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