jd1923

Thanks again, GJ. Love the PITA factor! 🤣 I went into Oliver ownership thinking I could pay about half the cost of a new hull with the used one I found locally, and then add $10K in component upgrades (plus my labor). I then purchased a truck at 20% of the cost of a new 2500 diesel truck (both were great finds!) and again invest another $10K in parts for TV restoration and upgrades. The plan has worked well except that I have added $12K in parts to the 2016 Oliver and another $12K to our 2001 Dodge Ram, so I'm $4K over budget and several hundred hours into maintenance and restoration labor. But as you can tell, I certainly enjoy this work! I would like to upgrade the A/C spending $1,650 plus labor and our Oliver does not need much more except for perhaps a Starlink Mini at some point. The Ram is in great shape today except I may spend on a stage II transmission rebuild someday which would certainly be WAY over budget. I like the classic look of our 2016 Oliver pulled by a matching 2001 TV. It suites our style! These pictures were taken about a month after our purchase in July of 2023, without new wheels and tires and all the Oliver mods! 😂 Oh, and I do use the Anderson regularly. Not for sway but for leveling. The TT and TV become one with the Anderson, otherwise it would be bouncy at the hitch (not enough tongue weight).

Yes, for sure. This would not work out west where you would want to boondock often! We don't camp summers nor harsh winters but the rest of the year is great in the SW and we would only leave the SW at the right times of year. Last week camping, day temps were upwards to 85. The first night I had not turned on the furnace and woke up at 5AM to find the cabin at 54F when I switched on the furnace set to 65F. Florida is the land of sweat and air conditioning 24x7 (we lived in WPB for 4 years). I could no longer stand to feel and hear A/C 365 days a year. Yes, there you need hook-ups. Although with 720W in solar, a 3KVA Victron Inverter, a 50A DC-DC charger, 600AH in LiFePO4 (can easily add another 300AH or more when needed) and coming very soon an Atmos A/C that cools well using <10A, we don't need no stinkin' hook-ups! It's such a great care-free feeling to do without. Often I ask for and sometimes get a half-priced stay paying cash without hook-ups.

Another point to be made re this comment, but btw for or against, I love the dialogue and thank you for being a fresh face in our wonderful OTT Forum! From a recent post, from what I could tell, I'm not alone in that many of us use the FWT and internal water pump vs. using the City Water inlet which can vary in pressure and have other issues. I prefer when we arrive at a campsite that we have power and water and do not need "hook-ups!" We use a two-stage filter like this, but I made one myself using their parts and filters, but way cheaper than buying the complete system: https://www.clearsourcerv.com/products/clearsource-premier-mini-rv-water-filter-system We have good mountain water where we live but since we do not have our own well, of course the city adds chlorine and fluorides, etc. I use the City water line only sometimes to fill the HWH and prime the plumbing and leave home with 30 gallons filtered in the FWT, 6 more in the HWH, 2-3 in the plumbing lines and yet another 35 gallons in the TV bed and we're ready to go for near 10 days! Yeah, I drink hundreds of bottles of water, day in and out, whether home or away. I should get a home filtration system at least as good as the one I made for the Oliver (coming soon). Someday, but in the meantime I would not vote for banning plastic straws or anything equally crazy! When we visit friends, I hope they offer us a simple plastic bottled water vs. what comes out of their tap or even worse, their tap water with refrigerator made ice cubes, yuck! To be certain, this will not cool my Texas Vodka nor Kentucky Bourbon! 🤣

There is a local company that advertises there whole house water filtration systems. They state emphatically that RO systems remove the minerals that are important to our health, that you ant filtration of "chlorine, fluoride, lead, etc," but do not want to remove minerals that are already depleted from our soils in the foods we eat. Blah, the blah, blah, blah! We bring bottled drinking water and would not want our FWT to be filled with RO waste water nor RV antifreeze... We want to shower in relatively clean water!🤣

Nice mod and great installation work as usual Mike! @rideadeuce Love our 30# tanks and would upgrade if we purchased an Oliver with only 20s. I don't see the need for aluminum tanks with years left on our tanks that were upgraded by a previous owner. It's only a 16LB savings, the weight of 2 gallons of drinking water. I do like 8 vs. 6.8 gallons capacity but this is a lot of money. We traveled twice this February, 7 nights to Q and back and 5 nights to the Santa Catalinas near Tucson. Twelve nights out camping, cooking on the Weber Q grill and the stovetop, limited furnace use give the reasonable temps and we only used the fire ring on two nights! Our first 30# tank is now at 22% and the second is still full. If we had two 20s we would be into the second tank already! What if we lived or traveled north? Would you as well use enough, someday? I love that we can and have gone for 4 weeks and only fill tanks when we return home. 😂

