CCA Stranded with Blown Serpentine in Abilene:
Three hundred miles from Hurst and two hundred from my first stop, I heard Bad Noises coming from under the hood during a gas stop in Abilene. The top idler pulley had decided it had somewhere else important to be. Its departure causes both bad feelings and the total shredding of my serpentine belt by the motor, strips of which jammed deeply into the crankshaft pulley.
Thanks to an ex-girlfriend who evidently wasn't wrong about everything, I had a spare serpentine belt. However, nowhere in Abilene had a compatible, or even close, pulley, so I ended up having to order a new kit from SD Euro Parts. The people here taken The Story of the Good Samaritan to heart, and have bent over backwards to help me. One of them let me use his address to ship the parts. Because I'm cheap, I accepted Priority Mail instead of overnighting them by FedEx. This mean no parts for several days.
In the meantime I have no AC in 100 o F heat, no power steering, and am living in a 1/4 finished RV. But, it's an RV with a fully functional 400 watt solar system! I wasn't able to install the Mercedes relay for connecting the car battery to the house pack before I left, but now seemed like a good time.
First I spent about four hours bouncing back and forth from the top and bottom of the engine painstakingly pulling out all the shreds of the old belt, beaning myself in the eye with vice grips in the process. Ouch! At least the scar will probably look cool.
While I was researching the serpentine repair and the relay install, I used my inverter and Dewalt 120V->12VDC charger to top off the batteries. Super inefficient, but I had power to burn.
In the meantime, I installed a Costco Winplus Flex Mount Backup Camera. Probably because I'm hot, exhausted, and sleep depped, I actually took the time to tie it into the backup wire, which worked. However, this was dumb, because I have no rear windshield, so I pretty much want it on any time the accessory circuit is on. Originally I mounted it on the black plastic cover over the license plate, as close to center as possible. However, the angle was too low, and it would routinely fall off when I slammed the door shut (it's held on to the bracket by a magnet.) Today I tried using just the magnet to mount it high pointing down like a security camera, and that's much better. I basically want it as a full-time rear-view mirror replacement, so I'm going to use it on battery for now and re-wire both ends into the accessor circuit once I have time. The major problem with this camera so far is that it randomly cuts out, which I believe, based on other reading here, to be a problem with the light sensor that's supposed to know when it's dark outside. I think it's getting spoofed by my brake lights and glares while driving. If I can't find a solution to this problem, I'm taking it back.
https://www.costco.com/Winplus-Flex-Mount-Backup-Camera.product.100323832.html
I pretty much used the factory document for installing the relay:
http://www.sprinter-rv.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Aux-battery-retrofit-guideline-NCV3.pdf
Normally I'd want to use 2-gauge welding cable for this kind of heavy power wiring, but since I was basically stranded at Autozone, I decided to vandalize a set of
heavy jumper cables instead. They were $50 for 40 feet of 2 gauge cable that *claims* to be able to handle 350 amps. I will probably never put more than 20 or 30 amps through it for more than a few minutes, so it will do, even though they're copper-clad-aluminum. I had my super-expensive crimpers with me, and AZ had the lugs and shrink wrap, so I got to
hacking! I bough solid copper lugs and shrink wrap at AZ and used my super-expensive heavy crimper from Waytek and butane soldering iron to
put them on.
I disconnected my master ground wire under the steering wheel and only reconnected it when I wanted to test something.
Under the driver's seat was
super dirty, so I spent some time
cleaning it up.
Next I
pulled the positive bus and installed the tiny 150A fuse. I'm still finding random power-wire incompatible
!*@*$ under here.
Once I got one end on, I routed it through the little tunnel that goes from the battery box to the driver's seat, measured the distance to the place the relay is supposed to live, and cut and lugged the other end.
I'm doing all this in 90-100 F heat with the van and portable fan, going into AZ every hour or two for little parts. I got blade connectors for the relay and put them on some wires, but when I went to push the second connector onto the activation tab, it
pushed the tab back into the body of the relay! This might be my fault, because I clamped the connector down a bit before putting it on to make sure it was tight.
Taking the relay apart, however, revealed that only the tiniest daub of plastic resists this breakage. Bad show Mercedes! Why am I paying for genuine parts, especially ones that carry 50 amps, if they're not better than after market?
It was also a total pain to get apart, I had to drill out the rivet, then put four separate blades under the clips to get the cover off.
I was installing it on the
blue-yellow engine-on circuit, which I had already tested. This was dangerous, because without an alternator, I was blowing precious battery power every time I started the engine. I also wanted a manual override, for exactly the kind of alternator-free situation I was currently in. I vaguely realized that making a switch that directly connected the 12V to the relay through a switch would also energize the blue-yellow circuit.The word "diode" bounced around in my head in search of something to connect with, but I was too tired to care, so I just wired it all together. So I installed it to test, and it didn't work. I should have know there was an activation polarity when I saw the diode inside the relay, but I was tired. Worse, the wires I used to hook it up were now incorrectly colored, and I was pretty sure that if I tried to switch them back, it would probably push the blade back into the housing again! !*@*!@!@! Luckily, I was able to switch the wires without much trouble, and after that the relay worked when connected to power. I can't live with myself with incorrectly colored wires in my van. I marked the polarity on the relay for future reference.
I then realized the switch I was using was backward. It connects the two poles on the opposite side of from the switch instead of the same side. I went back and forth on this a few times before I convinced myself I was right. Once I got everything wired up, the relay still wouldn't fire. Also, the blue-yellow circuit no longer seemed to come on. I think maybe energizing it with the override switch blew a fuse somewhere. I was definitely too wiped to track that down, and every minute I delayed the project was precious power that wasn't going into my tired car battery. I decided to call it a day and disconnect the blue-yellow wire and just use the manual override. What I really needed Right Now was the solar panels charging the car battery as well as the house batteries. At that point the relay worked, and I was ready to add the rest of the
heavy cabling.
Because I'm not 100% sure where my house pack is going to go, I used the entire cable for both colors so they reach the back of the van. I will trim and re-lug them once I know their final destination. In the meantime I tied them into my 408 Ah battery pack, flipped the relay, and saw the
combined voltage on my meter! Power was flowing from the house pack into my tired car battery, and when the sun came up, the solar panels would charge them both.
This also turned out to be Using Murphy to Defeat Murphy moment, because by eliminating the need for an alternator I caused my serpentine belt to arrive a day early! I have it in my hot little hands right now, and will install it once I can convince myself to leave the air conditioned comfort of Monk's Coffee and head back out into The Oven. Autozone has the 36 MM wrench and spline for the tensioner, although I think I won't need the latter because I ordered the whole kit, and the new tensioner has is pinned in the open position. Hopefully by the time I got to bed tonight I'll have three new pulleys and two new belts installed.