#318 June 21st Jordan lake bens bus Because of a hydraulic problem we stayed until till July 10th

When we arrived in North Carolina we visited my sisters and I remembered when we left last winter we said we would help Ben work on the bus. He would have to be on his own during my absence and he got quite a bit done. I intended to be helpful with his bus again.

I also needed to go down to Wilmington to see our daughter and deliver a sofa and a big tv that we did not need in the RV. These were some errands that had to be done but we might as well visit with Ben for a while first. We planned on staying at Jordan till July 3rd and then moving to Falls Lake. Because of a hydraulic problem we stayed at Jordan till July 10th. Even though the Rv was disabled I was still able to help with the bus. The story I want to tell is really two separate stories happening at the same time. One is working on the bus and the other is the hydraulic problem. I keep trying to separate them but it was all happening at the same time so I will ask for ones patience while reading.

Hydraulic problem

Our place at Jordan Lake was a nice pull-through that was like a hundred feet long. It had a bit of a dog leg crook to it but it was plenty big enough. We settled in and did our normal routine of making dinner and such.

We had arrived midweek and it seemed like we had all the privacy anyone could ever dream of. As Friday night rolled around, I realized that I had the front door part of the RV facing directly at another campsite that had previously been empty. I guess it hadn't occurred to me but now I'm staring straight at every move they make and they get to see every time I pick my nose. I decided let's reposition the RV so I don't have to look at these people. I'm sure they're wonderful but I just don't like staring at them.

I think I waited until they left on Sunday because I thought it might seem offensive if I did it right in their face. After they checked out, I completely repositioned the RV facing the vacant woods instead of a campsite. It took a few minutes but it worked out fine until I set the camper down off of the truck and pulled away. The next step is to slide out and begin the living process. I had noticed that lately sometimes whenever I had finished with the command of slide-out slide-in or whatever the hydraulic motor would continue to run against my will.

This is clearly a problem because it overheats the motor as it did a year earlier and Stone Mountain and it will burn itself up. I had done it several times in the last few weeks or months and it obviously bothered me. One time I had to yank the battery cable off because it wouldn't stop running. I had no clue of what would make something continue to run whenever I was asking to stop. I've got a control pad outside that digitally controls everything and I would press stop and it would just keep running. I am editing this story much after the fact and I will submit here what was actually happening. It appears that the 60 amp relay for the motor was going bad and would stay engaged even when the coil voltage was removed. This is a 10 dollar part if you don’t say the word RV. It’s the same Delco Remy starter relay they use on Ford inner wheel well since forever. Ten dollars if you say 1970 Ford station wagon. It's 65.00 if you say it's for my outboard motor. It's 158.00 if you say it's for my RV. Since the mother company for the RV, Lippert, was being so good and honoring a warranty they didn’t have to they paid 2,000 in-warranty parts to solve this 10.00 problem. I’m glad but knowing all this after the fact is hard to believe.

To go backward 6 months whenever I had the RV for only a week or two, I was trying to level it and it was giving me a bit of trouble getting it just right. The system had timed out and I guess I should have stopped but I went to manual and continued the process. I overheated the motor and it died and they sent me a new one.

These motors cost $800 so it's really great that they sent me a new one back at Stone Mountain. I told them then and I still feel like there should be some sort of motor thermal overload to kick out at the motor gets too warm. They never seem to get what I was saying and never gave me any type of protective device I can install so I just said thank you and they sent me the new motor. The thermal overload costs 60 cents but they would rather warranty an 800-dollar part hundreds of times per year than add this overload to their motor circuit.

Back to Jordan Lake. Lately, I have not been able to get the auto-leveling thing to work just right. Sometimes it would run and run when I don’t want it to which is creepy. The other thing it does is when I press auto level and it will go through the process and then I can hear the solenoid clicking but nothing is happening then it would time out and not work. I now know what the problem is a solenoid switch that is controlling the 60-amp wire that goes to the motor and a small gauge 12-volt signal pulls it in. If it doesn't fully disengage because it's going faulty the motor keeps running out of control.

