Ski Bum Truck V2.0, F450 Rough Road RV

I am so freaking sore. What idiot designed this f***king truck?!?!?!

48" deep, 9" wide.... My wires have to run at the VERY back edge.... Put both arms over your head, shimmy in, brace feet against other wall, breathe out and push.... Ouch. I am not a small person... 

After drilling two holes (because the first one was too small.....) Feed long stiff wire through and try to hit the hole in the upper shelf. Curse repeatedly. But I got it, take one VE direct cable, one power cable, and one ethernet, and hope like hell you can get it back thru the little hole.

Removed the BMV, cut the hole for the Color control, and mounted it.

Remounted the BMV (you need it for the battery calculations, the color control wont talk to the shunt directly....)

And powered it up. No programming. I was exhausted at this point...

Now the annoying part. The color control will not work with the bluetooth dongles.... WTF. I guess I will see if I can return the VE to USB I bought.... Stupid. It will work on wifi.... But you have to use their wifi dongle they like. And that's a sh$$it load more setup. I guess I will try to learn some networking..... If I can get on the house wifi from where the truck is parked that might be cool though.... Remote data logging is possible I guess. More to learn.

Rolled in late Friday night, nuking snow! Ending up with 7-8" and it kept snowing all day.

Snow was amazing. We skied. A lot.

Fun little cornice to drop off of. 

Saturday was gorgeous weather, so we skied then too.

And I learned more new things..... With the truck now charging at higher voltages for the cold temps, the maxfans now turn off. They have a high voltage cutout..... I will need a resistor or some sort of DC-DC voltage regulator.

I'm certain this is in the thread somewhere but I don't know how to search with any accuracy, can you tell me what your heater setup is? As I understand it, propane heaters don't like to work above a certain altitude (6-7,000' or so if I'm not mistaken?)

In reply to artur1808 :

It's a diesel heater. But an old one, it Also doesn't altitude correct. So I run kerosene as it burns much cleaner than diesel. It's an airtop 3500 

Is all your Victron stuff talking to each other now?  That is one of the major selling points to me is that they all work together, as well as being high quality.  

In reply to Petrolburner :

Yes they talk to each other well. The color control is wifi only which is annoying.... The new cerberus looks interesting.

But the basics, temp, voltage, charge profile, are shared between all units. And the Victron stuff is great quality. 

java230 said:

In reply to Petrolburner :

The color control is wifi only which is annoying.

What effect does that have? 

In reply to Petrolburner :

The phone interface was very good via Bluetooth. The phone interface for the color control really sucks

Well it seems that the Corona virus has killed the rest of the ski season.

But we did get two more days in in Idaho.

Spent Friday night social distancing ourselves..... this is one of our normal climbing spots, weird to see it in snow.

Heading East on Saturday, it was windy, windy enough to be spinning the tractor trailers around and shoving them in the ditch. We passed 8 that were aiming the wroing way and jacknifed. I am SO happy with our trucks performance, I could tell it was windy, but it wasn't shoving us around at all. I think the articulation just killed the semis. It was super icy too. Long stretch of 35 in a 70 zone....

But we made it over to Sandpoint ID just fine.

It was certainly beautiful, but 9 degrees, and REALLY windy. 

Ski in ski out lodging!

And overall it was a really good year. We got a ton of great snow days. Ignore the speed since I forgot to turn the tracker off one day..... But thats a good year! The speed from last year is my personal best though :D

Hey Java, looks like a pretty darn good year of skiing to me!  Love pics, and updates.  Question, what's the parking deal at resorts out west?  Do they charge you to park and camp?  Or do you just roll in, park, camp, buy ticket and ski?  Just curious.  I am finishing a box truck to camper and have used it a hand full of times for day trips to our local resort, 7 Springs, here in Pa.  Haven't had the opportunity to stay overnight in the resort with it yet.  But that is the plan.  I asked a bunch of people in the resort(that I thought should know) about rv camping in one of the parking lots, and no one knew...  Oh well.  I'll try it next season and see what happens.  

Thanks for all the great pics!

