It’s been quite a few years since I wrote these books. Riding Sophia was published on Amazon and went through one small printing, I never did much to publicize the book, which is a bit weird since part of my background is marketing. Riding Anouk was never published and needs an editing pass, at the very least it needs typos and grammatical errors to be fixed. People occasionally ask for a copy, so here’s a link to free copies. Enjoy. It was fun writing these.

I am actually writing a sequel, sort of. I started it a couple of years ago when something prevented me from either getting in the water or riding my motorcycles. I’m being the caregiver for my wife this month since she had knee replacement surgery. She needs a little bell to summon me but I’d probably toss it out a window. I might be able to write in the next few weeks.

Riding Sophia

Riding Anouk

It’s going to be odd. And sparse. And very pretty. But odd.

Anyway, here’s some progress:

Here are the chairs that will slip into brackets on the floor. The side tables (four of them) collapse to a flat and very light stand and a tray. I’ve built a collapsible aluminum top that converts the four side table stands into a dining room table, or two of the stands into a long serving table. The top weighs two pounds. All the tables and tops will store in the puka between the end of the battery box and the cab step.

A box for the water heater and battery. This is 3/4″ birch plywood. I’ve budgeted two sheets of prefinished birch ply for the refrigerator box, the frame of the kitchen cabinets, and this box. The flush aluminum edging is a design element I will repeat on all cabinet doors and drawer fronts. The drawer boxes will be aluminum and the interior shelves and counter tops will be honeycomb aluminum.

This is one of two batteries. For you battery geeks it’s a 4S45P  made from 180 32650 LiFePO4 5000mah cells with a 4s 60 amp BMS. That’s 225 AH, and 2880 watt hours. The second battery will be connected in series for 25.6 V to drive the inverter, to be charged from the MPPT solar controller, line charging and to run the refrigerator. I’ll split out 12V for cabin lights and everything else that needs 12V.

I started spot welding the batteries but ran out of nickel strips. Major miscalculation. Off by a factor of four. The strips needed a few kinks in the middle. I had to make the spacer from a sheet of formica with a holesaw–there aren’t any good premade spacers for 32650 batteries–at least none that I found. The middle got a little wanky because the sheet was to wide to fit the throat of my drill press and I had to do it by hand. Once one hole gets off it pushes the others. No matter, it will work fine and no one is going to be seeing this thing, but it’s irritating. If it hadn’t taken so long to make, and been so tedious I would have started over.

Here’s a shelf bracket, cut and shaped in the bead roller.

Gratuitous holes punched and trimmed.

Folded and ready for polishing and welding. I’m going to weld the middle brackets to the honeycomb shelves since I need to splice them anyway. I’m getting pretty good with TIG. The end brackets will be single sided and also welded to the shelves. They’ll screw into holes I’ve drilled and tapped in the body extrusions. It’s a pleasure attaching things to this Moho. The structure is bomber.

The top of the shelves will be covered with a vinyl fabric that looks like Stingray skin. Diane is outdoing herself on the design side. Of course that’s a two edge sword. After spending two hours making this bracket her comment was “does it have to be so wide”. Oof.

She’s doing great drapes and coverings. Here’s the drape fabric for the main room:

Just as a reminder, here’s the original interior.

Instead of Corian counter tops I’m using honeycomb aluminum panels with laminate tops. Each shelf and counter will weigh about 45 pounds less than the ones they replace. The aim is not just weight reduction, it’s safety and appropriate materials. In an accident a Corian countertop becomes a 60-pound frisbee headed for the front window. I can adequatly and solidly fix a ten-pound honeycome aluminum top, I’m not sure I could do that to the Corian. I can say for certain that the way they were fastened  in the original interior served only to keep them from falling to the floor. I’m surprised the table survived hard braking.

Here’s the parts of the interior that I considered potentially worth salvaging, or that I needed to make measurements before ditching. And the aluminum thing in the foreground is the slide-in pantry shelf I built to replace that massive wooden structure on it’s side behind it. The original weighed 45 pounds, it’s replacement is less than five.

Click any picture to see full size.

That tall, narrow cabinet standing in the background is one of the many overhead cabinets.  That one weighed 45 pounds–3/4″ plywood and MDF.

And this is a cabinet I built to replace it. About six pounds with the end caps. I made it from a single piece of .040″ aluminum, just bent the panel to form the mounting flanges, front, bottom and back. It screws into tapped holes in the extruded aluminum frame of the coach. A very strong mount. The opening will be guarded by three carbon fiber rods that can be slid aside. Across the cabin will be two similar cabinets, deeper, and with sliding doors.

