RV Repairs Archives - Page 7 of 18

This blog is sort of about Dish…. But let me back up.

We are in our final week+ before hitting the road again. We’ve been in this park for several months. When we came here (again), we picked a spot that was too shaded and under a pine tree. After a few days, a nice spot on top of the hill opened – that also had a nice deck someone had left. We moved up there without much thought of the kind of trees we were going to be under. We would have shade about half the day and they weren’t pine. That was as much as we thought about it.

Well a week later, during quite a Central Illinois thunderstorm, a 2 inch branch fell – but I think it slowed its fall by hitting other branches on the way down. I searched carefully, but found no damage.

Branch after it hit the roof and fell off.

But, several times a day !!THUD!! or poc, poc, poc, poc. One end of the RV was under a 40 foot tall walnut tree and the other end an equally tall oak. The squirrels would go up in the oak tree and eat acorns and dump the bits onto the roof and the walnuts, I presume, would fall on their own, several times a day and of course, without warning. But, the site was nice so we stayed.

Then, one night/early morning: 3:30 am – nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock! What? It sounded like knuckles wrapping on the front door as fast and as frantically as someone could knock. We jumped out of bed, turned on outside lights – and there was no one.

Ok, we’ve heard of people doing that for kicks, but not in this RV park. Yet, we are in the middle of town, so who knows. The next day we put out our motion detector lights, and the next night – nothing.

Third night: at 3:40 nock, nock, nock, nock, space, nock, nock, nock, nock! We jumped up – saw no one and none of our motion lights had been set off. What? So, we lay in bed till our normal time to get up thinking about all the possibilities – too loud for a squirrel, wrong time of day for a bird. Why would a person be targeting us? No idea made any sense. I couldn’t think of anything in the RV that would pseudo-randomly start making that noise ever, let alone at that time of night.

It turned out that I had planned to install an Easy Start in the front air conditioner and it came to the top of my to-do list that afternoon. I grabbed my tools, went up to the roof and found this:

Walnut in the dish — Walnut in the Dish!

Apparently, a walnut falling 30 feet broke right through the dish dome. It was sitting in the bottom. It didn’t affect how the dish worked – we had been using it every day without a problem. But the antenna must have chosen to do some sort of diagnostic calisthenics in the middle of the night and the walnut was certainly preventing full rotation of the dish.

Well, the Easy Start install went without hitch and I had my wife toss me up some clear packing tape. I didn’t want to take a chance that duct tape would have something that might reduce the signal quality and I hoped it would only be temporary. I pulled the cover off and taped the cracks and hole from the inside, then also taped everything from the outside. Re-installed the cover, tested the air conditioner and sat down to find a new cover. Turns out the domes are available from Dish – $80 and immediate shipping. I can only hope it’s built just a little stronger. I am thinking though about some sort of protective cover in case of hail – like some thick bubble wrap shaped into a dome…. My solar panels, by the way haven’t been hurt by any of it.

I had thought about dead branches – but hadn’t seen that one when I looked. I never thought it would be the nuts that did me in.

Mike

It seems like all I do here is complain about things that are broken. But I hope these provide some insight to people on things they need to be checking once in a while. Like the bolts on their tow vehicle’s receivers……. This post at least, isn’t about something broken on my Tiffin.

We have a 2015 F150 XLT. We set it up to tow back in, 2017, I think. It used to tow our trailer, but when we bought a class C, it became the Towed Vehicle. We bought a roadmaster tow bar and receiver kit which we installed ourselves. It was a real pain in the butt because according to the instructions we had to use these “nuts” with a long wire attached. They had to be fished through a small hole in the frame to reach the three bolts that hold each receiver onto the frame. The frame on this vehicle is a box – two u-channels welded together. Let me say, I like the Roadmaster product and brand. I’d buy them again. I’m somewhat responsible as I didn’t check my bolts – but the design was faulty, as proven by the upgraded version.

We followed the instructions to a “T”, including torque specifications.

We had towed, I don’t know how many miles behind the C – maybe 5 or 6,000 miles. Then we bought the Class A and put another, 15,000 miles or so – towing most of it. So, the receiver has had a lot of use. When we pulled into the current campground – this is what I found. It wasn’t quite dragging on the ground and only a single bolt held it in place.

Needless to say, this didn’t make me happy. Yes, the instructions say check the bolts every 3000 miles, which we didn’t do. After all, we worked really hard to get it installed correctly. Right? Don’t you trust your own work?

I pulled the bumper off and removed the remainder of the right side and the left as well (which had visibly moved, probably because it ended up being the only side towing the truck). I immediately order a new set. When it arrived, I could see they changed the design quite a bit – seemingly to fix the shortcomings of the original version. First, the instructions now tell you to pull the bumper so the receivers (and nuts) can be installed properly. The main bolts now have a heavy plate with nuts welded to it to provide a much better and stronger mount. The old unit used a loose spacer plate between the receiver and frame – which in the new one was welded to the receiver meaning one less surface for things to slide on.

Broken Bolt — Note concentric edges – stretching over time.

Those are the good differences. On the bad side, there are three bolts. Two go through the bottom of the frame and one goes in the end of a triangular shaped arm that braces the receiver on the side of the frame. And the new bracket is just over half an inch shorter so I have to drill a new hole in the frame to install these receivers. Yes, that is a crack in the frame, but only in one layer. I took the truck to a welding shop to see what the guy thought.

He said with two layers, it’s a terrible place to try to weld, and since the new bracket would have a support plate on top instead of just the weak nuts, that it would be fine without welding.

Now the instructions also say:

Every 3,000 miles, the owner must inspect the fasteners for proper torque, according to the bolt torque requirements chart on the last page of instructions. The owner must also inspect all mounting points for cracks or other signs of fatigue every 3,000 miles.

But they also say to put Threadlock Red on the bolts. If you put Red on the bolts, you won’t be able to tighten the bolts if you do discover they have gotten loose. I believe I’ll be putting Blue on when I reassemble it all. Also, the upper bolt still has one of those lame nuts on it. If it ever comes loose, the nut will just spin, requiring the bumper to come off in order to tighten it. Roadmaster could have fixed that as well with another bracket with a nut welded to it.

So, reminder – you should once in a while, check your tow receiver and your hitch bolts (some class A hitches have had issues) and make sure everything is tight.

Category: RV Repairs

Dishing it out….

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Unhitched at highway speeds? Almost

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