Whenever we slide out, I like to make sure it’s fully out which is something that is controlled on the inside of the RV at a control screen in the stairwell. India had been pressing the hydraulic slide-out button but I just went in there and I said let's press it just a little bit more to make sure it's full. I don't want any air or water leaks coming in through the slide-out seals. It started to slide out but as soon as I let go of the button it should stop but sadly the solenoid is engaged and will not disengage. The motor is running and running. I go outside to try to pull a wire loose and turned off the power but I couldn’t get it to stop. Finally, I yanked the main battery cable loose and it had to stop. Just like at Stone Mountain I thought I smelled something and I touched the motor it was red hot. I thought well let's just let it cool off and we'll check back later. I waited half a day or a day and whenever I went to check the motor it did nothing. Since I've been through this once before I knew that I was probably dead.

I wanted to make sure it wasn't a control issue so I took a jumper to bypass and put 12 volts of main power straight to the forward and the reverse of the motor terminal and nothing happened. That kind of removes the computer and the solenoid out of the situation.

The good news is we are allowed to stay at the site for 14 days. Sliding back in will not be a problem until we leave. I began this process maybe four days into our stay and it took me a day or two to get some response from the company called Lippert. Now its day six or seven days and then they have to process this request and all that for several days then they ship it but they do take their time.

It became obvious that the part that I need will arrive at or near the 14-day mark. I spoke to the park ranger and talked about my dilemma. They said they understood and you can't move until the part arrives. I can't go anywhere with the slide-outs out anyway. They understood and they said well we'll just have to make some arrangement with a person that was arriving and needed the site. They extended my stay there for a few days because I was kind of desperately waiting for the part to arrive.

Going back a bit I had thought that there was no way that Lippert was going to send me a second motor so knowing they cost 800 I thought I would at least speak to an electric motor repair shop.

I think all this happened on the weekend so it took until the next Monday or so to get in touch with anybody. I had a conversation with a guy and he said these motors are tough he said it takes a certain amount of $100 an hour troubleshooting to figure it out then it takes a certain amount of taking it all apart and figuring out what the problem is and he said if you're not careful it cost $600 hundred to rebuild them so he usually just tells the customer to get a new one.

This wasn't what I wanted to hear so really now I'm looking at buying a new one for 800 hundred instead of rebuilding it so that’s kind of a bummer. I would also like to point out that I had done repairs and repairs for the three years as we've been on the road because my old rig was 10 years old.

The beauty of buying a brand new one was we weren't going to have any repairs for 10 years. You know I had a problem within the first two weeks with this motor and now 6 months later I'm having another motor problem. I'm just saying it kind of put the knot in your stomach when getting a brand-new unit meant no repairs, it just don't seem right.

I tried to find out how to manually operate the slide-out or up and down or anything because we were in kind of a pickle. I tried using a cordless drill which is where you take off the motor and you just spin the shaft of the hydraulic motor and my drill wasn't spinning it fast enough or something. I went to the campground host site and asked if they knew how I can reach the Ranger. He called the park ranger on his radio and he was going to try to meet me and he loaned me his heavy-duty DeWalt cordless drill to try to make some progress on moving the slides in or out.

His drill worked better than mine but it just wasn't cutting it So eventually I decided to go to Lowes. I bought a replacement cordless drill that was really powerful. It was a rather stout 24-volt Hitachi lithium as I have been a Hitachi person for quite a while. I usually get the same 12-volt drill but this one was a good price and stout so here I go. When I got back to the RV, I put the drill on the hydraulic shaft, and man it spun those slide outs in and out like you wouldn't believe.

I want to go back a little bit because before I got help with even possibly getting a new motor, I got on the technical line with Lippert. You have to be on hold for a very long time and I had a very sketchy signal so it was very difficult to be on hold for that long and then get the PDF and so it was just kind of a mess.

When you call Lippert you will be on hold for 7 to 10 minutes and if you lose your signal somewhere on the way it's over you got to try again that happened more than once. While I was on the phone he sent me a PDF on how to do it but he sent me the wrong PDF for the wrong RV.

The way he described it was we're not going to use the control panel on the inside of the RV like India pressing the computer screen.

