savannals

Before I bought her, Agent May sat for a while at the dealership I bought her from. Which means that her tires, while new in terms of miles driven, also had experienced some unusual stresses related to lack of use.

A few weeks ago, one of the tire pressure sensors was telling me that the pressure was low in that tire. It hadn't been that long since the last time air was added to the tires. That, combined with the fact that another one of the tires assumed a somewhat odd shape when parked in certain positions, was enough for me to just decide to replace the tires. The old ones were... probably fine, but I knew I wanted to replace them eventually anyway with ones that were a bit more capable on less-than-paved roads. (I have no plans to take her off-road, but definitely want to be able to drive on not-well-maintained roads.) And it was worth it to me to do that sooner and avoid worrying about the integrity of the tires.

I also (for purely aesthetic reasons) got her some new wheels to go with her new tires. Naturally—The Cavalry needs shoes that are both on point and practical. She's looking awesomely badass!

In a major development in the get-things-out-of-our-house-and-into-the-van front, we put the solar panels on the roof this weekend!

I am very glad that's done and I really, truly hope we don't have to mess with the solar panels for a long time. Getting those up there was not easy.

The weather finally got warm and dry enough to clean Agent May up and take her out for some quick photos. Time to show off the wrap!

Oooooo. Isn't she beautiful?

This weekend we got the vent fan (mostly) installed! This is the result:

Pretend the blurring is just, like, artful hinting instead of questionable photography. And buckle up! This is a long one.

Last Thursday, the fellow at the vinyl wraps shop let me know that he could get the van wrapped early if we could drop it off on Friday. We could! Which means the wrapping started a week and a half earlier than we expected! It also meant that we didn't have the van last weekend.

We did have nice weather, some solar panels, and some bits to make a mounting frame for them. So that's what we did!

First step was to get the solar panels laid out so we could measure the distance between the mounting holes on the bottom. I grabbed some red wire thingydoodles from the shed because they were about the right size and we had a lot of them. We used those as spacers between the panels to give them a little bit of wiggle room.

On either end, you can see the cross bars of the roof rack where this array will eventually be installed.