Paul

paulmpetrun said:

Hey Java, looks like a pretty darn good year of skiing to me!  Love pics, and updates.  Question, what's the parking deal at resorts out west?  Do they charge you to park and camp?  Or do you just roll in, park, camp, buy ticket and ski?  Just curious.  I am finishing a box truck to camper and have used it a hand full of times for day trips to our local resort, 7 Springs, here in Pa.  Haven't had the opportunity to stay overnight in the resort with it yet.  But that is the plan.  I asked a bunch of people in the resort(that I thought should know) about rv camping in one of the parking lots, and no one knew...  Oh well.  I'll try it next season and see what happens.  

Thanks for all the great pics!

Paul

 

It totally varies by the resort. Vail owned ones are no go..... Many others are ok though. Yes usually they charge a fee, Schweitzer (last weekend) is supposedly $20, but no one ever came to collect. Baker is $10 now and they will come get it. Crystal is designated hook up sites and $$ etc. Many other BC places are free, they just want you in a specific spot. Really depends.... If the parking lot people don't know, park in an out of the way corner and see what happens :D watch for boots.....

What a difference a week makes! Same place without the snow, and 65 and sunny. Absolutely gorgeous spring weather.

Nice to be out on the rocks again.

And I was wrong on the Victron inverter, if you leave it in charger only mode, it will pass the shore power AC through. It just takes 5-10 seconds or so for it to kick in and do it.

Tire experts? 

Cuz holy BERK. They are at 80psi still

WTF?!?!  Those are practically new tires aren't they?

In reply to Petrolburner :

In use yes, 7years old by date stamp 

That's impressive- bead clamped at an angle or something?  Maybe just a manufacturing defect?

In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

The bead angle has been mentioned by a few people, MVT vs MPT? Idk yet....

Comments below apply to passenger tires, and *should* apply to tires like yours.

Bead area separations like that *usually* initiate from the inside of the lower sidewall where the ply cords are, and propogate towards the outside of the tire. Every time the tire rolls, the sidewall ply cords go from tension to compression and back to tension. That can be made worse by clamping the bead at an unexpected angle (mentioned above), ply fabric endings in that area (think stress concentration), or an improperly built tire (buckled ply cords, etc).

Do NOT drive on that tire. I would want to deflate the tire to relieve the 80 psi, but I don't want to be anywhere near that tire. More detailed pictures of inside that crack would be helpful, but again - I wouldn't want to be close to it with the air pressure still inside.

In reply to collinskl1 :

I let all the air out. Crack stayed the same size (or really close). It must be something with the bead shape and or clamping???

I will pull the wheels apart when I get a chance, I want to see the inside.

From someone else who bought these same tires, here is what I expect to see inside. Could the height/thickness of the insert be causing the tire to flex further into the sidewall instead of down towards the bead more?

OK my thinking is saying the insert is causing the sidewall to flex more, rather than being able to rotate at the bead. Apparently its common for alu semi wheels to wear the beads out from this. I can see cracking if the tires are designed with that in mind. 

Hopefully someone from Toyo will get back to me.

Talked to Hutchinson, They had no real ideas. The only piece of info I got was that if they were a military order they would not have a Toyo Tire. Michelin Multi D would have been on them. They are a standard 19.5 so I cant imagine the beads are different, but maybe?

He said If I can get them open and find the part number on the runflat, he will try to see if it is compatible with the Toyo's, but I need the tire info also.

This is all very strange.....

Talked to another guy running these, not getting the insert out wiht sawzall.... Not sure I want to run without them. I mean standard 19.5 have no internal saftey bead, but I am not 100% sure what the bead profile on these wheels is.....

Well I am very surprised. Toyo tech/customer support would not even talk to me about it. They said take them to your place of purchase for diagnosis... Helpful. Wouldn't even listen to what I had to say. They have a 5.5 year warranty FWIW 

That's pretty typical for the warranty process. Take them to the store, the store will credit or not, then the tires will go back to HQ for inspection, diagnosis, etc.

In reply to collinskl1 :

I wasn't trying to get a warranty. I got them second hand, and they are past the warranty period anyway. 

I called tech support, I was hoping to discuss and try to see if they had any insight as to what caused teh failure. They should have more knowledge about their own tires and construction than anyone else....