November 1, 2016—Mechanical issues of the past five months
We have had some mechanical issues to deal with over the past five months, altho they have been mostly minor.
As light as it is, the trailer is subjected to a lot of bouncing around and things rattle loose. Early on I noticed that a trickle of water was running from under the toilet into the shower enclosure. Something had shook loose in the supply line to the toilet; the flushing mechanism and associated piping had to be dismantled, tightened and reassembled.
I detected moisture under the sink, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It took me over a month to find that the collar holding down the spigot over the sink had come loose and every time it was used a little water would trickle out and back down under the sink, spreading over the various water supply lines and water heater infrastructure under there. The small leak was impossible for me to track down until it became a torrent, then any idiot could see where it was coming from.
The screws holding the table base down backed out and the subsequent swaying of the table base eventually tore the screws from their moorings. I just had to rotate the base a little and screw it down again. The new screws have held fast since Michigan.
Back in North Carolina the guy who repacked the wheel bearings left the trailer breakaway pin disconnected, which is how I discovered that the breakaway device (which locks up the trailer brakes in the event it becomes disconnected from the truck, so it doesn’t pass you going down a mountain road) wasn’t working. Couldn’t do anything about it myself and had to wait until we were situated in a place for an extended period near a city so I could hire a mechanic to come out and look at it; that didn’t happen until 2 months later in Stuart Florida. I had a guy named Joe from Father & Son Mobile RV Repair come out. Joe and his mullet head arrived on schedule and he proceeded to disconnect and rearrange the wiring around my batteries. In short order the breakaway device was working. He couldn’t find the leak under the sink which was plaguing me at the time, nor could he address the slight leak around a seal in the graywater tank. So I paid $180 to get the breakaway device rewired. A week and 150 miles later I realized that my batteries weren’t charging, either by being connected to the truck or by being plugged in at campsites. I called Joe and his mullet and they immediately got all defensive, suggesting that both the truck and the trailer charger had, remarkably, blown fuses at the same time which prevented the batteries from charging (no), or some other miraculous combination of failures, but whatever it was it wasn’t his fault because “..listen, I work on million dollar motor coaches,” leaving something unsaid . When I had watched him work on the truck battery connections I wondered why he was hooking up an extraneous wire that I knew to be left over from some modification the previous owner had installed and removed. Not being in a position to find help from an electrician I decided to disconnect that particular wire and, behold, the batteries are charging when it is in towing mode. There is still a problem with the DC charging system but it can wait until New Mexico.
The graywater leak was a miniscule leak, maybe a drop every ten minutes, until Joe and his mullet started poking around, then it became a regular drip-drip-drip and had to be dealt with. I had to empty the wastewater tank, wait two days for it to dry out, remove old sealant around the suspect connection, and spread some epoxy over the pipe joints, which worked.
Every screw that can be seen needs to be tightened periodically. It’s the ones I can’t see that keep me up at night. But as you can see we have been pretty much trouble free these past five months. When we get to Albuquerque I plan on replacing some worn parts but it is mostly cosmetic.