Now that Our Ohana finally sat in our driveway and not being constantly threatened by moisture from the sky, we needed to do a few things to get her street legal. At this point she had multiple tail light bulbs out and a running light out up front. Piece of cake, right?
Nope! I shouldn’t have even thought that out loud. What I normally would have achieved with a simple screw driver quickly became a myriad of tools and colorful words. First thing was that every screw in the tail light assembly was extremely corroded. Even with a good dousing of WD-40 and some soak time they were unforgiving. As I attempted to put any pressure on the screws to keep the heads from stripping out, the plastic tail light lenses began to crack and fall apart.
After a little over an our of plastic snapping, trying to coax out screws with a set of pliers, and still having them break off in the fixture, I decided it was time to formulate a plan B. These tail lights were not going to survive the process. So I researched online for a solution, and found a pair of LED lights that would fit the bill. The Bargman replacements were once again too expensive- so I decided to give the one piece LED units a try. I normally buy normal fixtures and install LED bulbs in them- but this time I would try a full on LED unit. Time will tell if I am going to regret that decision. After placing the order for the lights I decided it was official, I was going to keep my cargo pods and awning from Serenity. I dropped the selling price and un-installed them from her. I then re-drilled new holes and installed the cargo pods onto the Ohana. They worked great!
During this time I took advantage of the hold in the weather and painted the front rims on Serenity before the rain began again.
In the mean time we went to replace the running light. And since we were doing that we agreed we would upgrade the other one too. We spent a little more, but decided to just do it then and there at our local O’Reillys. O’Reillys has been there many times when I have been in a pinch, so I do like to give them business if I can.
Shortly after that the tail lights arrived. Opening up the old lights told me that this was definitely a good idea.
It took a little bit of modification to get them to mount in, but afterwards they were working great! (If your curious, I used a aluminum flat bar and ran inside the lip of the plastic inset for the light. I mounted it into the inset and then drilled holes in in it to mount the light into. Then I ran Lexel around the edges to seal it until we could get to Gaco the whole rig)
It was right after I received a request to travel out of town- to teach board games!
It was a great reason to head North! We were running low on supplies and we could certainly use an Anchorage run. Getting offered pay to teach board games was an offer I couldn’t refuse (and I would have done for free), and it was a golden opportunity to get to game with our new friend Josh Krull again! Last but not least, we had really wanted to do a winter test run in Our Ohana.
So with a valid list of reasons to plan a trip, we committed to travel towards the end of December. Also with that, we had one month and lots of work to do to get her ready for the trip!
Geoff Murphy 4/22/2020