This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,940 for Friday 8th of September 2023.
Today's show is entitled Equipment Maintenance.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Ahu Ka and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
We prepare the RV and the truck for our trip.
Hello, this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio, welcoming you to another exciting episode
about RV Travels, and this is talking about our 2022-2023 trip to the southeast.
The last time we talked about all of the planning that went into it and getting the book
prepared, well the next thing you have to deal with is Equipment Maintenance.
And so we had to do that and we started with the tires.
RV tires can blow out and among the main reasons is age.
You see tires are a lot more complicated than many people realize.
And one complication is that they contain chemicals that keep the rubber flexible and
strong, but these chemicals can break down and disappear over time, so the tire which
looks good and has plenty of tread can be on the verge of a blowout and that can be
a very bad day indeed.
It can do thousands of dollars worth of damage to your RV, leave you stranded on the
side of the road and worst case cause you to lose control resulting the loss of the RV,
the truck or even your life.
So it's nothing to be casual about.
Now the tires in our RV were manufactured in 2015.
I mean, in the United States this is stamped on the side of the tire by federal regulation,
so you can always check your tires and see when they were manufactured.
And it's usually the code is six digits or maybe it's four digits, but there's two parts.
The one is which week of the year and the other is which year it is.
So you know, 36, 15 would be the 36th week of 2015 and that sort of thing.
In any event, 2015, and we're looking at the end of 2022 meant that these were at least
seven, probably over seven years old and that's old that you don't want to take chances
that new tires were called for.
So I decided to go with discount tire because their nationwide and have an excellent warranty.
So I bought five tires, all right.
I needed to replace the spare as well since it is and it turns out the spare was even older
than the tires that were on the RV.
The previous owner was not paying attention, I would say.
In any event, I made an appointment to install all the tires.
Then when we went to hook up the RV to the truck, it would not start.
So I had to call roadside assistance.
All right, that's an essential piece of insurance that you don't want to go without.
If you're going to be doing any RVing, I would say I would not want to go without it just as a driver.
It turned out we'd probably done it to ourselves.
We had disconnected the negative battery cables since the truck was just sitting in there.
And we didn't want the battery to run down.
The vehicles these days are drawing in the battery all the time, sometimes referred to
as parasitic load, turn on various devices and it can easily drain a battery over a few months.
Then when I reconnected the negative, I didn't tighten the nuts sufficiently.
The driver from roadside assistance was very helpful though, diagnosed the problem immediately
and got it started.
But he said it looked like the batteries were in bed shape.
So when we got it running, I immediately drove it to the freight liner dealer and asked
them to check it.
There I discovered that we had not quite done it right.
We disconnected the negative cable, but because we have multiple batteries in the truck,
we would have needed to disconnect all of the negative cables or else there would still
be a drain.
We mentioned that most people install a battery shut-off switch to make it easy.
So I asked him to check out the whole charging system and install such a switch.
And then I would have to make a new appointment with discount tire.
And of course we have also an appointment with General RV in November to do a number of
RV maintenance repair tasks.
Well, more fun a few weeks later, we got the RV to discount tire for the installation.
We made the appointment for 8am when they opened, but we went down there closer to 720.
And the reason for that is I wanted to get the RV into the position they asked before
the parking lot filled up.
I might have had room even with the cars, but I don't like taking chances with the truck
and the RV connected the total length is about 50 feet and that's, you don't do tight
turns that way.
So I get down there and no problem.
The installation process took about an hour and a half, but we ran into another little
road bump.
I bought five identical tires, but the spare was undersized and on a smaller rim, which
I did not want.
So we ended up taking the spare tire with us in ordering a proper rim on the internet.
But we had new tires on the RV, so I felt good.
This is called foreshadowing kids.
We took it back to the storage lot and took the truck home so I could do a little maintenance
such as touching up the paint and a few stops, a few spots.
Cheryl told me she had made an appointment for 11 a.m. on November 11th, which would be
104th anniversary of the armistice.
But when we got to the storage lot to pick up the RV, we discovered one of the tires
was flat.
You really don't want to see that with a brand new tire.
We had only had the tire 10 days at this point.
So we called roadside assistance again and they actually had someone there in about
an hour.
