The Coolest Thing

The great Sonoran Desert stretches from the Mexican state of Sonora into parts of Arizona and New Mexico. The Arizona part lay directly in my path.

Desert is a geologic description based principally on the amount of precipitation that falls in a given period. Some deserts are cold. Some are hot.

The Sonoran Desert in the United States is hot.

Several years ago I rode across West Texas on my way to Roswell, N.M. When I stopped in the shade of Judge Roy Bean's office in Pecos, Texas, the temperature was 120 degrees. Riding through heat like that must be what a convection oven feels like to a baked chicken.

After giving some thought to how to keep cool in a hot environment I remembered that stock car race drivers wore personal air conditioning to keep them cool enough to race.

I thought a water cooled jacket would work on a bike so I went looking for one on the Internet. I found a couple of manufacturers of cool suits. I could have bought one of several had I been willing to part with several hundred dollars for the I jacket. I was confident I could build one cheaper than I could buy one.

The first hurdle to overcome was how to get power to a pump. I tried to convert an old telephone cell phone charger to power a sump pump, but I never could get the thing to work. Back to the Internet where I found a submersible sump pump that operates on D cell batteries.

Once the pump was delivered I had to convert a summer riding jacket to a cool jacket. Refrigerators transfer heat by circulating a cooling medium through tubing inside the refrigerator. The jacket could serve as the refrigerator, all I had to do was run the tubing.

I purchased about 20 feet of tubing for the project. I also purchased connectors and valves so the water flow could be controlled both at the pump and at the jacket. Were it that I had more patience, I would have opted to sew the tubing to the inside of the jacket. Lacking patience I secured the tubing to the jacket with nylon Zip ties. The ties have some sharp edges, and that may account for the strange scratches on my arms.

When I connected the tubing to the outlet hose on the pump, I was ready to test. The first test involved dunking the pump in a filled kitchen sink. With a little tweaking the connections were made watertight. I put the jacket on and dumped ice into the water. The cold water gave me a jolt as it started circulating through the jacket.

Since I couldn't ride around with a kitchen sink, I use a soft-sided, insulated cooler to carry the ice and water. To test the portability of the rig I walked around the house carrying the cooler. I felt like the astronauts on their way to the rocket carrying their personal airconditioning systems.

After devoting time and effort to the project I was a little disappointed that both south Florida and west Texas were too cool to break out the jacket. When I started for Phoenix Saturday morning I was wearing the jacket, but hadn't hooked it to the cooling system.

At Gila Bend, Arizona I was turning west and heading through the desert. I filled the cooler with ice and water and turned on the pump. I felt the cold water rushing around my torso. I was ready to take on the heat.

I was expecting temperatures above 100. If it made it that high it did so just barely. Residents in Yuma were probably thinking about putting on winter jackets because it was only 100. I was going to wear that cool jacket no matter what.

I got to wear it with the pump running all the way from Gila Bend to just past El Centro, California where the desert gives way suddenly to mountains. I bet I wore it all of two hours because it was cold in the mountains. So my development to use time is about 10 to one so far, and it doesn't look to get any warmer along the route any time soon. And I need to work on a watertight cooler because when I put the bike on the side stand the water runs out. Something else to think about while tooling down the road.