One Hour And We Were Back In Business

Yuma is on Mountain time and our appointment at the RV Repair was scheduled at 9am, which, coming from California, really is at 8am, which meant we had to get up early. Two other errands were on the agenda and they had to be done before getting to CJ's RV-Repair in the foothills.

We had to stop for diesel and a dumping station.

Pilot Knob LTVA

We found both at MAVERIK Truckstop. Then we continued into the foothills.

CJ's is operating behind an RV storage and when rolling into their yard, a guy was already standing outside and waving us into a parking spot.

All I can say is that the man knew what he was doing. After checking out fuses, voltage, and relays, he found the culprit. When I had my coach batteries out to connect the Lithium battery, and afterwards re-installed the old batteries, I had connected a thin red wire to the wrong battery pol. Instead of 12V it only got 6, and, obviously, that is not enough to run the slides. My fault entirely.

Well, the bill I had to pay was not scary. Or what do you think about $130? 

If you get into any RV-trouble in the Yuma area we gladly recommend CJ's. Not only are they very efficient and you don't have to wait months like with RV-dealers, but they also are very friendly and accommodating. When I told him about our experiment with the Lithium battery, he agreed that the battery most likely is faulty.

Being in Yuma, we got our diesel filled up and tomorrow we gonna see some friends, we haven't seen for 2 years.

This afternoon sun got out and we did a nice walk-about at Pilot Knob LTVA. This year the desert is especially beautiful.

And Back To The Projects

Lazy Holidays are over and we move back to projects, brought up from our dear motorhome.

In my posting of Dec 22 I talked about our metal roof loosening from the sidewall. Thank god I was able to fix this after I got the necessary screws. I drilled about 40 holes and got 40 screws to hold the metal in place. My way of pressing the roof material to the sidewall was working out. Of course, those screws are visible but who's looking anyway? That roof will never get loose gain.

Having finished that project, we decided to empty out our waste water tanks. The procedure of getting the bus ready to move again always involves a couple of hours preparations.

One of the last things is moving in the slide-outs.

And that's where a new project started.

None of our 3 slides were moving. Pressing the buttons yielded - nothing. Not a sound, no beeps - just silence.

I was stumped. I had only experienced this when I had started the engine without first pulling in the slides. Our bus has a lock-out switch which makes slides inoperable when the key is in the ignition position or the engine running. Similarly the same is valid with the parking brake off. With the help of neighbours I checked all related fuses and relays which could have an impact on the slide operation. All seemed working fine. Yeah, I really was stumped!

We still needed to go to the dump station so somehow the slides had to come in. Looking into our baggage compartments I saw that the electric motors were visible and accessible. One of each side and the third one mounted under our bed inside a wooden box. They just had an electric connector with plus-minus wires.

Searching auto part stores in town for a fitting plugin proved useless, so I build my own with 2 nails, wiring and hot glue. Once that was done I used the battery of my electric screwdriver and inserted 2 copper wires.  Once I connected this make-shift contraption to the slide-out motor, the slide was moving. That meant that we finally could go to the dump station.

Reversing plus/minus moved the slides out again. It is a little awkward, but works fine in a pickle.

A call to two RV repair facilities didn't yield anything. The third company got us an appointment for Wednesday morning. 

So we are near Yuma tonight. Our appointment is for 9am and we still have to go for 40 minutes from where we are now.

Meanwhile, we have been enjoying a super beautiful sunset.