Monthly Archives: February 2025

1972 Jayco Jaywren

The Jayco Marches On

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As I write this, Christmas, New Years and Valentine’s Day have all come and gone since the last update on the Jayco.

Since the Jayco is expected to be at least semi-permanently parked at the campground in Dennison, we had eyes open looking for a deal on a small camper that could be easily towed behind Wifey’s Sorento and on or about December 8, we found and acquired same.

This little guy does need a little work, but it’s not it terrible shape, especially for the cost.

The timing was interesting. We were packed up and literally on the road to Dennison in mid December when the truck overheated. We were not really even out of the neighborhood, technically. Went back home and killed an hour troubleshooting to determine that the water pump was leaking. Our choices were to stay home or pivot and do the shakedown cruise with the pop-up camper. We went for it.

We (understandably) arrived in Dennison later than planned, but the little camper stepped up and did well. It needs curtains!

We did not fully trust the untested propane furnace, so we just bundled up for bedtime. Having cuddly doggies helps.

When we woke up in the morning, we found that not only was it just cold and damp, but the door was standing fully open, so it was even colder inside than it needed to be. Since we were now awake, we went ahead and fired up the furnace. It worked perfectly and provided a stupid amount of heat. It can run you outta there if you let it.

The Palomino Pony camper will probably get it’s own blog category when we tear into it. Stay tuned.

Also, replacing the water pump in the truck was itself not a terrible task. I replaced all of the consumable cooling system components, including the upper and lower radiator hoses. They were probably fine, but they were also 20 years old.

Meanwhile, the work on the Jayco resumed. When we last left our hero, the damaged fender had been refurbished and reinstalled. The fender needed some sealing.

I used a generic flexible sealing tape in some places where caulking didn’t seem appropriate, such around cracks that formed where the frame protrudes into the cab and where the rubbing tire had worn a hole in the fender.

Hopefully that whole fender project is done!

The Lug Bolt Excursion damaged the gray water plumbing. It took a little while to gather the necessary components for the repair. The existing pipe is ABS. I’m not sure why, unless ABS is just more resistant to freeze damage. Lowes is phasing out ABS pipe, which made it slightly difficult to locate in the store, but they still had it and for the best price. They get about $12 for one 5 foot long piece of ABS pipe, which is kind of ridiculous on it’s face. That is, until you get the price from anywhere that has “RV” or “camp” in its name. From Camping World, you have to buy two 6 foot pieces in a kit for $90. That is $7.50 per foot, compared to what I thought was expensive at $2.40 per foot at Lowes. I needed only about 2 feet of pipe and two 90’s to make my repair and had I been willing to skimp, I could have done it with about a foot of pipe and a coupler.

The sheet metal bracket was pretty much trashed so I made a plywood replacement. I somehow managed to not get a picture of the completely finished outlet. It’s nice.

A surprisingly tricky task was reinstalling the original trim around the bottom edge of the camper. This was tricky because almost none of the original wood that this trim attaches to was still there; it had almost all been replaced when the original walls were rebuilt and little of it was exactly where the original had been.

Around the wheel wells was mostly close. Even so, I needed to fill in a bit in areas, some more than others.

In some areas, I chose to cut custom pieces from 1×4 lumber to fill the gap by marking first the fit to the existing bottom edge of the camper, then tracing the matching bottom edge of the siding.

I had to do this in four areas, basically in front and behind both wheels. Then I could apply the trim to hold the siding to that bottom edge.

Wifey found a lady online who makes custom awnings for vintage campers. Her work is incredible. We elected to choose from a few she had in stock, as opposed to the daunting task of choosing custom fabrics for her to make a custom one just for us, but I think we did well.

If I were better at this blogging stuff, I’d have a picture of it to post here. At some point, this paragraph will disappear and a picture will replace it. 🙂

However, the awning connects to the camper by way of sliding into a special aluminum channel. The channel on the Jayco has endured a fair bit of abuse in its 50+ years and is at least partly pinched closed, preventing a new awning from being deployed. I designed and built a custom swage tool to address this issue.

I started with a Stanley punch that was the right diameter, 5/16″ if I recall correctly. I softened the edges of it somewhat, so that it would be smooth to drive through the aluminum channel. I heated it with a torch and bent an offset into it. I then ground away material to allow the offset to fit into the slot of the channel. The pictures will probably make more sense than the description.

