What a Relief
The customer lounge at New Horizons' factory and service center is comfortable enough. They have gone out of their way to make it as homey as possible. Overstuffed couches and love seats, end tables with fabric shaded lamps, stacks of magazines and books and one recliner that everyone tries to be the first in each morning to claim for the day. The people in the lounge with us are mostly brief encounters with couples in for ordering/designing their rig or those dropping off or picking up their rig from the service center. But then there are those like us, fulltimers in for service, "homeless" during the day while getting repairs or upgrades installed. We also saw a few couples that were in for the couple of days it took to "move". They were moving out of their existing RV into their just-built mondo-condo on wheels. No kidding, these rigs were gigantic. The shortest one being 42' with five slide-outs. I don't know where they find campgrounds they can fit in.
There was one couple that was there before we arrived, you could tell by the zombiefied look on their faces that they had been around for more than a day or two. In visiting with them over our first days we discovered that they had been making the daily trip to the lounge for a month! My first reaction was, oh no, this place drags it feet on getting repair work done and runs up labor charges over weeks and weeks of piddling around. I wanted to get my rig and leave but it was too late, the interior was being stripped out as these thoughts were crossing my mind. But my fears, well some of them, were soon put to rest when the couple explained that they had a major flaw in the roof of their rig. Something about a laminating machine and an improperly formulated batch of adhesive. It turns out that they were one of two rigs built with this problem. But fixing this problem is not a matter of replacing the exterior portion of the roof. Rather, they had to literally decapitate the entire top of the rig, from end cap to end cap. All those appliances (air conditioners, vent fans, skylights, lighting, antennas, sat dish, duct work, miles of wiring) and the roof/ceiling they were attached to had to be severed from rest of the rig. There was no getting this rig back each night for them to stay in. Instead, New Horizons provided them a loaner rig for the entire time it took to replace the roof. They had use of a trade-in Montana 5th Wheel. Nothing up to par with a New Horizon Majestic but a heck of a lot better than a motel room.
Around the end of the second day the service manager came to get us. He wanted to show us what they had found now that the cedar lining of the closet was stripped out as well as the framing and carpet for the closet. I was dreading what we were going to be shown. We knew that it had been wet off and on for months and had envisioned thick mats of black mold and delaminated sub-floor plywood. But to our immense relief Ken showed us pristine side walls and like-new sub-flooring. The interior walls are constructed of a foam core laminate, the structural framing is aluminum and the sub-floor is exterior grade. Woo-hoo! Our little mobile cabin is not a respiratory killer on wheels. Months of worry just melted away.
There was one couple that was there before we arrived, you could tell by the zombiefied look on their faces that they had been around for more than a day or two. In visiting with them over our first days we discovered that they had been making the daily trip to the lounge for a month! My first reaction was, oh no, this place drags it feet on getting repair work done and runs up labor charges over weeks and weeks of piddling around. I wanted to get my rig and leave but it was too late, the interior was being stripped out as these thoughts were crossing my mind. But my fears, well some of them, were soon put to rest when the couple explained that they had a major flaw in the roof of their rig. Something about a laminating machine and an improperly formulated batch of adhesive. It turns out that they were one of two rigs built with this problem. But fixing this problem is not a matter of replacing the exterior portion of the roof. Rather, they had to literally decapitate the entire top of the rig, from end cap to end cap. All those appliances (air conditioners, vent fans, skylights, lighting, antennas, sat dish, duct work, miles of wiring) and the roof/ceiling they were attached to had to be severed from rest of the rig. There was no getting this rig back each night for them to stay in. Instead, New Horizons provided them a loaner rig for the entire time it took to replace the roof. They had use of a trade-in Montana 5th Wheel. Nothing up to par with a New Horizon Majestic but a heck of a lot better than a motel room.
Around the end of the second day the service manager came to get us. He wanted to show us what they had found now that the cedar lining of the closet was stripped out as well as the framing and carpet for the closet. I was dreading what we were going to be shown. We knew that it had been wet off and on for months and had envisioned thick mats of black mold and delaminated sub-floor plywood. But to our immense relief Ken showed us pristine side walls and like-new sub-flooring. The interior walls are constructed of a foam core laminate, the structural framing is aluminum and the sub-floor is exterior grade. Woo-hoo! Our little mobile cabin is not a respiratory killer on wheels. Months of worry just melted away.
Comments
Post a Comment