interfere with the opening of some storage space behind it, so I decided to add a gas strut. Oh what a can o' worms that was! The unit itself isn't made to be used outdoors, and several screws (yes, screws, not bolts) were starting to rust within the unit. We replaced those with proper bolts and installed nutserts (aka rivnuts) in several places. The unit was also riveted within it's stainless steel box, so we changed all that to bolts. Finally we had the unit together with the gas strut, etc., and tested it out. We found a minor leak. It looked like it was coming from the valve manifold, so we took the whole thing apart, tried various techniques to enhance the seals, but it just got worse. Finally we found that the problem was a 1" crack in the manifold! Luckily it's made of brass, so a little silver solder did the trick - at least for now. Here are the guts of the machine after we fixed it.
I also found a ground wire that was about to go, and another wire that had been nicked and taped. I fixed both (properly with solder and heat shrink tubing) and extended the original wires to re-located the battery box (two D cell batteries) and switch. The battery mount was particularly sad - a thin piece of stamped steel held on by metal screws. We decided to do better, so made a mount from aluminum angle iron in which we cut some holes for the battery holder and switch. So, lots of work for something seemingly simple at first.
Next on the list for this winter is a second group-34 12v battery, re-wiring the whole trailer (with full-length ground wires), changing all the storage and kitchen lights by LED bars, and running some 12v power up into the tent for lighting as well.
js.
