Slow Times Here in Florida

We did get our switch panel back, and it works!  But we've heard nothing about our captain's chairs yet, and it's been 3 weeks plus.  I haven't bugged them since my better half, aka, diesel mechanic, or Jan as you know her is a bit laid up.  She had been having some pain in her wrist and hand for awhile and went back to see her hand doctor, and he found that a cyst was causing the problem, so she had a bit of surgery and is wearing a soft cast for about 10 days.  Monday she gets it off.

But before that she single handedly washed and waxed half of the coach while I finished up the last of my doctor's appointments.  A colonoscopy to go next week and we're all done here with our Florida docs.  She also replaced our cracked vent cover.

We attended Debbie and Harold's Super Bowl party, and can truly say we didn't see a minute of the game, but had a good time visiting with friends.  It was a very cool evening, but they had a nice fire and several propane heaters.  This year has been the coldest we can remember since we first started coming down here in 1998.

Left to right, Sue, Barb, Phil, Harold, Debbie, Doug, Judy, my head, and Tom

On to the fires, Harold, me, Scott, Tom, Phil, and Doug

And the other fire, Harvey, John, Barb, Debbie, and Judy

We had a good time, and proud to say we didn't see any of the game or halftime show:-)

So as I mentioned in the previous post, Jan discovered her implant seemed loose, so we had to make a whirlwind trip to Atlanta to see our dentist.  We have been with him for almost 25 years, and yes it is absolutely worth it to drive 550 miles one way to see him and not someone else.  So we launched Sunday and arrived at friend's John and Diane's who put us for the two nights we were there.  We had a great visit with them enjoyed several different bourbons and even had a cigar or two.  Monday turned into a rainy cold day which gave us plenty of opportunity to visit, try to solve the problems of the world, and go out to a nice dinner.  Tuesday morning bright and early we went to see the dentist, and sure enough the implant was loose, he removed the crown and sent us directly to the oral surgeon, as he was concerned something wasn't right and wanted them to check it.  So off we go in the opposite direction to get Jan fit into a very tight schedule.  It's evidently a little bit unusual as the implant torques okay, but is loose, so Jan is on a month of antibiotics, and will have it checked again in March when we leave here and head north.  They think most likely they will have to remove this implant and put in a new one.  Time will tell, so instead of leaving at 08:30am, we never got off until almost 11:00am.  Oh well, it was worth the peace of mind.

Posing for the camera with John and Diane:-)

So now we are back fighting our battle with stink bugs.  We picked them up in Pennsylvania this past October.  It feels like we have vacuumed or killed hundreds of them and they just keep on coming.  We can't figure out where they are, or how there can possibly be more and more of them.  It's driving us crazy!

In case you aren't familiar with what they look like

We met with friend's Steve and Bobbie for our annual get together lunch along with Tom.  Had a nice visit and a good meal.

Bobbie, Steve, and Tom

Then, of course, I have to have a food picture of a dinner I whipped up, yeah me.

Delish!  Seared scallops over fried corn medley, with a bed of mashed potatoes

So still waiting on our captain's chairs, hopefully my next post will include pictures of them.  Still a few more projects to accomplish, and oh my gosh, we are down to less than one month to go!

 

Not Much To Report

Pretty much a waiting game here right now.  We haven't gotten the call yet saying our captain's chairs are done, still haven't gotten the switch pad back either.  So we haven't washed the rig yet cause it is so much easier if you pull in the slides, but we can't do that without the switch panel.   

But we haven't just been sitting on our laurels either.  After Jan had her crown put in while in Atlanta, she has had just a bit of discomfort, and found that when she flossed she thinks it is moving slightly, I agree peering down her throat with a flashlight.  We thought no big deal, we can get it taken care of in March when we get back to Atlanta.  NO!  Our dentist who Jan had contacted gave her a call back and said it would be necessary to have it looked at either here or there to determine what was what, if the implant itself is loose there is a chance an infection could get down in the bone, so.........we are making a road trip.  

A couple years ago, on one of our Oregon trips, Scott at Amazing Creations made a cat drawer for us.  We put Bert's food and litter box in there, he made it so Bert could go in and out, but also made up a panel that we could attach to it after Bert went to cat heaven.  It has taken a bit of time to deal with this project, but we got it done.

Bert's drawer

 

With the drawer panel on and installing the lock

We have a slight hesitation starting our coach's engine now and then, very intermittent, and usually when it has been running for awhile, shut off, then restarted like we do when we pull into a campsite.  I mentioned it to Detroit Diesel when we had it in, and the service manager suggested it might be the starter solenoid, easy to install and cheap and if it were him he would try that first.  So I ordered one and we put it in, simple job.

