Generating Low Voltage

I mentioned our ongoing generator issue yesterday and that generated some questions. Pun intended.

Main question? What is the problem?

The problem is that our generator does not produce enough voltage sometimes. It does decently well for a few hours, but then the voltage level on both sides gets lower and lower until the inverters go into error and we have no Air Conditioning or electricity for anything else.

We ran the generator for 54 continuous hours while traveling last week and for most of that time, we had enough power for one AC and almost nothing else. We certainly had no power for cooking or for hot water.

Saturday night it would not produce enough voltage for any Air Conditioning and we spent a hot night in a rest area. I got almost no sleep. That is not gonna work all summer long. Our schedule this summer is going to take us to several places where we must use the generator for power.

I emailed the generator manufacturer and the owner suggested removing the generator and bringing it to them. They would diagnose it when they could get to it. Ugh!

Another guy, who came well recommended, is not familiar with this brand of generator and felt like the complicated electrical system on our bus conversion was above his pay grade. I really appreciate his honesty. 

He did think it may be a fuel issue, the same diagnosis as Jeff Rowe, and suggested a fuel pump. I will look into that.

I have the number of another well recommended generator guy that I will try today. It is not really a problem of money. We have money saved for new tires this year and we can easily dip into that to cover the expense. It is finding someone capable and available.

Would you ask God to guide us? This is important to us this summer. Thank you and we appreciate you stopping by.

Davy

4,424 Miles In A Jagged Circle

You can read about our weekend and see lots of great pictures HERE.

4,424 Miles In A Jagged Circle

When the BoggsMobile pulled into the Lazy OD Ranch Saturday evening, it completed its first circle of the year. Each circle begins and ends at home and this was a decent sized circle for sure.

Our first circle of the year was four months, six days and 4,424 miles. It began early on January 1 and ended late in the evening May 6. 

Bus stops along the way included 

London, Kentucky, 

Gruetli Laager, Tennessee, 

Bernice, Louisiana, 

Sweeny, Texas, 

Ellisville, Mississippi, 

Semmes, Alabama, 

Elba, Alabama, 

Plant City, Florida, 

Haines City, Florida, 

Colquitt, Georgia, 

Jersey, Georgia, 

Vonore, Tennessee, 

Nashville, Tennessee, 

Central City, Kentucky and 

Evansville, Indiana.

The bus was in ten states including Ohio and traveled those 4,424 miles with very little trouble by God's grace. The miles were not completely without trouble, but what little trouble we had came equipped with plenty of help. We are very grateful to God for the help!

KJo and I will be leaving for a couple of weeks but the BoggsMobile will stay behind. It will leave in late May for a short circle that will include stops in Louisiana and Oklahoma.

We will be sure and keep you posted. Thank you for stopping by.

Davy

The Story of Paint

The BoggsMobile was painted at the Prevost factory before delivery to the Featherlite conversion facility in Sanford Florida. It was delivered there in early 1995 and was converted to its present configuration as a motorhome over the next several months. After the conversion was completed it was delivered to the buyer in southern California in late 1995 or early 1996 and was titled as a 96.

That is pretty normal in bus conversions, but there was one thing that was abnormal about this bus build. Normally the end buyer purchases the bus from the converter. This customer ordered the bus from Prevost to his specifications and then priced conversion packages from a few of the major converters.

He then hired the conversion company to convert his bus rather than a bus they had purchased from Presost. We have some of this correspondence. Going this route probably cost him considerably more, but he had the exact bus he wanted.

The reason this detail is important is the customer was dissatisfied with the finish on the paint when he received the completed bus conversion in 1996. The converter had nothing to do with the paint so the customer had to fight an international giant over the paint job on his bus.

We have some of those letters too. Including the final letter from Prevost telling the buyer that Prevost was agreeing to repaint the whole coach AND give him a sizable amount of money in return for his trouble.

Evidently, little the shepherd boy in southern California had a mighty stone that brought Goliath to his corporate knees in a hurry.😎😍 The new paint job, which was the same as the original design, was completed in 1997.

Why am I telling this story? Because the 1997 paint on the BoggsMobile is now twenty six years old and is in really sad shape. The clear coat has been peeling in places for years. We had some small sections repaired in 2013 and those sections are fine. Everything else is turning loose now and it looks bad.

