My F-350 is a pure work truck, with few concessions to comfort. The bench seat probably wasn't great when it was new 20 years ago and it hasn't gotten any better. On occasion I'm in that seat 10-12 hours a day. Can anyone suggest a seat cushion that isn't so thick I'm bumping my head on the ceiling or sliding off the side, that still provides enough cushioning to spare my butt and my back?
I just got this 2018 Jayco toy hauler last weekend and this weekend I had a rare run of good luck with repairs. I finished the two top items on my repair list (and several lesser items) faster than expected and without having to even make a trip to the hardware store.
The first issue was that one of the dinette benches, on a Happijac bed lift system, had been seriously overloaded at some point, which bent up the pins that hold it in the proper position and also damaged the brackets they sit in. I pressed the old pins out, fixed the slightly bent part of the bracket, found some suitable 3/8" steel rod, cut some new pins, pressed them in with the arbor press, and welded them in place. Even had suitable paint on hand. For the brackets, I had to add some metal with a MIG welder and used a die grinder to get the right profile.
The folding step had been seriously tweaked by a collision at some point. The top step had broken all but one rivet and one of the pivot joints was gone. I got the whole thing unbolted from the trailer, drilled out the old rivets and broken joint, beat on some things with a hammer, and finally had to break out the hydraulic frame straightening kit to force everything back into roughly the right place.
I had the right pop rivets to put the top step back on, and found everything I needed to make a substitute for the riveted pivot joint - a 5/16" shoulder bolt, washers, lock nut, and plastic washer. The step is a little stiff to fold up but it's 100% usable.
The roof access ladder had also had its lowest rung bent out of shape. The easy fix was to just take the plastic caps off the bottoms of the tubes that make up the sides of the ladder, shove a slightly smaller steel pipe in there to use as a lever to straighten each tube, and then hammer the steel pipe in to fix the crimp in the ladder tubes.
I can't remember the last time I had a project weekend that was as productive and didn't require any hardware store trips or McMaster-Carr orders. This is about as satisfying as DIY RV repairs gets.
This is part of a bench support for the dinette in an RV. It was apparently overloaded at some point and these knurled captive pins on both brackets got bent out of shape. I've gotten one of them out. The other side is a button head, and I'm assuming this was installed with a press.
I haven't been able to find a replacement on McMaster-Carr, I'm not sure if the hole is still in shape to take a replacement, and I'm not sure of the ability of my little press to install one so I'm thinking I'll probably just weld something in.
Are there unthreaded weld-in pins that will do what I want? What should I be searching for? It looks like I could cut off the end of a 3/8" bolt with an unthreaded shoulder and weld the head on but I feel like there must be a proper part for this.
I've only ever met about three other burners out of ~140,000 people in this valley, but every couple of years I like to check to see if any others have popped up.
I'm one of those people who's gone enough times that preparation is fairly routine; I just go down my 600-item packing list, spend 20-40 hours tearing down and rebuilding the art car and fixing up other projects and equipment that broke last time, and I'm ready to go. This year will be more involved because I'm fixing up a new-to-me trailer.
I've also got plenty of shop space to spare, and maybe even extra room to transport stuff between the flatbed truck and the new toy hauler, so if you've got some art project in mind you've been wanting to build but didn't have a place to do it, didn't have the right tools, or didn't have a way to get it there, hit me up. The ticket scarcity days are over, the Instagram influencers seem to be thinning out, and it's time to make it about weird art and dangerous things to climb on again.
I got my first EHT150 through Vine a couple of years ago. It's now the only product I've filed two CPSC incident reports for.
The first unit was operating on concrete in my shop. I walked past it and bumped it with my foot. It has a tip-over safety switch that uses a protruding button on the bottom, and the rocking of the bumped heater caused the switch to open and close rapidly and caused arcing that completely melted the switch.
Ecowell sent me a replacement, which I've been using on office carpet, off to the side where it can't get kicked. But now there's a new issue - twice (that I'm aware of) the heater has simply turned on its heating element with no warning and no indication it's running, and critically without the fan running.
Both times I've located it by smell. The first time I thought maybe I'd done something to it and figured I'd just keep a close eye on it. This time the burning smell was worse and I didn't realize what was happening until the heater started to make a buzzing noise. I was sitting near it the whole time and I'm 100% certain I didn't bump it or touch any controls.