It resides on our rear run panel near the engine

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to have solved our problem as the first start had a little hesitation.  So at some point we will either wait for our starter to die or maybe next year when we have our engine serviced we'll swap out the starter.  

We are still working on our black tank, the sensor is reading a little better, down to a low of 64%.  We keep flushing and flushing and have been adding a strong enzyme treatment to try to eat away at the scum inside the tank.  I don't expect total success until we can get moving again when we leave Florida to really slosh the tank clean.

And I'll leave you with our visit from Mad Max who arrived at the hardware store while I was there:-)

Hopefully I will have a lot more to report in the next post.

A Short Update

Almost all the way back to Florida, a dump truck gave us a gift of a rock in the windshield, sounded like a gunshot.  But it was nicely contained and an almost perfect circle, turned it in and  after 3 scheduled appointments, the third being the charm, we got it all fixed up.

As I had mentioned, we lost most of the readouts on our Aladdin monitoring system, and were thinking the worse.  We have to have a way of reading our electrics, AC, DC, battery banks, amperage to and from both, we could live without the other stuff, like temperature, compass heading, and with our new tank system, the tank levels.  With much research I did find that there is a replacement system called Silverleaf that is almost plug and play, but quite expensive, so we were very relieved when Jan, the diesel mechanic got it working after unplugging and replugging several connections.  We had hoped it was just a loose or iffy connection and that is what it turned out to be, thankfully.

A part of the system where those affected modules are,
on the ceiling of one of our basement compartments

We had a wonky switch problem when we first left Florida last year, the switch that controls the driver's side front slide extension, it was intermittent, but with some persuasion, you could get the slide out.  And in fact it seemed to work perfectly after a few days until a few stops before returning to Florida.  The button is on a 10 button panel that feeds our multiplex system, a computer driven system that allows each button or switch anywhere to do most anything in the coach.  Like a lot of things on our older coach, replacements are hard to come by.  There is a company M&M Electronics that are experts with these Intellitech systems.  I called them and they had me pull the switch panel out and send it to them.  They are confident they can fix it.  Time will tell.

These are two similar switch panels

A big thing on our agenda is getting our captain's chairs recovered.  We had them recovered in 2015, paid a lot to have them done in ultra leather and never imagined they would need to be redone for as long as we have the coach.  Well, the driver's seat started to split and chip off, at one seam at first, then it looked like the material had "broken".  At first we thought the passenger seat escaped, but sure enough it started to crack as well.  After a lot of research we found a shop in Sarasota that has been doing custom car restoration and upholstery for over 50 years.  We talked to them and made an appointment for them to redo our seats.  We also found out that the ultra leather we had paid for wasn't even ultra leather!  This time we are having the seating surface done in real leather and the rest in a matching commercial vinyl, more like auto seats are done.  I'll enclose pictures and more info when we get them back.

You can see the cracking at the seam, but the entire surface is cracked

Then I learned a very expensive lesson, in fact one that has cost hundreds of dollars over the years.  We and most other coaches built by Monaco, and I am sure many other brands use a pretty robust water pump made by Remco, variable speed, puts out a lot of water, and is fairly quiet, but it does have one weakness.  There is an internal check valve that fails periodically after 3-5 years that allows pressurized water from the campground source to bypass through the pump and fill your water tank.  You can live with it for awhile, just by turning off the hose bib and using tank water, after all the pump still works fine.  With no research and just dumb thinking I have thought all these years, yeah this goes back at least to 2008 for this coach, that the check valve was deep inside the pump and unserviceable, so the solution to this issue was to buy a new pump for $230.  And I did just buy my probably third pump for our coach.  It is a very easy swap out, and I had cut the wires on the new pump, attached the electrical connectors after removing the older pump, and I happened to look into the outflow side and what do I see?  Something that looks like a chintzy plastic check valve, what?!?!  Then I look into the new pump and there isn't one??  So I call Remco and am told they don't include a check valve any longer, and yes, that is the check valve, easily replaced by just pulling it out with a pair of pliers, and if I want one I can order them for $7.99!!!!!  OMG, after buying pumps for over $200 I could have been buying check valves for $8.  Live and learn:-)  And no, I can't return the new pump as I had already cut the wires.....

So to close, I have to include at least one food picture, a delicious dinner we made, seared scallops on a bed of spinach with roasted turmeric cauliflower.  Yummy!