Wow, the end of Feb already--Some good stuff, and some not so good stuff

So first with the good.  We went up last week to Josam's in Orlando, and other than the incredible amount of traffic and road delays it was a good trip.  The new Toyo's call for different inflation pressures than the Michelins did so the first thing on the agenda was to reprogram our TPMS, tire pressure monitoring system, for the new, higher pressures.  Our TST system has alarms for over pressure and under pressure, so depending on the required pressure you have to input those parameters, and while we were at it, we decided to replace the batteries in all our sensors.  

One of our flow through sensors

I should mention setting tire pressures on a motorhome.  First of all, all manufacturers install a placard with required tire pressures for the OEM tires at the gross weight of the rig.  This ensures that with the published pressure the tires can carry the maximum weight of the coach.  Some people just use this pressure, but in many, if not most cases, motorhomes are nowhere near their gross weight, so the tires are effectively over inflated causing a firmer than necessary ride and potential for an abnormal wear pattern.  So the answer to this is to weigh your coach when it is completely outfitted for travel.  All the "stuff" is on board, tanks are full or calculated, and the people are figured in.  And the weighing should at least be axle by axle, if not wheel by wheel.  With this information, you can then take the tire manufacturer's load and inflation chart for your particular tire model and size and calculate what the pressure needs to be to carry the actual weight.  So as an example, on our steer axle the Michelins we took off required 115#, and the new Toyos require 125#, so we had to make adjustments on the TPMS to accommodate the new pressures.

When we got to Josam's, a little late with all the traffic, Barry had us pull right in and put 2 techs on our tires immediately.  Meanwhile we checked to be sure of the date codes on the new tires, I had requested no older than 6 month tires, and sure enough they all fell inside my requirement.  I should mention all tires are stamped with a date code, it is a 4 digit number inside an oval, the first 2 numbers are the week of the year, and the last 2 numbers are the year, so if the code was 4117, it means the tire was made the 41st week of 2017.

In the bay ready to go

Some of our new tires

After they got the old tires off, Jan happened to walk by and notice quite the blemish on our front left tire.  It appeared we had hit something big at one time, all the way down to the cord, we were lucky to not have had a big problem.

Quite the hole!

So as the guys were working away, Barry came by and said, "Hey let me show you something".  Now folks, that is never a good thing to hear.  So he takes me back and shows me one of our airbags that looks pretty darn bad.  He says you might want to replace these, they are deteriorating pretty badly, although they are not leaking right now.  He thinks we could probably get through a year:(

One of the 10 airbags on our coach

A close up of the checking and cracking

So I have been doing research to find out the part numbers for our 10 airbags, and Jan and I are pretty much decided that we will replace them coming back out of Florida this spring for peace of mind.

So we got all the tires on, balance beads inserted, new extended valve stems on the inner duals, and an alignment.  It was funny though, as I said the Toyo's on the front have to have 125# of air in them and the shop couldn't get them over 120#, what with all the various air tools the entire shop is using, so we started our generator, and filled them from our compressor to the required 125#.

Pumping them up

Kinda like watching a pot boil:-)

We both thought the ride was even better on the way back than with the Michelins, even at the higher tire pressures.  So we are very happy campers!

We towed the truck up and back to try out the new tow bar, and we were very pleased.  It does release as easily as advertised and tows well.

New tow bar

So after my last post detailing our tile replacement, and all the care we took making sure the floor was nice and level and covering the back of tile carefully with silicone, it shattered with the very first slide retraction on our way to Orlando!  So we now, once again, have a beautiful fake plywood tile back in place.  In fact we are talking about replacing the entire tile floor with wood, and really wish we had just put wood throughout when we redid the floor.

A little visualization with a bunch of samples
Time will tell

And the winner is..........TOYO!