To use the tool, you start at one end of the channel and run it through to the other end, driving it through to widen the channel where needed. I found that it was helpful to kind of wiggle the swage though the worst spots, sometimes using a sheet metal creasing hammer on the outside for more effect.

In all, however, it was about an hour long job, including making the tool. Sometimes, I impress myself.

I finally made a set of stairs. I’d like to say that the 2 inch addition on the back is because of a material limitation. Unfortunately, however, I had spent a few hours designing the steps, scrounging up the materials and building the the stairs. I proudly showed them to Wifey and the first thing she said was, to wit, “It would be nice if the top step was wider.”

One of those little things that needed to be done for a long time was to put a latch on the rear bed so that it will not slide out of place while towing. The original latch was lost so I finally procured another. It is interesting that this little latch on one end of the bed is enough to hold the whole thing in because of the way the bed slides in place.

Fast forward about a month to January. Back when the whole lug bolt unpleasantness occurred, we had a Walmart tire mounted on that one wheel. We have not had a spare at all until now. We took the spare wheel to Discount Tire and had the same model tire mounted as the other tire on the ground. Right now, this is the tire that is the spare. At some point, I will swap it so that both tires on the ground are the same Discount Tire units and the spare is the Walmart tire. In any case, I have now mounted the spare tire carrier on the bumper, which turned out to be trickier than expected due to avoid blocking the tail lights and clearing the hitch on the bumper.

This same weekend, I did a LOT of finish trim work on the interior. I was particularly happy with the work around the ceiling vent and this celing seam.

Likewise, I think I did the best I could with what I had to work with here. That outside corner was not helping…

There were several kind of oddly shaped panels that came together on some of these walls, based somewhat on what material was on hand, as opposed to waiting and going to buy new material later. This left me with some seams to cover. These are mostly behind the refrigerator, so they are not particularly noticeable, especially now that they are covered with trim!

This one shows not only a bunch of trim, but also the switches by the front door.

Due to a slight lack of planning, this switch box is mounted a little too close to (read: under) the door frame, which made the switch plate a challenge. I managed, however, and one switch is wired to an interior light and one to an exterior light. The exterior light is kind of irritatingly bright 🙂

This gives us both 110V and 12V exterior lights.

This brings it pretty much up to date to early February. The February full moon event was Feb 8th.

We arrived early enough on Saturday to take an evening scooter ride before drum circle, though Sunday was uncomfortably damp for a daytime ride before packing up and heading home. :/

HomeLAN

It’s An All Ubiquiti Shop Now

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Thanks to a lucky sequence of events elsewhere, I inherited a Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Ultra router.

My Netgate 1100 running pfSense was not underperforming and didn’t need to be replaced, but I took the opportunity to replace the only major piece of network gear left in the house that wasn’t Ubiquiti.

I have a moderately sophisticated home LAN, beyond what most of the people I know need, but not as over the top as some others. I currently have one internet service provider, Starlink, though for a while I had an LTE provider as well. There is a fiber provider building out in our area and we have signed up. They have installed our ONT to a fiber stub that runs the the curb and all over our neighborhood, there are runs along the street between stubs. Still waiting for the rest of it to be completed somewhere. Whenever that does happen, we will have fiber and Starlink for long enough for me to trust the fiber.

I have the router, a switch and two WiFi access points in the house, a switch and a WiFi access point in the workshop and a wireless bridge connecting them. The main complications to this otherwise fairly straight forward deployment are: 1) My ISP is currently Starlink and to avoid all the trees around the house, the Starlink dish is physically installed at the workshop, requiring the use of an isolated VLAN to backhaul Starlink across a wireless bridge to the house where the router and all the other central gear is and 2) I have a moderate number of IoT devices, particularly inexpensive home automation devices, that should be somewhat isolated from the rest of the network.

I had set up a Unifi Network Controller running as a Docker container on my Synology NAS to administer the Ubiquiti switches and APs. No more CPU than this task takes, this has hardly been a load on the NAS at all. However, the Cloud Gateway Ultra can take over this task as well.

I read that there are ways to back up the running configurations for all of my devices and restore them to the new controller. It’s not particularly complicated, but I elected to take the opportunity to clean slate my configurations and reset each of these devices and configure them anew. This may have cost me more time than was necessary, but it definitely made me understand and address specific elements of the configurations.

