Slow is better than no progress. We just finished up one of those half hour projects that morphs into 2 days. We have a powered hose reel on our coach, you just pull out the hose to hook up to campground water and then a motor pulls it back in when you unhook. We managed to get something on the hose, at least the last 15 feet of it that caused the hose to become almost rigid, and when you are trying to get it to roll onto the reel it doesn't work too well. I called the company that makes the reel, and figured I could just buy a new hose and stick it on the reel. They explained that I could do that, but they recommended for a little more money it would be better to replace the entire reel with hose already attached as it was fairly difficult to install the hose on the end. They said that way by only removing one big nut I could replace it and get not only a new hose but a new reel complete with new bearings, so we went for it.
I started the quick little project yesterday and found out immediately that the coach manufacturer would have had to really outdo themselves to put it in a more inaccessible spot! And the nut is 1 1/2", no I do not have a socket that big. I decided to see if my friend Harvey or Jack had one instead of buying one. Struck pay dirt, Harvey had one. Good, simple now, just crawl in the basement and loosen the nut, pull out the reel and put in the new one. Noooooooooo! First off I can't get to the reel without disconnecting several water lines, easy enough. Then I put the socket on and........I CAN'T BUDGE IT! I try using a long breaker bar, no luck, hitting it with a hammer, no luck, call my strong son, still no luck. Run out of time and energy, hook up the water line again so we have water. Today our son Jason comes back with new vigor, crawls in, and no he can't get it either. Decide to remove the whole assembly from the bay. Have to move lots of wires, remove a switch, cut a wire, move a couple water lines and connections, and we finally manage to wrest it out. Then we try the nut again, no luck. Finally with both my son and I using a 5 foot pipe we get enough leverage to get it off! Man they sure wanted that nut to stay on! Putting it back in only took an hour, so we are good to go.
We have 75,000 miles on our coach now, so we have decided to get new shocks and an alignment. I have been shopping on the internet for shocks and discovered there are two main manufacturers of shocks for motorhomes. Koni and Bilstein. Both have great reputations and have been building shocks for many, many years. I've read a ton of opinions and comments on several different forums and find both are well liked by folks who have installed them. I have decided to go with Bilsteins, both have lifetime warranties, and Motorhome magazine actually did a test of the various shocks and found they liked the Bilsteins the most. But the best part is the fact the Bilsteins are HALF the price of the Koni's.
There is an alignment shop in Orlando called Josam's that is considered the best on the east coast for alignment and chassis work for motorhomes and trucks. So we are going to buy the shocks, and head up to Josam's to have them installed, adjust our ride height, and do an alignment. It's a 130 miles from here, so it will give us an opportunity to run the motorhome a little bit in the middle of our 4 months here.
Almost forgot. Our strut issue under our bed has been solved, although no one was able to figure why they all of a sudden failed. We sent our original non locking strut and the new broken locking strut back to Alliance Coach, and they couldn't see anything wrong either. So what we did was replace the locking strut with another regular strut. It makes it very easy to raise the bed, and we will use a dowel to make sure it doesn't come back down until we want it to. Alliance made good on the bad strut so all is well.
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