A quick post to welcome the New Year

We are pretty much settled in to our Florida digs.  Our dinners and lunches are lining up, Jan is happy playing Mahjong again, I've started Texas Hold'em with Tom, our Tiki bar group is happening, and we have just started a few of the projects for the winter.

I told you that we ripped out our wheel well for the 3rd time just before getting back here, so I have been spending some time trying to get estimates and planning when and where to get it fixed.  Amazingly we have found that our coach was manufactured somehow with the left offending wheel well 1 1/2" lower than the right.  No wonder it's happening!

We are pretty sure we will have it repaired and maybe modified a bit in Elkhart in the spring.

Also our good friend Jack has said he would be happy to help repair our broken bay compartment latch that broke in Shreveport.  Thank goodness because for some unknown reason they want $105 for this simple piece of metal!

This is an unbroken one

We have 2 slide locks, one on each end of our front driver side slide.  They are mechanical locks in that when the slide closes, it forces a lever back which extends a lever inside the coach to lock the slide in.  Each lock is covered in a piece of robust plastic held on with nylon rivets, to protect the inner mechanism.  I had noticed over the last few months we had lost several rivets on each lock.  It was time to get them off, checked, lubed thoroughly, and remounted and covered with new rivets.  You have to cut the head of the rivets off with a chisel to get the plastic cover off, then remove the 20 screws that hold it to the side of the slide.

One of the slide locks

I have removed a few of the rivets

Now you can see the guts of the slide lock, all stainless

On the workbench, er picnic table:)

All done

It was an easy fix.  Another unexpected issue has popped up though.  If you remember we had discovered numerous cracks in the sidewalls of our Michelin tires back in early 2014 on our then, 3-4 year old tires.  We went through the process of getting a tire rep to look at them, photo them, submit it for consideration, and waited weeks to hear that Michelin would pony up some money to replace our tires, of course, with new Michelins.  I had done some research and found there were many complaints about the tire we had, a XZA2 Energy, so we changed to a X Coach HL Z which was reported not to have the cracking issue.  Fast forward to now.  We have found all of our not even 4 year old tires have sidewall cracking again!  I have been researching other brands because we are DONE with Michelins and will not even pursue the warranty issue.  There are 3 primary tires we are looking at, the Bridgestone R268 Ecopia, the Continental HSR2 SA, and the Toyo M144, with the Toyo in the lead right now. As we continue with quotes, we will either replace just the steer tires in the spring and continue with the cracking rear tires, or if we can find a good deal, we will replace all 8.  Right now with preliminary info the Toyo's are looking to be around $150/tire less.  I will keep you all informed as to what we find and decide to do.