Thank you GJ, and yes, please swing by Prescott when you travel the mainland this year! I installed this pump Jan 2024 after earlier trying a Seaflo pump that did not work out to my expectations. I wrote up a mod post on this and the motorized valves installation here: https://olivertraveltrailers.com/forums/topic/9771-water-system-upgrade-for-better-water-flow-pressure OK, so y'all are going to love this! This guy, me, installation guru guy, I can be dumb, and yes dumber than the next guy! 🤣 I FOUND THE LEAK! Why did it leak on Day 2 of our trip but not during Day 1? As Chris has told me often, when I loose something, "retrace your steps." I started thinking in this way. Then realized, I used the outdoor shower at the campsite to rinse something our first day out. I left the cold water valve on. The only thing holding the water from flowing out fully was the water control lever in the shower head. I fixed this by merely closing the valve, OMG! I was hoping it would be easy to see and correct and it was. So, we're back to NO failures since we took possession of our Oliver, lucky number Hull 113 on June 7 2023. I'm knocking on WOOD now, three times, since saying this. That large block of WOOD, up top and center, often referred to as the NOGGIN!

We only get mosquitos a few weeks a year, once monsoon rains get the area wet enough (August +/-). No flies either though we ran through a lot of them to and from the Oct Texas Rally. Brought a couple home in the hull to the fate of death in the Arizona dry! 🤣 However years in the Midwest (stewardess on board?) and in Texas (those little nasty B-words) brings back bad memories. I always do yardwork in Jeans and long sleeves, hats and gloves even in the heat of the day. Always have two fans in my garage. One blowing at ankle height and the other chest height. As far as travel, we prefer not travel in those areas or seasons. Might have to miss that trip to Alaska. It's too far anyway! How are the bugs at the big rally on the Lake in northern Alabama?! Also, too far, maybe someday.

Gross, all that pink stuff in your FWT! Not easy to rinse without half filling and dumping it a few times. I only use air as a winterizing agent! 🤣 We travel with an extra 35-Gal FWT in our truck bed, using the Boondocking valves all the time! We can be off-grid for ten+ days when needed, given we can let a little gray water out in the back country. Turning two switches sure beats lifting a 10” mattress! The third switch empties the FWT. The picture also shows the heater duct delete and the added air intake filter housing.

And don't forget to remove the government regulated restrictor in the head of the faucet! When I used to travel for business a lot, I had a wrench and pliers in my suitcase so I could remove the restrictor from the hotel shower head. Got a decent shower instead of the designed trickle! Later I would nicely reinstall their device, prior to check-out! 🤣

This pic shows the motorized ball valves I installed. More important to flow is the upgrade to the water pump! This Made-in-USA pump is 5 PSI higher and 0.4 GPM greater flow rate which is a positive yet conservative upgrade. I believe the variable speed motor also provides for greater flow rates when in use. This pump should last forever (can run dry for hours) but it's not near as quiet in my application as they claim. It could be my steel bracket holding the valves acts as a sound conduit. I should add softer rubber footings when I get under there this week. I could also insulate this bracket and the basement cover that sits above this area. I certainly hope to fix the leak before getting into additional mods. I truly hope the leak is obvious and easy to reach! 🤣

That was lucky! 4-5 weeks ahead I looked at both parks plus ALL of the Maricopa Regional Parks. There was not a single night available for the week of Feb 24th, in any local park between Prescott and Tucson. Then two weeks out a Thursday night at Catalina opened up and I grabbed it. A few days later the Monday night opened at Lost Dutchman. That was our first night out and I like when the first day is less driving, Lost Dutchman being half the distance to Catalina from our home. Then a week before Catalina had a Wednesday opening so we got 2 nights, at two different sites of course. I wondered, what would they do for a flood? Our visit to Catalina SP was OK, not great. After the first night we moved to the new site at noon and had the day to investigate. I wanted to see the town of Oracle AZ and drive into the north end of Coronado NF to take the back route up to Mt. Lemmon. We got a few miles past Oracle and there was an obvious Temperature Inversion. All of the dust from the dry conditions of the valleys were trapped so that we were driving through a huge cloud of dust! After sneezing a couple of times and the look of things we abandoned our trip. You could not see through the haze at all, not a single view of Santa Catalina Mountains while climbing up! One reason for your visit was to meet friends who had recently purchased a home in nearby SaddleBrooke Ranch. We played pickleball with them and others in the community on two evenings and had a great time. Dinner at their home the first night and a good strong hot shower the next morning! Drove up to Wickenburg for our last night, taking a detour around Phoenix to Gila Bend, Buckeye and up. We often prefer driving the back way up Hwy 89 to Prescott vs. I-17 (currently on a 5-year construction plan to widen it). This picture was taken from Constellation Park (found on Campendium $10/night) looking down at the town of Wickenburg. There was one site left available at 5PM! It was a short and sweet trip and we're back home today for the day of rest!

