The unexpected......

6:38 am - Thursday - April 9th - Wittmann, AZ - 42° F, 82% humidity, wind 4 mph out of the north by northwest.......clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 69° F.  On this day in 2014 we were boondocking at Lone Rock Beach, UT......

 Lone Rock Beach, UT

Horseshoe Bend

.......this was our first of three visits to one of our favorite boondocking sites.  On this particular day we visited the iconic Horseshoe Bend vista point.

I began Wednesday with no particular plans, or aspirations.  As I was walking out the door to the trailer I noticed TLE had pulled all the glassware out of the cabinet on the right side of the sink.  She was intent on cleaning the glass door, as well as the interior which has mirrored walls.  I had been noticing for some time that the strip LED lights I had installed in that cabinet years ago were failing, and only about 6 of the 36 LED's were still working as you can see from the picture below......

.....since the cabinet was empty I decided to seize the day, and remove and replace the 10 year old strip lights.  As I pulled them out they broke like pretzels......normally these all weather LED strip lights are very supple, but these had gone bad in a big way.....

....I had about 26" of all weather strip LED's left over from my rocker panel project a week, or so ago, so I cut that length in half.......

.......and wired them together in preparation for installation.....

......I apply a water based 'flux' to the wire ends, and to the contacts on the LED strips before soldering the wires to the strip....this helps the solder to make good contact with both surfaces.....

....and a soldering iron I bought at Radio Shack a few years ago to do the soldering...it works well....

.....it took a while, but I have nothing but time on my hands, right?  Finally I was ready to install the new all weather LED strips in the cabinet.....

   The two new all weather LED strips are now wired together

.......installing the new LED's was very easy, and within 20 minutes the new lights were installed.  All I had to do was peel off the protective strip to expose the adhesive strip and press them against the ceiling of the cabinet......

.....and we once again had the cabinet lit.......

......while I was on a roll I decided to begin replacing the lights in the engine bays.  About 9 years ago I replaced the original light, which was completely inadequate with a fixture containing two strips of LED strip lights....it was a big improvement, but I was still not happy with the amount of light.....

The old one

....when we were here in Wittmann a year ago Tom show me some LED lights he had bought for just this purpose, so I bought a box of 5 off Amazon, and installed two of them in the trailer to replace the old, inadequate lights there.  It took me less than 30 minutes to remove the old engine bay light, and install the new one in the passenger side.....

 Much brighter!

.....with that my unexpected day of lighting projects came to and end.....I'll install another one of these in the driver side engine bay on Thursday.  That is how some days evolve when an unexpected opportunity presents itself.

Oh, and by the way, it is now official.....my sister and brother-in-law are coming to Wittmann.  They placed their order for a solar system with A.M. Solar and it is being shipped via UPS to our Wittmann location where we will install it when they arrive in a little over a week.  We are very excited about this development.  Also, TLE and I continue to be without COVID-19 symptoms.....we are healthy, and just taking it one day at a time.

Thanks for stopping by!

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