Boy O' boy! It looks ok from this distance!😎🤣

It not only looks bad but it is hard to keep clean and the paint is beginning to be affected as well. We hate to make a huge investment in a twenty eight year old bus, but we do not want to watch the investment we have already made deteriorate right before our eyes.

We have been researching paint and even vinyl wrap options recently. Part of my trip this last week took me through Nashville where we have explored some options and the results are not encouraging. The surface needs so much preparation because of the clearcoat issues and other problems, it makes every remedy nearly ridiculous.

If we do this, we are determined to use a shop that knows its way around buses or motorhomes and is completely comfortable painting stainless steel. I am not interested in my brother-in-law's first cousin's ex-husband's neighbor who paints cars under his tree in the backyard.😍 We need the Lord to guide our steps IF we are to make any steps at all.

Pray that God will guide us. That is all we ever need, God leading the way. We are not in a super rush. Thank you and thank you for stopping by today.  

Davy

Owning A Bus IS A Trip!😎

Owning a bus is not only for trips. Owning a bus IS a trip!😎

We have learned during fifteen years of bus ownership that we must schedule downtime in order to keep things running like they are supposed to run. This thing loves to eat miles going down the road, but it requires proper care and feeding.

It has become our habit to schedule bus time in Vonore toward the end of the year and also set aside time while we are in revival in Wartburg in the spring. That seems to work pretty well.

There have been years we stayed in the bus in Vonore and drove back and forth to Beechfork for church each night. That is a little bit of a stretch for us, but it can be done. On other years, we drop the bus with Jeff Rowe and stay in a hotel in Oak Ridge. That puts us about 25 minutes from the church and an hour from the bus.

I often drive to the bus during the day and take pictures while work is being done and generally hang out and watch. Part of the reason I do this is because of Bus Psychosis and also I genuinely enjoy being at Jeff's shop and watching the work. I have learned a whole lot of valuable information that way.

Lately, I have needed every moment of the day to rest and be prepared for revival each night. I was up early in the mornings last week thinking about going to the bus but ultimately chose to err on the side of caution and refrain from the two hour round trip drive.

The BoggsMobile was in good hands, of course. We thank God for Jeff Rowe and the guys at East Tennessee Luxury Coach. They are a blessing to us.

What Was Done?

In no particular order, these are the highlights.

-Oil, filter and lube

-Charge the over the road air conditioning

-Find and fix coolant leaks in the over the road heating system

-Work on a recurring generator problem

-Find and repair bus suspension air leaks

-Inspect a few other items and plan future fixes

-And the main item, repair the brake problem that flared up as we were leaving Ellisville in March.

The bus needs about 10 more things, but they only had it three days and as good as they are, they are not miracle workers. They worked on every item on the list for this trip and did a great job. So far, the heat and AC seem to be OK, the breaks are releasing properly and the air suspension is better.

The generator is a little more stubborn. Jeff discovered some problems and fixed them as much as possible, but it is still acting up a bit. He probably needs more time with it to sort it all out. There is something I can check for him next week in Kentucky.

Overall, it was great stop. I am sure we will be back around soon enough.

Thank you for coming back around to Mile Markers today. See you tomorrow.

Davy

Endurance For The Road Ahead!

The BoggsMobile is in the shop, The Boggs Family is in a hotel in Oak Ridge while we are in revival at Beechfork Holiness Church near Wartburg, Tennessee. The Lord was near us on the first night of revival and we are thankful.

Will you continue to pray for us? We have no complaints. The Lord has been very good to us. However, I am not nearly as strong as I need to be. Three or four days in a row with lots of driving or other activity is enough to prove to me that I need more strength to preach and travel.

I was honestly dragging all day Tuesday and Wednesday, although I had enough energy to preach the first night of revival Wednesday. I know that God is able to heal me completely and we are asking Him to do it.

I will be busy with bus stuff all next week, but I will not be preaching Monday through Friday. Maybe that will help. I would rather preach than deal with bus stuff, but it is part of staying on the road. It must be done.

Thank you for praying for us and for taking the time to drop by each day. May God bless you for your kindness toward us.