I’m also ditching the propane system. This will be all electric, with a big LiFePO4 battery and solar panels. I’ve insulated the floor and walls carefully with Polyiso panels and Reflectix. We’ll see how that goes, but carrying a huge weight of propane for the light heating and refrigeration load of an RV doesn’t seem like the best idea.  I’m installing a compressor refrigerator to replace the absorption one. The electrical draw is surprisingly low. I’ll cover all that later. I’ve calculated likely air conditioning, heating, cooking and lighting loads. It looks a bit marginal for hot or cold weather if we’re not plugged in to shore power, but it should be enough for two days without sun. And we do have a 5.5 KW Onan genset, though I’d like to minimize using that.

Here’s the trailer headed for the dump.

We also aim to have open space, and NO Shag Carpet. We’re using a high-end locking edge vinyl tile for the floors. If a tile gets damaged, the floor tiles can be lifted to replace the damaged tile.

Here’s the cab with the skanky shag carpet ripped out.

Sound deadening material installed (that big 455 engine is loud).

Thermal insulation installed–Polyiso and Reflectix.

And the finished floor.

Enough typing, time to get back to work.

Diane hated the idea at first, but I showed her a few pictures and talked about having some adventures. She started to warm to the idea. I’ve found that I can’t push this lady into anything, but some seeds take root and the grow by themselves. This one grew startlingly fast. Soon she was showing me pictures of coaches she liked, talking about mechanical issues, looking at interiors, and making plans. I was looking at the cheap end, assuming everything was rip and replace. She was looking at the higher end, saying we’d be better off with a solid place to start with. I did the math and decided she was right.

So we found one, owned and cared for by an engineer and his enthusiastic wife. He recently turned 90 and had a stroke, which effectively ended his ability to use and maintain a coach they enjoyed for nearly twenty years. They bought the coach they called “roadrunner” in 2004 and turned it over to a well-known restorer for a complete makeover. Two things that I liked were the high-quality disk brake conversion on the four bogey wheels that solves some known problems, and fresh engine rebuild by a reputable mechanic less than 5000 miles ago. The interior was nice, if crowded and dated, and the auxiliares were good quality and fairly new. We paid a little more than we probably needed to, but I could see the value though I figured a lot of the interior would need to be redone.  We sent the money and I flew to Fresno to pick it up and drive back–through the smoke and detours of the worst western fire season in recent history. The coach performed very well. the steering is a little vague, but the to primary concerns I had: Overheating going up the mountains, and brake fade coming down, were never a problem. The steeing is a little vague, the gas mileage isn’t great, but there’s nothing here a little TLC can’t fix. And so the adventure starts.

The subsequent posts will detail what we do and why we did it. I’ll try to do some videos on some of the metalworking techniques I use, as well as the features of the equipment and materials we choose.

Here’s the original coach:

Rest and recovery–You can continue to train for the things you love to do, but you need to allow more time for rest and recovery. Generally, that means active recovery, not collapsing on the couch, though devoting some time to outright rest is sensible and effective.Alternating high-intensity training with planned active recovery days will give you time to assess how well your body is recovering and tune your workouts accordingly.

Stretch, and make it count–We all get less flexible as we age. The combination of a lifetime of injuries, muscular imbalances, and natural aging effects on muscles and tendons all contribute to the general loss of flexibility. Much of the loss can be counteracted daily stretching or adding disciplines like Yoga to your routine. But the inflexibility that stems from muscle imbalance will get more extreme if you don’t pay attention to it. A general stretching program won’t help imbalance, in fact it can make it worse since the muscles that are already somewhat loose will be helped more than the ones that are tight and contracted. If you can’t identify those yourself, get a pro to help you, and then target your stretching at the muscles that need help.

Nutrition for recovery and protection–One of the major element of aging is oxidation stress, and the free radicals that cause that are more prevalent in athletes than sedentary people. That means Xtreme Geezers need to consume more antioxidants, which are compounds that neutralize free-radicals and repair oxidative stress damage. Vitamins C and E are especially helpful and consuming foods that are known to contain antioxidants is important. You should be able to accomplish this with good food choices (brightly colored vegetables, berries, etc.) but you might want to assist with supplements.

