Body Work and a Re-Shod

August 22, 2017 has finally come.  Our scheduled appointment for getting body damage repaired by a pair of blowouts that happened just as we began our summer trip in June has arrived.  The explosive ruptures took out ten feet of fender and 16 feet of skirting on the galley slide-out.

1st blowout

2nd blowout an hour later.

This is a prime example of my discussion of being flexible as a fulltimer in a previous post.  Junction City, or Kansas for that matter, were never on our radar when we left Georgia this spring.  After a pass through Texas to see family we were going to go to Wyoming and the Dakotas to enjoy Devils Tower, Custer State Park and Mt. Rushmore.  Instead, here we are in the windswept wheat fields of Kansas alongside Interstate 70 in a little town adjacent to the Army's Fort Riley.

 Fort Riley is huge, covering 10's, probably 100's of thousands of acres.  Its population is much greater than that of surrounding communities and home to at least one Calvary division.  The pictures on either side are views that can be seen from a location alongside I-70 and represent a tiny fraction of the entire fort.  We got the chance to watch helicopters doing what we interpreted as training exercises on a couple of occasions.  Pretty impressive.  Civilians can also get access to the inside of the fort where they have museums and memorials that are pretty good.  There is a section of officer housing from the 1800's that had Gen George Custer as a resident and it can be toured.

But back to the reason for our being here, New Horizons is the manufacturer of our 5th wheel coach.  Their specialty is custom built 5th wheels, they have no dealers, there is no showroom and there are no floor plans.  If you buy a New Horizons you start by saying how long a rig you want, how many slide-outs and their location and then arrange all the creature comforts (galley, living, entertainment center, bathroom(s), etc) as you want and then they build it.

New Horizons factory front entrance.

Not surprising, they cater heavily to the fulltimer crowd.  Their rigs are rugged-built for continuous use in a wide variety of climates.  This ruggedness and the quality they put in their finishing touches are what got our attention.  When we decided to go with New Horizons we were a little different than their customary clients in that we were not interested in building a humongous rig in excess of 40' in length.  We wanted a relatively short rig so that we would have more options in regards to fitting into campgrounds.  Our goal was to stay at 35' or 36'.  This is still too big for some older campgrounds like CCC built National Forest or National Park campgrounds that have not been updated but we knew that this was the minimum length that would accommodate the living space and floor plan we wanted.  Another requirement I had was three axles.  I wanted as much weight capacity as possible, ultimately hoping that the axles and tires would be lightly loaded.  But we soon found out that our axle count and rig length were not compatible.  It seems that there is not enough room under the rig for both three axles and waste water tanks in anything shorter than 37'.   The triple axle was more important to me than length so we bumped our length up to 37' and took a hit on size and weight (at about 600 lbs per foot).  Actually, axles is a misnomer.  We have six independent suspension wheels built by a company named MORryde.

Photo of our frame and suspension being built.  Each wheel is mounted on an independent suspension "box".
Get a load of the size of the frame.  Practically no flexing at all. 

 Another plus about New Horizons knowing the fulltimer so well is that their repair facility is set up for people that have no home other than their RV.  They have a nicely appointed lounge to hang out in during the day while your rig is being worked on and then they make the rig livable by the end of each day so you can stay in it at night.  They provide connections to water and electricity so other than being in a parking lot it is a good set up.

Staying overnight in factory parking lot with hookups.

 There is a catch though, these guys start work early.  You have to be up and out of your rig by 7:00 am because they come knocking to take your coach into the service facility.

Every morning by 7:00 am the rig has to be ready to move - utilities disconnected, slides in, antennas down, doors locked in travel position, just as if you were hitching up and heading down the road.  Every afternoon at 3:00 you put it back again.

 The work on our rig started fairly quick.  In addition to the body work we also needed some odds and ends done.  A couple of slide seals had failed and a fluted column on the interior of a slide needed to be re-anchored as well as a bellows seal on the inside of a slide.  But the body work would have to wait a couple days as there was another rig in the paint bay that was taking longer than expected to complete.

In the customer lounge we met and visited with other couples that were in for repairs or to do their three-day inspection/training/pick-up of their new rigs.  Some of the people in for repairs had been there going on a month!  But that was not a surprise, our last visit lasted almost three weeks and another couple that was there was going on three months.  That is definitely not the norm.  They had a catastrophic failure of their roof and the rig had to be "decapitated" and replaced in its entirety.  There is a lot of stuff on the roof of one of these rigs - at least two A/Cs, at least two powered roof vents, antennas, skylights, a multitude of ceiling mounted interior lighting and all the associated wiring.  Thank goodness our work is just some skirting and a fender, they don't have to get into the actual body of the rig.