Davy

Home In Tennessee

We are home in Tennessee and we have big smiles on our faces! Yay!

That may be slightly confusing for some because you may have read before that we live in Ohio. In fact, we do live in Ohio (As much as we live anywhere) but pulling into East Tennessee Luxury Coach in Vonore feels just like coming home. 

We first came here and met Jeff Rowe in early 2014 and we have been coming back on a regular basis ever since. Jeff has become our friend and it feels comfortable each time we pull into the gate. It is hard to remember life before we knew anything about Jeff Rove and Vonore, Tennessee.

We left Jersey, Georgia about 8:50 AM Monday morning.

Normally we would leave earlier, but there was no sense driving into Atlanta in the middle of a mess. It is always a mess in Atlanta but there are times when it is less messy than other times.

The best time is the middle of the night, but that was not happening after driving in the rain Saturday and preaching twice on Sunday. The next best option is just after rush hour in the morning so that is what we chose. It still took us a long time to make it to the north side of Atlanta, but we made it by the grace of God.

We stopped at a Flying J north of Atlanta to empty the holding tanks and that took a little longer than normal. There was also a slowdown in Chattanooga and a major slowdown between Charleston, TN and Sweetwater, TN. We exited at Cleaveland and took 74 over to 411 North.

The detour was four lanes the whole way but it is difficult for us to make good time going through towns on non-interstate roads. But it was a whole lot better than slogging through stop-and-go traffic jams for and hour or two!

The whole trip was 231 miles and took us six hours and twenty-five minutes. Wow! We were glad to arrive at our Tennessee home! 

The BoggsMobile will stay here all week for a few repairs and some maintenance. We will take the Jeep and stay in a hotel during revival at Beechfork Holiness Church with Pastor Herman Woods and our friends in Wartburg, Tennessee. I am sure we will have more to write about that later in the week.

Thank you for stopping in today.

Davy

The BoggsMobile - 15 Years and Counting! March 21, 2008-2023

This is a special post for us today. I hope you enjoy it. We would love to hear from you.

The BoggsMobile - 15 Years and Counting!

What is the BoggsMobile? 

The current BoggsMobile is a 1995 Prevost XL delivered to and converted by Featherlite in 1995 in Sanford, Florida and titled as a 1996 Vantare. It was custom built for a family from southern California.

We have owned it fifteen years today! 

It is difficult to believe this week is the fifteen year anniversary of bus ownership for us. The bus now has 410,809 miles on it according to the computer. We have driven it 74,693 miles in the last five years and 226,330 miles since it became our BoggsMobile.

We purchased the bus on Friday, March 21, 2008, drove to a Flying J in Tallahassee and stayed in it that night. We parked next to our 5th wheel on Saturday, March 29th and began moving into the bus. 

That was fifteen years ago this week. We have never lived anywhere as a family for fifteen years except for the bus. That makes these last fifteen years pretty special. 

The longest we have lived in a particular house is a little over two years.

We did make it a little longer than two years in our last 5th wheel. We lived in our 2004 Newmar Kountry Star four years.

When we bought the bus we fully expected to be in it for many years. That is one of the main reasons we bought a motorhome built on a bus chassis rather than a conventional recreational vehicle. 

It is really all in the name, "Recreational Vehicle". Conventional trailers, 5th wheels and motorhomes are meant to be used on weekends and 2-4 weeks in the summer. They are not designed to hold up to what we do week after week and year after year.

The first time the BoggsMobile was backed into the barn on the Lazy OD Ranch in December 2014.

A bus is designed and built to run 2-3 million miles of revenue service. The Detroit 60 Series engine in a bus routinely goes 1,000,000 miles before a major overhaul. A good diesel engine in conventional RV would be comparable in that respect. The difference is in the "house" part the motorhome.

A conventional RV has a frame with a box for living quarters built on top of it. The whole outer shell of a bus is part of the frame and the "house" is built within the frame. That is a major difference in comfort, longevity and safety.

I have friends and acquaintances that drove 100,000+ miles in a conventional recreational vehicle and the house part of the motorhome was literally falling apart! The diesel engine was ready to go hundreds of thousands of miles but the box built on top of the chassis had been rattled into pieces.