You should also consume proper nutrients immediately after exercise both to enhance recovery and to stem aging. A balanced amount of water, electrolytes, carbohydrate, and protein are needed to rehydrate, restore glycogen, and repair tissue damage. Exercise suppresses hunger, so you need to apply this as a discipline. You may find a sports recovery drink to be the simplest and most convenient way to accomplish this.

Strength through resistance–People lose muscle mass as they age. That gradual loss of strength can be kept at bay and muscle mass retained at close to youthful levels if you do resistance training. Finesse or speed sports may not demand great strength, but if you don’t do strength training you will lose muscle and tone, and eventually, that loss will impact your ability to perform.

Get your eight hours–Sleep deprivation cripples your immune system, slows recovery and decreases mental acuity. Give yourself the rest you need. Besides, skipping late night TV is sure to improve your mental health all by itself.

I was involved with the nuclear power business for a long time–a reactor operator on the USS Enterprise, worked at a variety of nuclear power plants as a radiological control technician during refueling periods, was a reactor operator at the Trojan Nuclear Plant in Ranier, Oregon and worked in public relations for the primary utility operating Trojan: Portland General Electric. My primary responsibility in Public Relations was talking to the news media about Trojan. I was a lousy nuclear reactor operator–Homer Simpson with ADD. But I did study well, learned the physics and understood both the design and the radiological aspects of power plants. Then when I worked in public relations I had the opportunity to pay a lot of attention to waste disposal issues, safety, environmental impacts and operational issues of both nuclear plants and most of the other ways of making power.

While I remain an advocate of nuclear power, it’s not because I think it’s a wonderful thing. In fact, I think it’s an incredibly dangerous way to make electricity. And the politics of technologically advanced countries make some aspects–like waste disposal–potentially impossible to do safely. But the alternatives are almost certainly much worse.

That may be hard to believe given the harsh realities of Fukushima. But I’ll explain why I think that way. Unfortunately, that will take quite a bit of explaining. Your eyes may start to glaze over. That’s the problem–the reason why decisions made in democratic societies may be ultimately disastrous. Real understanding only comes with a lot of boring detail. I’ll do my best to keep the detail minimal.

Let’s start with the hubris. All nuclear plants do disaster drills–either in the plant as mock actions or in a simulator. The Three Mile Island accident is an easy simulation and pretty much a standard for training for operators of Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs). Trainers can choose to let trainees solve the problem and end the drill, or they can keep adding problems or preventing a solution to run the drill through to the end. It’s an accident that makes for a realistic drill–not only did it happen, but operators can see how the mistakes were made and how the safety systems failed to prevent the accident.

No one bothers to model Chernobyl. Who would model insanity? A primitive, inherently unstable design with few emergency systems and no containment building. Then the operators decide to try an experiment–cut off all cooling and see if they can recover from the incident. No, they couldn’t. Complete, unmitigated disaster. The core burned and released massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. No emergency response was possible. The only response possible is: Don’t do that. Don’t build a plant like that.

But no one would ever concoct a drill scenario like the Fukushima disaster. You might as well toss in the plagues of Egypt and a few angry Norse gods. An accident involving six nuclear reactors at once? A complete inability to regain cooling. Loss of all normal and emergency electricity. Complete inability to add water, even to the spent fuel pools, which then proceeded to boil. A massive earthquake, massive tsunami. Complete inability to respond to the accident for hours, and limited capability for days and weeks. Unbelievable. but real.

As you would expect, the old line antinuclear folks are having a well-deserved field day. What you wouldn’t expect is the larger environmental groups are not. In fact, the debate within those organizations has intensified, and some prominent green advocates are speaking up in favor of nuclear power. How can this be?

What a strange turn of events. Instead of uniting the environmental movement in renewed opposition to nuclear power, the Fukushima disaster in Japan has divided it still further. An increasing number of green advocates, including some very prominent voices, have declared their support for nuclear power as a clean energy option, even as radioactive water accumulates and the timeline for cleaning up the contaminated areas extends by decades. Can they be serious?

They can. The irony of Fukushima is that in forcing us all to confront our deepest fears about the dangers of nuclear power, we find many of them to be wildly irrational — based on scare stories propagated through years of unchallenged mythology and the repeated exaggerations of self-proclaimed “experts” in the anti-nuclear movement. As the British environmental writer George Monbiot has pointed out, if we took the scientific consensus on nuclear energy as seriously as we take the scientific consensus on climate change, we environmentalists would be telling a very different story.

