A quick check in

First, on the air bags or springs.  I inquired at Monaco, or what's left of Monaco, and at Alliance, and on numerous forums and found out the part numbers for our bags.  Seems the front 4 use bags with a 3/4" supply as they connect to a ping tank in the air suspension system which is basically an accumulator to provide more air and comfort to the ride, and the 6 rear bags use the more typical 1/4" supply.  Barry at Josam likes Firestone bags better than the Contitech on our coach so I was able to get a cross-reference.  Although Barry was very competitive with his tire pricing, I was able to do better at SDtruckspring.com.  We also made up our minds to replace them this spring so we have an appointment set up in April on our way out of Florida.  We have already received all the bags and have them in our storage facility until we head north.  If anyone cares, on the Roadmaster S10 bag chassis, the front bags are W01-358-8897, and the rears are W01-358-9376.

In the meantime we have been doing a few little things on our list.  Our front entry door needed a bit of adjustment, it was getting to the point where one of these times we wouldn't have been able to get in, not a good thing.  Well, we pulled off the access panel and found we could not reach the adjustment nuts with any wrench I had, so we were looking at removing the inside panel of the door.  As we studied that, we saw we would have to cut the caulking between the outside border of the door and the face of the door, and dismantle the entire edge to get to the nuts.  We figured there had to be a better way.  The inside of our door is a vinyl covered extruded plastic, so I decided to cut a hole in the door with a hole saw right above the adjusting nuts, and then cover the hole.  But what to cover it with?

Our new adjusting hole

Another project of ours this winter is to install skid plates on our passenger side rear slide bottom.  A weakness of our slides is the bottom where the rollers touch deteriorates over time and many, many slide extensions and retractions, and if you catch it before it goes all the way through, it is a fairly simple and inexpensive fix.  The rollers will ride on top of the plates preventing any further damage.  In fact we had plates put on at Elite in Oregon 2 years ago on our driver side rear slide and were warned we would need to do it on the other side at some point, well that time has arrived.  

You can see the wear spot where we will install the skid plates.
Getting ready to raise the slide.

Kind of hard to see, but it is wearing through the fiberglass

Eric installing a plate 2 years ago

So as I was ordering the stainless plates, we had an epiphany that a piece of stainless would cover our new hole in the door and look like it had always been there, so that's what we did.  It still needed to be cut to the exact curve, and our good friend Jack took care of it for us with his portable band saw!

Looks great!

We are now down to 5 weeks, and are starting to feel the need to get the rest of our stuff done, and we do have a small list.  Aqua-Hot service, Sani-Con service, check the roof for caulking, wash and wax, replace some clearance lights, etc.  

On another note we have made reservations at almost all the campgrounds for the summer, a new record for us.  We still have a few public campgrounds to go, but their reservation windows haven't opened up yet.  So right now we are firm in our plans to swing quickly through New England, then to Buffalo to visit our son, then to Elkhart to get our wheel well repaired, and then race west to Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado for the rest of the time into fall.  More details will be shared as we get closer.