It's important to me. I've done a lot to improve water pressure and GPM flow rates. I replaced all OEM valves with motorized ball valves with true 12mm ID. The OTT installed valves were 1/4" ID (see picture, drill bits shown are 1/4" and 3/8"). Every 90 (too many of these installed) and ALL PEX crimped connectors have 3/8" ID. Newer hulls do not have the 1/4" ID brass valves but instead more of the other valves shown center of picture with 3/8" ID. The Oliver plumbing system is then a 3/8" system. If they had used SharkBite everywhere it would be a true 1/2" system.

My son’s first USTA tennis tournament was on the grounds of Texas A&M!

Welcome! Pretty soon the forum cops will suggest you add a signature including hull and tow vehicle info. Some write a book with all mods info… and others do something simple like ours. Very nice first pic!

The Santa Catalina Mountains from the Catalina State Park of Arizona. Was dry as bone here, no real precip this season, daily highs in the 80s!

Again, thank you Mike! I would have not looked there first, or second and it’s so down low on the floor. I did have it closed for two months since I had winterized late November and just turned it back on the day before the leak occurred. Do you believe in coincidence? Let you know in a few days, TY!

Thanks Mike. This leak could be of my doing when replacing manual valves with electric 18 months and 50 nights out earlier, but not likely. I will figure it out soon and let y’all know when I know! We had two broken frame welds upon purchase, but I will say, two years and 64 nights out camping, this is the first failure in our quite wonderful, very well built OTT! 😂

Out on a camp this week. Left home after positive tests of our new waste valves, no issues there. First night at Lost Dutchman after filling the Fresh Water Tank (FWT) all was good, not a drop for 24+ hours. Second night, parked at a friend’s house near Tucson, in their driveway we had an obvious leak out the curbside rear, but as we moved at different levels it would leak at any weep hole but front left, TG! Y’all know for sure, I’m the working sort but not during the time when we are away enjoying life. So we only turned on the water pump when needed. I tested the City Water connection, same thing, which means it’s not in the connection. What do you think would be the cause of the leak. My hope is it’s obviously and easy to reach. We’ll be home tomorrow. I’ll put the beds in the house and run a fan down there to dry things out! Good news RH here is <10% so no mildew. Will let you know what I find but would like to know if any of you had this experience?

Yeah and BTW, please do not travel Arizona without reaching out and stopping by. 😂

Yeah, Duh! Cut me off Val, before I have a Bromance issue with you! 🤣

Yep, ours too and we still have them. I upgrade a lot of stuff, but since this is in the area of liability insurance, I figure OTT is responsible if I do not touch what was installed by the manufacturer. This should receive comment! 🤣

I wrote a mod post on this. I strongly suggest moving the bus under the street side bed to the area under the rear dinette seat. Blow a fuse and remove a bed, what was OTT thinking?! 🤣

Hit a deer with my ‘84 Goldwing Standard, coming home one night in Georgetown TX. Saw her coming and kept it up on two wheels as she glanced off the side of my bike. Heck, the raccoons in suburban Chicagoland are larger than the deer in Texas! 🤣

Very similar backgrounds, the two of us were west-siders, 6 years in N VA on the way to 9 years in Texas. Our last cold winter was ‘99 unless you consider VA cold. I worked for that late great 20th century manufacturer of communications equipment, also headquartered in Chicagoland!

My first job was installing stereo systems in cars which led to working through college installing aftermarket kits (alarms, cruise controls, etc.) Install 12-16 automotive accessory kits a week at every named dealership and a few Oliver mods are quick and easy! Love your quote here. I also enjoy the repairs! Like buying an old motorcycle priced low since it doesn’t run and driving it in the neighborhood a few days later! The of course restoring it fully. Not the 10-hour day I used to work but a half day teaching (my paying job) followed by a few hours in the garage. Or half the year when I’m not working, a half day on a repair and playing pickleball or going on a hike in the afternoon! Call me nuts, but I/we have always worked our own yard work, and always on properties with acreage! Don’t understand how full-timers survive, being without a good home attached to the ground! Couldn’t be without my 3-car garage with wrap-around work benches, toolboxes, cabinets and shelves, besides our two outbuildings for more parts and tools. Love when I do repairs using hardware and parts I hoarded from decades ago! No trip required to True Value or The Depot. Most members here online rave about being retired, not me. Like my life working occasionally. My uncle retired at 51 after selling his half of 3 Chicago restaurants. Moved to Port St. Lucie and although he was a near scratch golfer, got bored, disliked his retired life, feared reinvesting in something new, passed of a heart attack while on a riding mower at age 64. His brother, my father worked everyday of his life until he passed at 92 years. I won’t be at either extreme! I’d be gearing up for spring yard work soon, but with no real rain or snow in the last 5 months, this will wait until after the summer monsoons! 😂