He told me where the actual solenoid bypasses are and it's an Allen screw that you turn all the way clockwise or so forth or counterclockwise for reverse and back and forth the slides or leveling and all that.

Like I said the first phone call produced the wrong PDF then I get on hold again for 10 minutes and they finally realized their mistake and they sent me the right PDF so I got all this done. I was so pleased I was able to move the slides in and out and up and down and everything worked out fine. The only problem is it takes hours to do stuff like this

I finished up with the project and I was able to slide the RV fully out and get it leveled up using the cordless drill. All this was happening on a weekend and I eventually was able to get ahold of Lippert customer service on Monday.

I sent an email to the guy who helped me back at Stone Mountain and called and got him on the phone.

I sent the email waited for a few hours then called so that when I called, they would see clearly what my issue was.

I gave them all kinds of information and the numbers and I just thought maybe they were going to just sell me one. The guy I was talking to decided that I needed to get not only the hydraulic motor but the whole hydraulic assembly. I asked if all this was pretty expensive? He said we're not going to charge you anything it's our fault.

I was pretty thrilled because last time they sent me something for free that cost 800. This time is about two thousand and I'm very impressed with the way they handled it.

I stressed many times don't you think we ought to have a thermal overload? Everybody seemed to think that was a little weird. I think I’m going to install one myself because it's failed twice from overheating.

It took about three days to get approved about three more days to get it over to the shipping department, and then 3 to 5 days to get to my door, god bless but it took a while. We were supposed to leave on a certain date so I talked to the park ranger and they were nice about it and they worked with me.

While I was waiting for the part I was able to make some progress with Bens Bus.

I went by bus and did a few things and actually there was a connector that I was trying to figure out while I was away. It was a 60 pin connector that had something to do with the transmission and shifting. When I was in Raliegh last I disconnected it and the wires fell from the socket and the bus will not operate until its fixed. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what it does.

One end of it goes to the tachometer and the other seems to be a governor that regulates the RPM to 2,500. The pin connector just sort of started falling apart and wouldn't go back in properly. I'm sure from Ben's perspective is like thanks Dad for all the help but now the bus won't crank. Thomas said that harness is unavailable. Using the Thomas Bus 400 page wiring schematic I methodically labeled each of the 60 wires and placed them properly into the pin connector. When finished I added electrical tape insulation between each wire to prevent shorting. I set the assembly permanently with gorilla glue and when installed in the bus it worked fine. The bus still would not crank. I did some troubleshooting on the phone with a mechanic and he said there was a main power to instrumentation problem. I checked a transmission module and it had a blown fuse. I replaced it and the bus cranked and worked perfectly since. This was quite a relief. Ben worked on the bus in the parking area of a storage facility. It had not been necessary to move or crank it while I was away. This soon would change because Ben was considering moving into the bus in the coming winter and letting his apartment go. A big step but also the bus needed to crank and run properly to do so.

I also spent time trying to remove some redundant wiring from the bus. In one of the fuse panels, 35 wires were all spares. I thought if I could remove them from that area it would be less chaotic there. I ran some wires here and there and just generally tried to help him while we're in town.

The part for the RV arrived and I installed it about a day or two after we were supposed to leave and it only took about an hour to install.

At this point, we were all packed up, slid in, and ready to go. I was so stressed about that one little item that had gotten by me. I was so busy trying to solve my problems I didn't notice that Bert was hiding because he doesn't like leaving and that took like four hours. I kept on following him around with the cat carrier in tow and I was right there and I kind of got a little rough with him because I was fed up. I had him pinned down but I couldn't keep him down and unzip the cat carrier all the same time so he made his Great Escape and now he's really stressed and really upset.

The way we know he's stressed as he walks around with his mouth open and pants really weird even when it's not hot. It's just his weird way of being very stressed out and he's now pretty much not letting me get anywhere near him.

I would follow him around and walk behind him but he would just go further and further into the woods. I told India maybe she could have better luck and at some point, she left the door open and was able to talk nice to him he ran toward the RV and jumped in we were allowed to leave finally.

Still no cat tracker collar but I'm getting close because it's been six times and I keep doing the same thing expecting different results.