RE: Lance truck campers TPO Nose construction
....we've got a TPO roofing membrane stretched over an aluminum roofing frame, on the Outfitter. TPO is indeed extremely resistant to tearing, impact and incoming ultra violet radiation (in fact, TPO loves UV; it thrives under UV radiation).
Thanks for the video link!
Silver-
RE: New Lance, Refused Delivery; Your Opinions Please
"I walked away from the deal based on non disclosure of a structural defect or damage, the dealer is not returning my deposit."
....this is Canada. No one can simply "keep" a deposit if a buyer decides to back out of a purchase for any reason whatsoever. If you, for example, went to buy a new or used car, an aircraft, boat, refrigerator, insurance, ANYTHING, and gave a deposit for later delivery in this country (Provincial laws vary, but they are essentially the same cross-country in principle/intent), and you decide to back out of the deal FOR ANY REASON, you deposit MUST be given back IMMEDIATELY. Even signing a contract, you have a cooling off period where you can back out of the deal NO MATTER WHAT THE REASON. No lawyer needed.
Forensics on "the roof depression":
Sabconsulting nailed it: this depression likely existed for many seasons (or, years) based on his evaluation of the concentric evaporation stains.
RE: a few roof repairs
Thanks Cal!
You could PM me the chap's contact info. If I decide to go this way, or:
I have a CNC shop near us that could laser-shoot a precise 3D model of the cap, and quickly mill out the corners for us using any metal I desire (this would incapacitate our rig for some x time, so I would do this over winter storage IF I go this route).
Stainless:
....yes, the torque and stress on the stainless screw application vis the awning on Outfitter would pose no problems overstressing the screw (this includes potential shear).
Cheers,
S-
RE: a few roof repairs
Nice repair/upgrades Cal!
Where (and what part number) were you able to get the nice aluminum radius corners ?
Also, thanks for the heads-up on rear roof-mounted awning screws. I'll check ours later today for rusty screws, and replace with stainless. If the rear awning ever flew off the rear of our roof on our crowded Eastern highways, it could potentially kill someone driving behind.
Cheers,
Silver-
RE: Trip Report: Weekend in Tucson
Mike:
Reading through and seeing your great photos reminds me when we last had anything close to warm weather here (8 months ago!).
Fabulous photos and great write-up!
Cheers,
Silver-
*$3.26 a gallon for gas?? We're at $5.52 a gallon here (this is converted to US gallons, US dollar)-- and this has been the lowest price we've seen since last September!
RE: Owning Beach Property!
....just a quick Ejido lesson:
This is "communal land", used for farming. Ejidos date back to (ya better sit down) the days of the Aztec Empire and ancient Maya (in Mexico and Central America). Virtually all land in Mexico not under a Federal building, was (is) ejido.
During NAFTA (North American Free Trade agreement), Salinas de Gortari (the president in power when I was living in Mexico) killed the constitutional rights to ejidos (so, no more ejido protections exist after 1991; additionally, ejidos started becoming privatized en mass, and owned by Mexicans, foreigners, and corporations, both domestic/Mexican and foreign-controlled).
....but the problems started in the 1980s and 1990s in the Chiapas region, when Mexican industrial development started walking all over ancient ejidos (logging and oil extraction) held by various Maya groups throughout the Lacondon jungle; and the precise day and time the NAFTA agreement in Mexico actually took effect (1st of January, 1994), the EZLN (Zapitista Army) mobilized, and took "control" of large areas of Chiapas' indigenous regions...yada, yada. Funny thing, I interviewed Trudy Blom, at Na Bolom, on my tape recorder, in San Christobal d LC, just months before the Zapatista take-over of that part of Chiapas, and some things she said, now in retrospect, should have clued me in to the impending "war".