And while I was dealing with this, Cheryl sent emails to the service person at General
RV explaining the situation and that we would be late, but we'd get there when the tire
was fixed.
The company that roadside assistance set us was a local truck tire service, which
I was glad to learn about, it makes sense that there would be such a service, but I'd
never thought about it before.
Now the service person diagnosed the problem instantly when I said we had just had the
tires a few days and said it was probably the valve stem.
He removed the tire and sprayed a solution of soap and water on the valve stem and you
could see the bubbles.
That pretty much proved the point.
So he took the tire off of the rim, replaced the valve stem and remounted the tire.
He said if one was bad, what were the odds on the others?
And spraying them with that soap and water solution showed a second bad valve stem, not as
bad as the first, but it wouldn't have been a slow leak.
At this point we unanimously agreed to replace all of the valve stems, a valuable lesson
learned.
Now the service charged us $15 per valve stem.
This is the truck tire roadside assistance service.
Now I have no idea if that's a standard price, or if it is marked up, nor do I care.
The point is that if the sales person at discount tire had said to me when I bought the
tires in the first place, hey, you have all brand new tires here.
We recommend you get new valve stems in addition only $15 each.
And I would have gladly said make it so my good man.
Instead I spent over $300 for a service call to the storage yard.
I only wanted peace of mind in the first place and an extra $60 on my tire bill would not
have bothered me in the least.
I later went back to discount tire and they put in a refund claim which was paid to cover
my costs for the roadside assistance.
I had to show receipts and everything but I didn't get the money.
While all of this was going on, Cheryl heard back from General RV that she had the date
of our appointment wrong anyway, it was not November 11th but November 17th.
There are lessons to be learned here.
Okay, I never really knew much about the importance of valve stems but I think that from
now on I will insist on new valve stems whenever I get new tires.
I'd rather spend a few bucks up front than be dealing with the roadside assistance.
And the other lesson learned is the importance of not putting things off until the last
minute.
Our trip does not start until December 15th so we have a month yet and can deal with these
issues without disrupting the whole trip.
In fact next year we planned to move our RV maintenance trip to General RV up by more than
a month we're probably going to set it up for something like August just because it's
better to have everything done well in advance.
We took our RV into General RV and November 17th gave them the list of things we wanted
to work on.
Our service advisor Chad warned us that they were very busy and might not be able to get
through the whole list.
Again, this is a reason for moving up our visit and future.
So we triaged the list, told them which ones were priorities.
We also told them that we needed to get it back by December 13th to make our departure.
Happily, he called us on December 5th to say it was ready so we went down and pick it up with them.
Now we brought the spare tire with us so they could install it since I thought it was too
heavy for us to manage.
Couple of senior citizens trying to get a big truck tire and it mounts underneath the
carriage of the RV just it did not make sense.
So we had them do it, did they charge us for it?
Of course they did, they charge us for every single thing they do, it's a business.
The RV looked good in any event we were looking forward to making our departure on time.
I told the RV back to the storage lot, Cheryl followed behind me and her car.
I noticed the truck was running a bit rough and Cheryl said I was a meeting white smoke
from the exhaust.
Then we got to the storage lot, we thought the front jacks were not working.
And if we couldn't use them getting the RV off the truck would be a problem.
But as Cheryl was going to look for help, I started hitting buttons and suddenly it came
on.
It was working so I disconnected and drove the truck back to the house so I could plug
it in.
Now one of the things I learned from the roadside assistance guy who came to the truck
in October was that diesel truck should be plugged in if left parked in cold weather and he
showed me where the plug is.
Another thing I didn't know about, but I could park it in my driveway and plug it in
through the garage so that was the plan.
But we're worried now about the truck, so on December 7th we took it to a westside freight
liner.
They were very busy and told us they probably could not look at it until December 13th.
They didn't look at it and diagnosed that we needed a new injector, so that's another
2000 repair bills.
I thought RV travel was supposed to be inexpensive.
But then they said that most likely the truck would not be done until December 16th
which is one day past our scheduled departure.
So once again I have to make some calls to reschedule our first few reservations.
This should mostly mean less time and Memphis, but since there were only a few things
I wanted to do there it probably isn't a big deal.
So this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always encouraging you to support
free software.
Bye-bye, you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
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