I told you we were looking at replacing our once again cracked Michelins sometime this spring, either just the steer tires this year or possibly all 8 if we could find a good deal.  Well, it's going to be all 8, and we are doing it next week.  We were for some reason taking another close look at our tires and noticed with quite some surprise that not only were they all cracked but our steers had a funny wear pattern on them that we had not noticed before.  In fact when we first saw the front left tire we were shocked at how bad it appeared.  When we are parked and leveled the coach sits down quite a bit so to take a better look we started it up, got it up on it's air suspension, turned the wheel, and even though it was unusual, it wasn't as bad as we thought, thankfully.  At first we wondered if we could even drive it to get tires or whether we would have to have someone come to us.  So with this development we decided we were going to take care of all 8 if we could.  Now I should interject, we have driven more than 46,500 miles on these tires, but they are not quite 4 years old.  Then I looked and found that since our last alignment 5 years ago, we had driven over 53,800 miles.  I had narrowed the choice down to the Toyo M144 tires from many, many reports on line and a few direct contacts and found they were a very well respected tire with great specs, and even better, $200 less PER tire than Michelins, and I could find no reports of cracking or failure.  First, I called Josam in Orlando, probably the most respected RV chassis and alignment center east of the Mississippi, and a place we have been several times to see if they thought a bad alignment might have caused this wear pattern.  Barry, the service manager there said he doubted it, but when was my last alignment?  When I told him, 5 years and 53,800 miles ago, he said I might want to think about another:)  We talked about tires and he felt Toyo's were a great choice as well, and then asked if he could give me a quote?  Of course!  Never gave a thought to getting tires there.

Our strange wear pattern

The right is not nearly as bad as the left

I made numerous calls around Florida and Georgia, as we had decided we would both feel better getting new tires before going too far.  I got several really good quotes and waited to hear back from Josam.  When I did we were doubly pleased as their quote was the best we had found, and it meant, "one stop shopping".  We set up an appointment for next week to have all 8 tires replaced, new Dynabeads balancing beads installed, new Borg long valve stems installed on the inside duals, no more extensions, and an alignment, all at one place!

We also got a few other smaller projects out of the way.  Our entry step treads were getting worn and looked pretty ratty, and the nonskid finish wasn't very nonskid anymore so off they came and new went on.  A multitool made quick work of it.

Old off and now the adhesive

New going on

Tada!

Then since we were on a roll, we decided to just bite the bullet and get our chassis batteries replaced a little sooner than we had planned, especially since we were going to make a trip to Orlando to get our tires.  And the fact that Karen and Tom wanted to replace their's as well made it a package deal.  We replaced our Lifeline AGM's with Interstate 31M-AGM's that have 800 CCA, and best of all a 36 month replacement warranty.  So I picked up the 5 batteries right here in Venice and installed 3 in our coach and we put 2 in K&T's coach.  Quick, easy, and best of all, done!

Old ones coming out

Bright, shiny, and new

Getting installed

Karen and Tom's coming out

And then one more thing.  If you remember way back in 2016, just before our appointment to have a few things worked on in Oregon, I ran our front passenger slide in  and POW, one of our new, at least in 2014, tiles cracked into a thousand pieces like a gunshot.  After realizing it was only a tile and not the entire side of the motorhome falling out, we put a temporary piece of plywood in until we got to the point of replacing it.  But why did it fail?  Turned out after we got to our appointment at Elite in Oregon, Erik found that the mastic we had used to apply the tiles didn't work, and in his opinion it would only be a matter of time before ALL of our tiles would loosen and come up.  Oh so wonderful, especially after the absolute hours and hours of time and effort that Jan and I put into that floor.  Well, we just got around to replacing the temporary plywood with a new tile, and we even considered, albeit for just an hour or so, replacing the entire tile floor.  After we came to our senses and at least told ourselves we would wait at least a year or maybe two before we would consider that, we did put in a new tile.

Plywood out, a sad uneven chunk of OSB out, and
a patch installed

Floor leveler to get it mostly smooth

A shim to, we hope, absorb the weight of the roller

Yes, we used silicone instead of mastic

All in waiting for grout

So we have not just been sitting around:)  We still have a few more smallish projects to attend to before we leave, and lots of time, famous last words.  Our quick trip to Orlando will also give us a chance to evaluate a new trip planning and mapping app we bought.  But more on that later.  So in the meantime, Happy Valentine's Day.