More recently in Mexico (2005 onward), the PROCEDE operations will eventually lead to the total obliteration of Mexico's rural land registry for communal property system....but not without a fight from the indigenous populations of Mexico (and all the other Latin American countries this is going on in!). So, a huge geographical information system (GIS) traditional land use inventory is being done (a multi-disciplinary international university-led project) from Mexico to Argentina, mapping traditional indigenous knowledge, to establish (like massive land surveys) which indigenous groups use which lands (ejidos) and for what purpose, and since how long (centuries, millennial)...I was involved in some of this mapping in Latin America (and abroad, in Indonesia).
If you are looking at buying lands in Mexico (or, any Latin American Republic), read between the lines, and you better really understand the recent, decadal and centurial land use histories of the land you plan on buying, or you may end up in the middle of a revolución :B
...now, back to the regularly scheduled program...
Silver-
RE: Automotive GPS suggestion
Hi Bugs:
Make sure you buy a micro-sd storage card for your map updates, and plug it into your new GPS (if your new Garmin didn't come with one) ! An 8 gig micro-sd card is around $19 on-line...
S-
RE: Tampa to Calica rumor.
I'm on Bruce Nierenberg's mailing list (managed by Tamara Magnusson).
I get regular updates on the Tampa/Progreso automobile ferry situation, from Bruce.
My last update was just a few weeks ago (in March). Here is the latest:
Its taken much longer than I had hoped it would as a result of many things International that are out of my control.
But I feel we are getting to the finish line and will be establishing the start date soon.
I know you all plan as far in advance as possible so while I wont have the start date for awhile let me give you and your friends down there some info as to what they should be planning.
1. The ferry will not start until 2014.
2. It is being targeted for a winter start hopefully by February.
There is no way we'd ever drive to Mexico (we're only interested in Mexico's deep southern regions, for culture and warmth) "...the long way..." from the Northeast. The cost of fuel and wear-&-tear on the rig would be absolutely ridiculous (in the long run, it would be cheaper to buy a place in the Bahamas to escape winter, and fly there for nearly nothing from the old Plattsburgh Air Force base/now jet-port 45 minutes from us, compared with the hellacious drive to the Yucatan & back from Quebec every winter!). So we've got our fingers crossed for the Tampa thang...
S-
RE: Another new one (Hallmark)
I remember my hunting buddy that was a rocket scientist at Lockheed Martin checking out my first Hallmark pop up. He was looking for hidden cables or supports...
That's really funny your hunting buddy mentions "hidden cables..." in the cabover design.
The Frank Lloyd house with balcony overhanging a river (Fallingwater) went through a MAJOR repair to correct a structural defect: the balcony jutting out over the river/waterfall (like a cabover) wasn't built correctly, and sagged. The structural repair was a series of steel tensioning cables, that lifted the sagging balcony. To maintain proper tension, a computer-controlled tensioner operates 24/7/365 monitoring the balcony stability/tilt :B
Anyhow, using today's FEA structural analytical software, and plugging in various materials (composites, or combinations of materials making up for example, a sidewall buildup of a pop-up truck camper cabover member), you can place any and every load (static or dynamic) range imaginable on the assembly, at varying shock moments and determine precisely the structural makeup needed for the job. Absolutely NO guess work.
As an earlier Poster mentions: the fly in the ointment is: if the structural side wall is modified in ANY way (by glue losing adhesion; statc or dynamic loads exceeding design; etc...), then some kind of failure can occur...
RE: Automotive GPS suggestion
Heck, it's enough that people using consumer GPS even know how to input an address in a lot of cases!
...true enough...I was just hoping to broaden the average user's possibilities, and for those enthusiasts, make links to (potentially) additional sources of GPS data... :)
As I mentioned in my first post: TomTom makes great GPS units (as does Magellan). Like the previous Poster suggested: go to a GPS vender (hopefully they really know their product well!), and tell them precisely what you expect from a GPS, and let the vender staff show you (really hands on) the process...
