Blessed Day of Rest

Sunday is supposed to be for resting and I finally got to do it, today. First one in a long time (or maybe that's just how it seems).

The generator is now generating, once again. The Generac NP 5500 watt that came in DaKotR has always been a little cantankerous but it finally reached a point where it would not start. I had fiddled with it a little some weeks back (actually, months, I think) and got it to start and run but Carbon Monoxide built up inside DaKotR so fast I ran out to see where it could be coming from and found the generator sitting in a puddle of raw gasoline!

I overrode my first impulse (to RUN) and stopped the generator with no sparks. The steel tray that the genny sits in has a 3/4" lip on it and the gasoline was almost to the top. I quickly threw rags and whatever else I could grab to soak as much of the gas out of there as I could.

After much thought and research I decided to ck for gas line leaks, first. I pulled the air filter housing off so I could run the whole fuel line and did find a few less than tight-enough clamps. After checking it all over, thoroughly, I pressed the starter to see if I could see a leak. From the amount of gasoline, I knew that it had to be a doosie.

I pressed it just long enough to have it start to catch up... and then a pulsing stream of gasoline began shooting straight out of a vent on the carburetor air cleaner mating face. Good Fuel pump, for sure. That sucker was squirting a pencil lead thick stream of gasoline a good 2 feet straight out of the carburetor. I instantly shut it off (but it seemed like about 20 minutes for it to quit running) and decided that I had to pull the carburetor off and rebuild it.

So, that was how I spent my Saturday.. a partially disassembled carburetor in one hand and a can of Carb cleaner in the other. After cleaning ( and it was definitely crudded up really bad) I put it back on the generator and hit the starter. NO GAS running anywhere! Super, but no running, either, unless I held the choke fully on.

Pull the carburetor again, opened it up and found 2 little intake holes that had such solid plugs of gunk in them that it was hard to push them out with a probe.

All done, put it back together, put it back on the Generator and hit the starter. Wahoo!!!! runs like new!!! Sure could have used that for a few days after the Tornado hit us a couple of Saturday's ago. But it will work fine, now.

So, on my day off, I have been working (playing, actually) on a rework of our exit strategy next week. It is just looking like we are not stopping the slippage of our timing so we are planning to go to WV as planned, but then spend a few weeks or a month, hanging around the mountains of WV, Kentucky and Tennessee and checking out some COE and state campgrounds. Some of them are really exceptional with FHU/50 sites and with my America the Beautiful Senior Pass in hand, they are half price for us. It won't be Colorado but maybe it will take the edge off of our hitch-itch hunger for the Rockies for a couple of months.

ttfn