We researched the differences for about two years as we pulled our 5th wheel down the road. The Kountry Star was a great trailer, definitely the nicest of the three trailers we have owned. It really held up well, doing what we do, but we knew it was only a matter of time before we would be buying another one and then another one, not to mention new trucks. There is no telling how many good trailers and trucks we would have gone through over the last ten years.

The journey toward the current BoggsMobile was a long and convoluted route. We looked at hundreds and hundreds of buses online, dozens and dozens of buses in person and came seriously close to buying four different buses. We came close to buying one in Pennsylvania, one in Georgia, another in Alabama and still another in Tennessee.

We found the BoggsMobile online in Sanford, Florida and a friend saw it advertised in an RV magazine. It definitely caught our interest but the dealer was not willing to work much on the price. We made a low ball offer without seeing it in person, subject to inspection, but they turned us down flatly and quite rudely.

The dealer kept in touch over the next few months, dropping the price about $5,000 each time they called. When they finally descended to the offer we had made months before, I told them we would drive down to look at it.

We arrived to see it for the first time on Monday March 17, 2008. A friend had already driven it for me and my Dad had looked it over and let us know it was very clean and seemed sound. We needed to see it for ourselves.

By that time we had looked at many buses and we knew that pictures could be very, very deceiving. We spent a few hours looking it over and driving it and eventually made another offer that included the same money we had offered before plus some things we wanted to be repaired. They counter offered and we accepted it the next day.

By March the 21st they had the repairs completed and we had the money in place to make the deal. We signed the papers and spent about 8-10 hours trying to learn the systems of the bus. I was overwhelmed. It was like drinking from a fire hose. In hindsight we needed about a week of training.

This is where the 95/96 Prevost Vantare that became the BoggsMobile was sitting when we first laid eyes on it in Sanford, Florida at Florida Luxury Coach. This is only 87 miles from where we are parked today in Plant City, Florida.

This is what the interior looked like. 



Now there is a bunk where the table and chairs were on the right, the barrel chairs are gone and the carpet has been replaced by engineered hardwood.

Dad and Mom came up to see us off and put the first 50 gallons of diesel in for us. March 21, 2008 was the first day I had ever seen diesel at $4 per gallon. OUCH!

My head was full of information and my heart was full of fear.

When we drove away from Sanford on March 21, 2008 the computer odometer was showing 184,479 miles. The next day we arrived near Butler, Alabama at the location where Bro. Jerry Turner's new church was being built.

Bro. Shannon McDonald was working on the church and he had volunteered to build Odie's bunk. We left the bus there, hooked onto the 5th wheel at Allentown and drove to Pine Prairie, Louisiana to begin revival for Bro. Barry Gautreaux.

We left Christian Tabernacle Friday night March 28th and got sideswiped in the truck and trailer by a drunk driver within 60 seconds of pulling onto the road. Wow! My nervous condition took a turn for the worse.

We dealt with all that, pulled the trailer to Richton, Mississippi, drove the truck over to Butler, Alabama, picked up the bus and brought it back to Richton. We were scared, beat up, exhausted and ready to break down and cry.

Except we did not have time to cry. We had a limited amount of time to transfer our stuff while we were preaching our first revival for Pastor Scott Morris and Sis. Kim. They probably wondered what in the world they had gotten themselves into!

The rest is history, as they say. Fifteen years later I now know more about buses than I have ever wanted to know and I know almost nothing about buses in the grand scheme of things. If not for Ben Isaacs and Jeff Rowe I might have left the BoggsMobile and the payment book alongside the road years ago!

After all of this time, we still felt like we made the right decision when we chose to make the jump from conventional RV's to the bus. We are happy to call the BoggsMobile home. God has been good to us.

These are a few more pictures of our first day of ownership.

We incorporated Boggs Family Ministries before we purchased the BoggsMobile. While searching for ministry names we seriously considered Road Runner Ministries. It is ironic that the Road Runner was on the bus when we bought it!

And here are a few more pictures of the BoggsMobile. 

Fifteen years and counting in the BoggsMobile! It feels like maybe we should celebrate in some way. Maybe we could celebrate with Sonny's BBQ!

❤️ ❤️ 

Thank you for tuning in today. I hope you enjoyed the post.

Davy