RE: Automotive GPS suggestion
Woodglue:
There are (no cost) converters that convert GPX (waypoint) files into OV2 TomTom files (an example here--> ). Additionally, you could convert any GPX exchange file to an CSV file, then use a limited number of CSV to OV2 no cost software to do the work (or, buy a commercial GPX to OV2 converter directly). However(!), the whole raison d'etre to owning a GPS (these days) is to acquire open-source and shared GPS files as NATIVE exchange files, without the need to be throwing money at needed navigation product every year (or, if you plan on driving through another country, like Canada or Mexico, obtaining the entire Open Maps (OSM) IMG file of the entire foreign country of interest, and ingesting it directly into the GPS without convolution).
Propriety means 2 things in the GPS industry:
1)the software package(s) sold by GPS mapping providers for any given GPS are "proprietary" products;
2)the file format itself used by each GPS manufacturer is proprietary (the waypoint, line, route, and polygon layers structure in any GPS, for example).
So, yes, there s a round-about work around to ingest "shared" GPX waypoints into TomTom. The issue with TomTom is the ease (and proliferation) of any software out there (free or not) to convert the World's most drawn upon source for GPS map layers: Open Street Maps (OSM) data-- lines, polygons, IMG files, or others. In the words of OSM themselves:
"Though TomTom's mapping format is a closely guarded secret, both for copy protection and because if you knew how they stored the maps, they would be giving away a lot of their navigation secrets. As a result there is no software to allow OSM mapping to be converted to the format the TomTom app uses, and unlikely to be any unless TomTom themselves make it."
So, to easily grab OSM data like trails/line vectors and the big one: IMG files of a foreign country you want to use your GPS in, like Mexico, is problematic (you can try experimenting with TomTom Open PixelMap TTOPM) on the World's largest repository of GPS data for every country on Earth: CloudMade here-->. The *Open-TomTom* development community is diverse and active, so I don't see any of the mapping format issues being insurmountable-- over time.
There are efforts to accomplish this, like Linux add-ons (modules) to TomTom's operating system (eg. Navit on TomTom: TomTom is linux closed-source, running on an ARM processor, with several GPL open-source modules). The following are some software projects using original TT Navigator at the Open-Tom community portal, here-->.
Answering your question: waypoints being the only GPS product practical for consumer users...: wayponts are only a fraction of the GPS navigation product available to the consumer user. Avid users of GPS units use many diverse navigation layers, including but not exclusively: GeoTIFF, GeoJPEG, IMG, polygon, line, GPX (actually, NATIVE GPX files are usable DIRECTLY in Garmin GPS units without ANY conversion whatsoever!), DEM (digital elevation models), etc, etc, etc, etc, etc...
The two most blatantly obvious advantages of a Garmin GPS over GPS units requiring proprietary file exclusively to be ingested is: Garmin reads OSM IMG and GPX files natively without any convoluted converting necessary. However(!), some enterprising individual at CloudMade is making native OV2 TomTom files available as waypoints only (thank God!).
RE: Automotive GPS suggestion
BTW:
your smart phone (like Galaxy II or III, or iPhone) are excellent GPS units right out of the box. There are ALL KINDS of apps (some free) for Android and iOS out there, and many, many free repositories of GPS campground waypoints, too (and, repositories of free camping sites and boondocking waypoints you can download, and ingest into your GPS). The GPS in my Samsung Galaxy smart phone (Android OS) is absolutely excellent (as good as my Bluetooth GlobalSAT miniature GPS I clip onto and under the brim of my baseball cap, linked directly to my Samsung Android, by a software hack to bypass data link).
RE: Automotive GPS suggestion
The 1st thing to consider when buying a GPS is: cross-data type compatibility!
TomTom is notoriously proprietary, and Magellan is less so (but can be difficult to ingest various free products nonetheless, like open-source IMAGE files for foreign countries (if you want to travel to Mexico for example) from OpenStreetMaps {OSM}, and others). You want ease of ingesting literally all the myriad FREE open-source GPS data types available out there; why limit your data choices to ONE manufacturer's severely proprietary file type?