The science on radiation tells us that the effects of Fukushima are serious but so far much less so than some of the more hyperbolic media coverage might suggest. The power plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has been releasing enormous quantities of radioactive water into the sea, for example. It sounds scary, but a member of the public would have to eat seaweed and seafood harvested just one mile from the discharge pipe for a year to receive an effective dose of 0.6 millisieverts. To put this in context, every American receives on average 3 millisieverts each year from natural background radiation and a hundred times more than this in some naturally radioactive areas. As for the Tokyo tap water that was declared unsafe for babies, the highest measured levels of radioactivity were 210 becquerels per liter, less than a quarter of the European legal limit of 1,000 becquerels per liter. Those leaving Tokyo because of this threat will have received more radiation on the airplane flight out than if they had been more rational and stayed put.

For the green movement, which is often justifiably accused of making the perfect the enemy of the good, having to confront real-world choices about energy technologies is painful. Most environmentalists assert that a combination of renewables and efficiency can decarbonize our energy supply and save us both from global warming and the presumed dangers of nuclear power. This is technically possible but extremely unlikely in practice. In the messy real world, countries that decide to rely less on nuclear will almost certainly dig themselves even deeper into a dependence on dirty fossil fuels, especially coal.

In the short term, this is already happening. In Germany — whose government tried to curry favor with a strongly anti-nuclear population by rashly closing seven perfectly safe nuclear plants after the Fukushima crisis began — coal has already become the dominant factor in electricity prices once again. Regarding carbon dioxide emissions, you can do the math: Just add about 11 million tons per year for each nuclear plant replaced by a coal plant newly built or brought back onto the grid.

In China, the numbers become even starker. Coal is cheap there (as are the thousands of human lives lost in extracting it each year), and if the hundred or so new nuclear plants previously proposed in China up to 2030 are not built, it is a fair bet that more than a billion tons can be added to annual global carbon dioxide emissions as a result.

Japan is also heavily dependent on coal, so it is a fair bet that less nuclear power there will add substantially to the country’s emissions. No wonder the Japanese are insisting on backing off from the Kyoto climate treaty. Looking at the entire global picture, I estimate that turning away from nuclear power could make the difference between whether the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius (bad but manageable) and 3 degrees Celsius (disastrous) in the next century.

We have already made this mistake once. In the 1970s it looked as if nuclear power was going to play a much bigger role than eventually turned out to be the case. What happened was Three Mile Island and the birth of an anti-nuclear movement that stopped dozens of half-built or proposed reactors; coal plants were substituted instead. It is therefore fair to say that the environmental movement played a substantial role in causing global warming, surely an ecological error it should learn from in years ahead.

Don’t get me wrong: I am an enthusiastic proponent of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. I strongly support wind, solar and other clean-tech options. But all energy technologies come with an ecological price tag. Wind turbines kill and injure birds and bats. Solar thermal plants proposed in the Mojave Desert have conservationists up in arms. If we are serious about taking biodiversity into consideration as well as climate change, these concerns cannot be idly dismissed. In terms of land use, nuclear scores very well, because the comparatively small quantities of fuel required means less land disturbed or ruined by mines, processing and related uses.

Take Japan again. According to some recent number crunching by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist environmental think tank, phasing out Japan’s current nuclear generation capacity and replacing it with wind would require a 1.3-billion-acre wind farm, covering more than half the country’s total land mass. Going for solar instead would require a similar land area, and would in economic terms cost the country more than a trillion dollars.

Those debating the future of nuclear power also tend to focus on out-of-date technology. No one proposes to build boiling-water reactors of 1960s-era Fukushima vintage in the 21st century. Newer designs have a much greater reliance on passive safety, as well as a host of other improvements. Fourth-generation options, such as the “integral fast reactor” reportedly being considered by Russia, could be even better. Fast-breeders like the IFR will allow us to power whole countries cleanly by burning existing stockpiles of nuclear waste, depleted uranium and military-issue plutonium. And the waste left over at the end would become safe after a mere 300 years, so no Yucca Mountains needed there. IFRs exist only on paper, however; we need to urgently research prototypes before moving on to large-scale deployment.

What is needed is perspective. Nuclear energy is not entirely safe, as Fukushima clearly shows, even if the current radiation-related death toll is zero and will likely remain so. But coal and other fossil fuels are far, far worse. And insisting only on renewables risks worsening global warming as an unintended consequence. We need a portfolio of clean energy technologies, deployed in the most environmentally responsible way. Above all, let us base our energy policy on a scientifically valid appreciation of real-world risk, and not on scare stories from the past.

