On the Road Again!

After a month of hanging out with family and doing maintenance, we’re finally back on the road again! This time we’re gonna do a Southeast United States tour working our way from the San Antonio area up to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, down to Chattanooga to visit my nephew, over to South Carolina to visit a college friend and then we work our way back across the Gulf Coast. We have it all planned so that we’ll be back in time to spend Christmas with the kids and grandkids.

During our hiatus from travels, we had a lot of maintenance that we had to do that has been building up for some time. If you’ve been following us, you know that we’ve been having problems with our bedroom slide that’s been grinding and popping and not working correct. Michael at Texas Custom Coach, fought with Lippert and finally got them to set us up with the new a new Schwintek system. Michael’s team installed this while we were home and it’s working very well. We also had some issues with a mechanism under the kitchen slide where the welds were breaking either from rocking and rolling down the highways or from the added weight of the heavier refrigerator (that came standard) or both! Again, Michael and his team ordered a new part but unfortunately we were sent the wrong one and they decided to custom manufacture one for us that was made of slightly sturdier materials. That repair went well also and the slide is working very well. We had noticed that that slide wasn’t closing all the way under the refrigerator side due to the broken weld but now is closing tightly for Travel down the road and hopefully we won’t get any water up in the system.

The other issue we had was that the driver side rear tire, which is the heaviest side of our rig, was wearing very badly during the last trip and had actually gotten flat spots on it and looked like the brake had been locking. We had to buy a new tire as soon as we got home because the old one stopped holding air about 200 miles out and we had to put the spare on. While I was repacking all the bearings and inspecting the brakes in preparation for this trip, I took a hard look at that particular one and noticed that the inside of the hub, where the electromagnet for the brakes rides was scoured very badly. The other hubs had some light scouring, but that particular one was really bad. It occurred to me that that scouring might be increasing the friction and causing that brake to lock up occasionally and damage the tire. Given that we ordered a new hub and drum assembly which comes pre-greased and just pops on. We’ll see how that rides on this trip. We put two new tires on the RV, but kept them away from the rear tires since the rear tires were the ones getting torn up the quickest. After this trip, we will get two new tires for those as well depending on how they wear.

There were other small maintenance things that we did like fixing the two cabinets at the very back. The sides were always getting popped off and this time I put in some screws to see if it would last better.

Additionally, during the October Grand Design Rally, we were told that we had two small horizontal cracks in our frame and that Lippert should be notified to come out and fix them. After some back and forth, Lippert sent a repair tech to drill out, weld and reinforce the frame where it was cracking which was along a side to side support beam.

Finally, Kim discovered that there was light coming in around the bedroom slide, which had been completely rebuilt by the folks at Texas Custom Coach. We were able to drop by Monday morning and they took a look at it and discovered that between the clearcoat and the clear sealant that they used when they fixed it, light was able to sneak between the frame and the body of the RV. I couldn’t believe it, and I was absolutely gob smacked when I saw it, but they were running their hand up and down that seam and the light would disappear so clearly it was sneaking in around the new seam. We were actually sealed up, but they replaced the clear caulk with black caulk. The light went away and at the same time they fixed a small tear that we had on the upper seal over that portion of the slide to make sure we wouldn’t get any water in. We’re heading east and there’s a lot more rain in that area of the country so we fully expect that all these new seals will get tested and we need to make sure they pass the test!

So stand by for more updates as we begin our next adventure!