This said, both TomTom and Magellan make excellent GPS units. I have personally owned Magellan, TomTom, Garmin and Lowrance units, and use (regularly) Trimble professional GPS units (and base stations), costing many, many thousands of dollars. I wouldn't worry about "accuracy" in any of the newer GPS units (anything GPS from about 2011 onward will have extremely sensitive antenna technology integrated right out of the box), so who cares if manufacturer A's GPS is 1.7 meters west of the centerline, while another maker's GPS is 0.6 meters east of the centerline. Each manufacturer has an intelligent "snap-to" line algorithm that snaps your GPS's navigation arrow to the track (road) you program anyway (or, are simply driving along out cruising, with no particular route programmed), so there is little way of telling which GPS is "more accurate" than any other with the snap-to feature permanently on by default in the GPS software.
I personally would suggest you seriously look at the high-end Garmin vehicle GPS units (get a vehicle unit with integrated antenna that can be unseated from the dash-board mount and pocketed for off-road trail work). Garmin GPS units are used by many agencies and academic field research groups; some US agencies (and GPS enthusiasts) have even written software specifically for Garmin GPS units that facilitate interfacing geographical information systems (GIS) file type conversion and loading these right into the Garmin. Example: you could grab the entire TIGER line file roads, points, rivers, Parks (and many many more themes; or even Marine coastal navigation files) DIRECTLY from the US Census Bureau website up to date as of 2013 ( here--> ) in SHAPEFILE format, then using the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources free software: DNSGarmin (I like version 5.4.1) you can download from here-->, you can convert the TIGER LINE files from Census Bureau to GPX files, and up-load the GPX files right into your Garmin (play with DNSGarmin software, it is quite interesting). Or, you can use the Garmin software to do roughly the same...One word of warning: TIGER road/river/city/county/state/point SHAPEFILES can be terabytes !!! So, watch and know your file capacity in your GPS unit!
Silver-
RE: Trip report: Yorkshire Dales, England
Excellent trip report Steve! Its hard to believe that you guys get that much snow on the Island!
The Hoegaarden and Leffe remind me: pick some up tomorrow for the weekend :B
Cheers,
Sand & Dunes
RE: Why so many Dodges than the other big 2?
I would think that how the owner takes care of their vehicle plays a more important roll in wither or not their truck rusts or not.
Its hard to say but generally speaking, if you power-wash the underside of your vehicle periodically during and after a long winter of deicing chemicals, it should stand up to (or better: against) the process of rusting (corrosion).
I did my research in a very methodical way, and simply put, the above were my observations. One thing to make clear: it wasn't that I did not see any rust whatsoever on Ford and GM trucks over my observation time, it was that the Dodge pickups I had observed had noticeably more rust, and the rust had completely perforated most areas. This was worrisome to me.
Travelnutz and I know each other (personally), and I have an absolute implicit trust and confidence in his technical (and, non-technical) writings. I am not at liberty to divulge his credentials in the subject being discussed, however I can say that they are substantial.
Silver-
RE: Why so many Dodges than the other big 2?
Dodge simply uses zinc primer and paint over bare steel for most of their pickups and it rusts quickly especially at door bottoms, wheel openings, and rear box joints etc.
What a timely Post! During the "buy research", one of my missions was to physically go out to known shopping areas where large numbers of full-sized pick-up trucks are parked (always at the back of the parking lots; this makes it easy to do a survey). I checked every parked pick-up for rust over an entire summer, and noted the ratios of Big 3 trucks, and their incidences of rust....
....to make a medium story short: my "field research" showed that Dodge pickups (both HD and 0.5 ton...in model years some as new as 3 years) I had inspected had far and away more rust (especially around wheel-wells and door bottoms) than the Ford and GM trucks of the same years. This I noted in my buying criteria, and eliminated this maker's trucks off my list.
Anyhow, in concluding: is it possible that buyers of used trucks are put off by inordinate quantities of rust on used trucks more than esoteric chronic engine problems of other truck brand(s) less "in your face" visual (and, vehicles in general) ? And, this being the reason why so many Dodge pick-ups (an over ratio) are seen in used vehicle venues/on-line ads/private sales ?
The above were my observations in a northern salt-heavy usage region of North America...so, perhaps your survey mileage may differ by geographic territory...