I started by locating an ‘as built’ drawing that I made after adding the Ubiquiti switches and APs.

I used this drawing and consulted the existing configurations to verify the port numbers and VLANs, particularly dealing with the Starlink backhaul.

The flow of the VLANs are better illustrated here.

The thing to realize is that VLAN 50 allows data to and from Starlink to connect directly between port 7 of Flying Dog switch and port 15 of the Hippy Hollow switch without being available to any other ports on either switch. The router then processes it as a WAN source and distributes it out it’s LAN port, connected to port 16 of Hippy Hollow switch. All other ports on both switches have all VLANs except VLAN 50 available, so nothing can connect directly to Starlink, bypassing the router.

In any case, because I was going to deploy these devices with factory resets, establishing this VLAN backhaul added a twist. I had already brought the Gateway up in the house and changed it’s network IP from the default 192.168.1.0/24 to my existing 172.29.0.0/24. I then took the Gateway over to the workshop and connected it directly to Starlink and a random switchport and importantly, I plugged the workshop AP in to one of the Gateway’s switchports. This let it come up with the Gateway easily reachable from my phone. When things settled down, I reset the switch, adopted it, configured the VLAN on port 7 and the trunk on port 8 (which has the bridge between the workshop and house) then I moved the Gateway back into the house to reconfigure that switch.

In the house, I had the advantage of a laptop in the network cabinet, so I didn’t have to necessarily worry about the AP immediately.

I was able to quickly get the VLAN backhaul for Starlink up and going. Then came everything else.

I understand there is some method of resetting APs over the ethernet cable, but I needed a ladder to reach only two of the four and adoption to the new controller went smoothly.

There were two mildly troublesome parts to all the wireless stuff. First, it took so long for me to get all the APs reset that all the open DHCP scopes assigned IPs that were previously fixed and I couldn’t conveniently reassign them to the addresses they once had. There was kind of a plan there at one time. I just sighed and left the things that needed to be fixed where they landed, mostly cameras and printers. Second, the whole idea of having a separate IoT subnet is that devices on that network can reach the internet, but not your other local networks. A simple checkbox enables this isolation, but if something *does* need access, if for example if your Home Assistant server is on the main network and a bunch of your wireless home automation devices are on the IoT network, then this simple network isolation checkbox is not the solution; you need a couple of appropriate firewall rules instead. That is why all of my WiFi Home Assistant devices were grayed out. 🙂

To get all these devices up and running, I elected to remove the network isolation checkbox and work on setting proper firewall rules later.

As is often the case, a couple of months have passed between the previous paragraph and this one. In the interim, Ubiquiti has released Zone Firewall for my router, so I need to figure that out. It’s not expected to be difficult, but I haven’t even looked at it yet 🙂

I have four APs, three in the house and one in the workshop. Two U6 Lite APs were purchased together, one in the house and one in the workshop. I needed to add one in the house later and managed to secure a used AC Pro for free, which is a significantly older unit. By itself, that didn’t matter much, but it would probably be better if both of the units in the house were at least similar in features, such as WiFi 6, so I swapped the older one to the workshop. I also have an AC Mesh AP for some outdoor connectivity.

Also, that AC Pro had complained about the wiring ever since it was installed, claiming that it was Fast Ethernet instead of Gigabit. Not surprisingly, the U6 Lite didn’t like the wiring either. I shuffled the attic wiring around so that my USW Flex in the attic now powers one of the AC Mesh and one of the U6 Lites instead of the AC Mesh and a camera. The wiring that was on the troubled AP is now going to that camera, which is only Fast Ethernet anyway. I started by just running all three on the USW Flex, but it ran too close to the max PoE power budget for the switch and kept dropping the newly added AP.

There is one more VLAN thing I’d like to solve. I’d like for all the cameras to be in either the IoT VLAN or maybe their own VLAN. It is pretty trivial to move the WiFi cameras, but for some reason, I can’t seem to get the wired camera to be happy in anything except the default VLAN. I can definitely make the switch port appear to be in the expected VLAN, but then the camera just stops communicating. It seems to refuse to get a new IP from the DHCP in the new network. Maybe the zone firewall rules will make that easier to understand and manage. 🙂