#321 Falls Lake State Recreation Area

It was a relief to finally get to Falls Lake. We had made a reservation to arrive the day we left Carolina Beach State Park.

As soon as we left Carolina beach we were going to go straight to Falls lake in Durham. Then we had all of that pain of the truck not running and we had to delay getting there. When we finally arrived we were very relieved.

It seems that some of our stops are quite interesting and some are just a little ho-hum. This one wasn’t so exiting. While we were there I did a few things pertaining to helping Ben's bus along a bit.

During the winter his water heater had become frozen and had burst some of its pipes internally because now it leaked horribly.

Ben was faced with having to get a new one and so he looked into getting just the part that was broken. It was not really available as a replacement part or if it was it cost the same as a new heater.

I told him I would be willing to take it apart and see if there was something I could do as I hoped it might could be soldered.

It was a pretty complex little machine but I got it disassembled to the point where it is just something like a radiator coil with lots of 3/8 inch copper tubes twisting this way and that.

I determined that cutting the pipes and putting a coupling in would be just about impossible. There were extremely tight tolerances and really crowded in there. There were also multiple tears in the copper tubing.

All of the damage was were the copper tubing kind of exploded under the pressure of expanding ice crystals.

I'm began to wonder if I could just use a small hammer and tap them back into their tubular shape and reduce the gaping holes to only a fracture. If they could be as small as possible, I could probably just fill the cracks with solder.

My idea worked great. I guess it sounds like I'm bragging but I'm pretty pleased that I was able to do it. I got the idea being under sinks where plumbers did a cheap dead end on copper pipes. On the end of a run they must have runout of couplings and so they just squeezed the pipe shut and soldered the crack. One after one I sealed up all the leaks and I pressure tested it and it worked great. I was pretty pleased for good son Ben that I was able to save his water heater.

I don't think I accomplished too much more on this adventure except I was able to take some really nice pictures of a sunset and I don't think that's nothing so here are some pictures of that.

I had made a decision that since the whole Wilmington event was off for the summer maybe I would just go up towards where my sister lives in Franklin NC. It would be cooler for the summer and I started nosing around and I was able to find a place that could provide me a place for the most of the summer.

I didn't know anything around the place and but I got it from a referral actually. I had found an RV site on a river and he said well from the way you described it my your rig will never fit at my park. I've got a guy that I can refer you to, he might have a place. It was called Old Corundum RV Park.

It was on the edge of Franklin as you begin the twisty road up towards Highlands.

It was close enough so I could see my big sister Sheila in a matter of 15 minutes. We were able to get together on a regular basis but that's another whole story.

I was able to secure the site and reserved it. As we finished up at Falls lake we were off to the mountains of NC for the summer.