What would your savings look like if you spent the last 30 years unemployed? I know mine would be very zen–like the sound of one hand clapping. And yet that’s what you’re planning to do as you consider retirement. If you retire at 65 it’s not out of the question that you’ll live to 95. More likely that you’ll live to 85, but do you really want to be scrambling for bucks at 90? The simple reality is that retirement is a concept rooted in the turn of the last century, codified in the USA by the social security act in 1935–when the average life expectancy was 61.7 years. You were supposed to save for retirement, with a pension from the big manufacturing company you worked for all your life, sweetened by savings and a little social security to help anyone that fell through the cracks. Then die shortly after retirement. In fact more than half of the prospective retirees were supposed to die in the traces, a couple of years before they were booted out at 65.

It’s obvious that the situation has changed completely. There’s simply no way that saving at the typical rate for Americans working at a typical middle class job can support that person in retired splendor, walking with their elegantly aged, active, slender, vibrantly healthy wife on a secluded beach for 30 years. First, most of us would go nuts staring at waves and gulls for more than five years, and second, those beaches would be very crowded. Worse yet, for most Americans, retirement means scaling back on activity, accepting the “limitations” of aging, and eating junk while staring at the boob tube. The dirty trick of an extended lifetime for most people is that it’s just a lot longer time to be old and sick.

So lets accept the premise that retirement is not really going to work for many people. How are you going to avoid the trap that confronts a huge number of people? Keep working? For a lot of people that’s not an option. They either have jobs with a mandatory retirement age or they work in a job with physical requirements that get harder to meet as they age.

Save more? Well, that’s a good start, but as many people discovered in 2009, saving in the way that most people do, by stuffing as much money they can into an IRA or 401K can be pretty disappointing.

Spend less? Another good start, but Alpo sucks, and some of the biggest expenses you have are either invisible to you or are hard to avoid.

Work at something else? It’s very likely that anything else you do is going to pay less than what you do now. Going from a position and expertise you spent 30 years acquiring to something new is not a recipe for instant success.

This paints a grim picture, but your reality doesn’t have to be grim. I think the key to retirement success is to plan well for it, and be very realistic about every decision you make. Plan everything–income, expense, activity, interests, where you live, how you save, how long you will work–with a clear understanding that you are looking at 30 years of a very different kind of life than you are living now.

The next article in this series will look at all the elements in detail, but here’s a basic index to what I will be writing about:

Saving and investment–Every element of this matters. You can’t just turn your money over to someone else and expect good things to happen to it. The cost of your investments is as important as their performance, and tax issues are critical.

When To Retire–You probably want to recalibrate your thinking on this. We’ll step through some options.

Activity and fitness–Nothing will kill your savings faster than illness. And medicare won’t bail you out. You need to stay physically active and fit. If you aren’t fit now, it’s time to start. The cost of obesity is not the food you eat, it’s the toll on your body.

Post retirement earning–Uncle Sam might penalize you if you start collecting Social Security and then rejoin the workforce.

It’s not what you make, it’s what you spend–Changing your lifestyle to suit your cashflow.

Here’s the basic, basic, bottom line rules:

1. Your total draw on your savings can’t be more than 3% per year. This includes the expenses of investment but not taxes. If your financial advisor is charging you 1.5% to manage your money and they invest it in mutual funds that have an average expense ratio of 1.5%, then there’s no money for you. Fire them and invest the money yourself in stock and bond index funds that have an expense ratio of less than .2%

2. You can’t owe anything. No loans, no mortgages, no credit card balances. It makes no sense to have loans at rates that exceed the return on your investments. The only exception could be a locked in mortgage at a crazy low rate.

3. Keep sufficient liquid, low risk funds to last you two years.

4. Don’t buy individual stocks, alternative investments, or any risky investment.

5. Don’t have a broker.

6. If you need financial advice use someone who charges an hourly fee. No long term charges. A CPA can be more useful than a financial planner.

7. Funds should be held by an independent custodian. If you use a financial manager (DON’T), never write checks directly to them.  The fund family must be reputable and low cost. I like Vanguard, but any company with a similar size and operating principles may suit.

There’s a lot more detail of course, but that’s a good start. Build a budget, have a plan, get in shape, pay off your house, invest wisely, and work as long as you want. And maybe a little longer.

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