As nice as the customer lounge and company is, after a couple of days it got old.  We decided to get out and explore central Kansas a little more.  Last time we made it over to the Wizard of Oz Museum, this time we are going to go the other direction, west, and see what we can see.  First stop, Salina, KS.  It was the nearest town with a Sam's Club and we needed to do our once per month run to this big box store to restock a lot of our household goods.

It's only 45 minutes straight across on I-70 to Salina, but wait, what's this?  About half-way to Salina, just off the highway in the middle of a wheat field there is a giant Russell Stover candy factory, and it has an outlet store!!  Big Gulp instinctively knew to take the exit, I had nothing to do with it!

Exit 272 off of I-70 sits a Russell Stover candy factory.
The outlet store is under the roof that is jutting out from the middle of  the building.

 Less than an hour later we were walking out with about 12 pounds of "Bloopers" chocolates.  They were irregular chocolates that had been packaged in plain white boxes marked with a general description of what might be in the box. These chocolates may have been irregular in appearance but there was nothing irregular about their taste.  Just in the remaining 20 minutes between Russell Stover and Salina I had more than my year's allotment of chocolate and sugar.  The next time I unbutton my pants I don't know if they will button back up.

These plain white boxes contain the "Bloopers".
There is a back room to the outlet store and it is nothing but huge stacks of these white boxes.

Salina has a storied history, as most of the plains towns do.  Theirs is one that began in 1858 as a trading post catering to local Indian tribes and settlers and prospectors heading west.  Just after the Civil War the railroad came to town and they were briefly known as a cow town.  But the cow business moved down the road in a couple of years and the economic engine that rules to this day took hold, wheat farming.

Giant grain elevators are scattered all over the old town district.

The old town of Salina is quaint.

With touristing done and groceries in hand we head back to Junction City.  The rig should be returned to its spot for the night and we'll make it livable - get it level, put out the slides and deploy the satellite dish.

After a couple of days we get a spot inside so that they can start taping off and prepping for paint.  All the skirting, fender and trim had been replaced while outside but the prep for painting needs to be done indoors to minimize the ill effects of wind.

We've been moved inside for painting preparation.

All taped off and ready for base coat.

Now that we are getting painted the routine is a little different.  Each coat needs time to cure so there will be no pulling us out of the maintenance bay at the end of each day.  Instead, we will be staying inside for the next two or three days.  The pluses are that we can occupy our rig all day (that means sleeping in is an option) and it is in the shade.  The minuses are that there is the noise of the work all day and when they close up the building for the night it gets really hot.  We can run our A/C but its exhaust just adds to the heat in the building.  By morning the heat will take your breath away as you step out of the camper.  And of course there is no deploying of the satellite, so it is DVD's or nothing in regards to TV.

Our "camping spot" for the next few days.

If you have been reading this blog you know that I have been whining about the blow-outs we had in early June and my subsequent research of the kind of tires we have.  That research yielded some pretty disturbing information.  It seems that the Goodyear Marathon is infamous for having blow-outs.  I didn't learn it until it was too late but if I had kept those tires and sent them back to the factory, Goodyear probably would have paid for my damage repair.  That's water under the bridge now.  I have to figure out what to do going forward.

Staying with these Goodyear Marathons is not an option and switching to another brand in the same size does not look promising.  This particular tire is an ST (special trailer) and has a speed rating of 65 mph.  The same is true of all brands in this size and nobody makes a light truck tire in this size so there is no option to switch out to something with an untroubled history.  I can hear you now, saying; ""why don't you just get a different size tire and be done with it?".  Well, I wish I could.

Remember earlier in this post my discussion about rig length and just barely enough room for three axles?  If I pick an LT (light truck) tire with the proper load rating its outside diameter will be larger than the existing tires.  The tires are so close together now with the existing size that there is not enough space to go up in tire size without them rubbing each other.  What to do?  The service manager and I have been exploring possibilities over this past week and we may have a solution.

It's not cheap, it will entail discarding of all my existing tires and wheels (all seven of them) and replacing with a commercial 17.5" dia wheel and tire.  Even though I will be going from a 16" wheel to a 17.5" wheel, the outside diameter of the tire is exactly the same as my existing tires.  But these tires are speed rated at 75 mph and have at least 1,000 pounds more load capacity per tire than my existing tires, with no bad history.  All I have to do is write a check for $5,000.00.  Yikes!

I'm not about to head out down the road with a knot in my stomach while waiting for the sound of the next tire ripping everything to shreds, so write the check I did.

Here she is all freshly shod with big wheels and short tires.

It's Friday and everything is not quite finished yet.  When they delivered the rig out of the paint bay as ready-to-go today I was disappointed to find that the body work where the fender meets the skirting was pretty awful.  The bondo used to smooth out the fit between the fender and the skirting had some serious shrink voids and unevenness.  I showed the service manager and he did not blink an eye.  He said we'll fix it first thing Monday.  So here we are for the weekend.