Today is a reminder that this blog is not strictly for entertainment, but to share and maybe even teach new things. So we talk about the camper wiring. I bought the trailer lights at Harbor Freight, hoping the LEDs would draw so little power that I could run the off the Honda. No such luck. That’s been covered here, including the solar panels to be installed for keeping the camper charged up. We found another problem this morning. Trailer lights are designed to work off a harness that connects independently to a vehicle left and right brake lights.
Shown here is the control panel for the camper turn signals, tail lights, and brake lights. The knife or throw switch is incoming juice from the battery that is charged up by the solar panels (not shown). This setup duplicates the “logic” that operates the lighting system on the batbike. This was an exercise, I could have done the same thing programming an Arduino for about the same cost. But that would have been too easy for me.
To those who say never stop learning, you should undertake the study of batteries. More specifically the performance and recharging characteristics of batteries. The more I find out, the less I like these things. The entire industry is a mess, right from the way they build ‘em, to sell ‘em, and dispose of them. It smells of a racket from the word go. I dedicated today to iron out the last of the electrical problems, or I should use the word foibles and I’m so happy I designed the system to bypass the DC circuitry when AC is available.
One area I focused on, and read this for your own potential safety, was the use of a battery charger. Beware that the instructions that come with these contraptions is incomplete and could put you in harm’s way. As examples, when they tell you that batteries produce poisonous and explosive gasses, I’ll bet they didn’t tell you the cause is leaving a battery charger connected too long, or over-voltage. I mentioned this can “boil” your battery acid and that is the real cause of the out-gassing. There may be other causes, but that is certainly the main one.
My advice is charge the battery outdoors in a dry, shaded location and never for more than an hour without checking. The stupid “amp meter” thingee on the front of most chargers is a bad joke from a sick-minded engineer. You want to charge until the amps decrease, not increase. I have never yet seen a battery instruction manual spell that out. The average man wants maximum amps, not minimum. If I was civic-minded, I’d write a booklet on this stuff. But I’m kind of busy this century.
I took the evening off to relax. That means Karaoke, where the new bartender and I don’t see eye-to-eye. We are not enemies or anything like that, but he is the bass player who has such a severe case of guitaritis, he doesn't even know it. That is the terminal stage of the condition, when a guitarist is so far off his own deep end he thinks he cannot possibly be wrong. He plays only bass lines to music that has intense guitar parts and likes all the guitar standards. He even plays bass like a guitar player. The abrasion between us is minor, but he is uncomfortable with any viewpoint that his take on good bass playing could even be questioned, much less analyzed and joked about.
It kind of started between us when he realized I had terms for everything he said or did concerning bass that would border, just barely, on derogatory to a guitar player who switched to bass. He denies being a guitar player, but if that were true, he would not act and think like one. But I’ve dealt with such individuals for decades, and frankly, no, I don’t like their attitudes any more than they like mine. I do not view the bass as an adjunct to the guitar, but as an instrument in its own right that should be played that way. I doubt the guy could do what I can—entertain a room for hours with just the bass.
Don’t get me wrong. He could entertain them for a few minutes. By doing a guitar-like “bass solo” of rapid-fire upper fretwork of pattern riffs which would dazzle another guitarist. Which is precisely how a guitarist thinks. And that is what I’m talking about.
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
