Rufus The Doofus

We’re leaving soon for our road trip. I’ve started loading up the Cruiser. The rack turned out pretty good. I’m happy with the design. It’s functional and easy to secure the load. I can feel the weight of the stuff on the rack when driving around town. It doesn’t feel tippy or uncomfortable around turns. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m trying to come up with an official name for our trip. “Cody and Philo’s Great Western Adventure” was the first thing that came to mind. I’m sure it will change from time to time.

We bought a HD camcorder just in time for the trip. I’ll be posting photos and video updates of interesting stuff along the way. I can’t promise it will be interesting or even entertaining but it will be up for all three of my loyal readers to enjoy. I’m kinda looking forward to learning how to edit video for DVDs and the web. It’s a job skill that I think will be beneficial for some future projects we have in mind.

Here’s another view of the rack partially loaded.

I hope we don’t have any car troubles. It’s not like these old BJ42 Diesel Land Cruisers are easy to find parts for in the U.S. I’ve put about 2000 miles on the car since we got it in January. With all of the work I’ve done on it I think we’ll be OK. The only concern I have is some of the wiring the previous owner did. I think this BJ42 was a 24 volt model at one point in time. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s been hacked into the main wiring harness. Most of it appears to be well done but there’s some stuff I need to keep an eye on. I’ve got wire, connectors, relays, tools and just about everything I might need to diagnose and fix a wiring problem. So short of a meltdown we should be OK.

I loaded up the back tank with B100 biodiesel today. We’ve got 21 gallons ready to go now. I’ll transfer roughly two gallons to the front tank each time we fill up. That will give us a B10 (10% biodiesel) mixture out of the tank that supplies the engine. I figure we’ll be able to stretch our biodiesel for about 3,000 miles using this ratio. We’ll top-off on B100 in New Mexico somewhere. There aren’t many biodiesel stations west of Oklahoma. We’ll figure that out on the road.

Cody and Philo’s Great Western Road Trip begins early Wednesday morning.

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