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Let the Maintenance begin

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carsten.schwark@shaw.ca

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Who would have thought? A RV dealer that is actually standing by the product he sells. At least he made me happy.

Now that the coach is home again it is time to look at some preventative maintenance. I created a checklist of things that need to be done soon. The list looked like this:

• Wash, wax, polish the coach

• Change all fluids

o Engine oil

o GenSet oil

o Coolant

o Brake fluid

o Tranny fluid

o Diff fluid

o Leveling Jacks

o Fresh beer in fridge

• Check if the coach got Daylight Running Lights

• Aim head lights

• Winterize

I was not in a rush to get the stuff done. I want to do as much myself as I can. I start my to do list with washing and polishing. I took the coach to a local RV wand wash. It took me $60 to get the coach washed. Now I drove back to my storage place and start the polish part of the job. I have no idea what to use but after checking around at RV.net and IRV2.com I settled for NuFinish.

So there I am. 1,000,000 square feet to polish on a nice Saturday morning in October. I am armed with NuFinish and rag’s. Motorhome, here I come. I start my adventure on the roof. I figure if I do the roof first I know it is clean and all the run off should be clean. The roof on my HR Vacationer is a 2 piece Aluminum roof. I simply assume that my NuFinish will do a good job up there. Up to the roof I go. For the age of the coach (it’s a 2002) the roof looks very very very good. No dirt or tree sap at all. I start my Job on the front cap. Wipe on, wipe off, wipe on, wipe off. After around a quarter of wiping on and off I had enough. I NEED A POWER POLISHER. I jump into the car and off to the closes Canadian Tire. Found a 10’’ Orbital polisher for sale for $20, good enough for me.

While on the roof I noticed that the joint sealing tape is coming loose on the edges and corners. I am sure that this is not Ethernabond that Monaco is using here. For now I will just use some Dicor and seal everything off. Next time I am up here I will start replacing the tape they use with Ethernabond. With the Polisher it took me 3 hours to get the roof done. Cleaned polished and sealed. I now move to the side walls of the coach. It took me the rest of the on Saturday and most Day on Sunday to get the coach polished up. This was the longest it ever took me to polish anything. By the time I had the polish job done I was beat. BUT it looked good.

I used the generator for 2 days to do the polishing. I noticed that the generator got around 250h on the clock. I thing that is actually not to bad for a 7 years old unit. The entire coach only got 17,000 miles on the clock to the unit was definitely not used a lot by the previous owner. I decided that I should give the generator an oil change before I got home. I went to a local Cummins shop and got me filter. To my surprise the filter was only $7. One more thing done on my check list.

We did one last trip for Thanksgiving. After that weekend it was time to winterize. I checked the owner manual for everything I needed to know. I must say that Holiday Rambler got a great 240 pages owner manual. The manual gives instruction for both methods of winterizing, Blow out the lines or use 5 gal antifreeze. I somehow don’t trust the blow out method. I live in Canada and it gets cold here (in fact we had snow the last 24 hours and it is May 19, 09 today). I am sure there is still water in some low points where the air simply blows over the water. So I choose the antifreeze method. So I start looking around for plumbing antifreeze. RV-store, Home Depot, Rona, Canadian Tire, Wal-Mart all carry the stuff BUT the price difference is huge. I took the cheap stuff at Wal-Mart and just to make sure I got 7 gal of pink.

Totally motivated I head out to the coach. And start winterizing. I actually have the owner manual open for this. Point 1 of the manual instructs me to remove the in line water filter. Of cause by the time I am at point 16 no clue what point 1 was. So I hook up the antifreeze and open the kitchen faucet. Of cause I did not remove the water filter. The filter was only 2 trips old. Darn another $60 down the drain.... literally. Ohh well, I finished my winterizing project without any more problems. I used just over 6 gal of the pink stuff. Now I was planning to do an oil change on the engine.

Now I continued my Maintenance Adventure and my brake fluid. There is a lot written online about Brake failure on the Workhorse W22 chassis. I had never done this before so I used the trusted Internet to find the information I needed. I choose FORD DOT 3 brake fluid. I chose to use the Ford fluid because it got the highest wet boil point of the DOT 3 fluids I found. I spend an other $20 on a vacuum pump. I clean out as much of the old fluid for my reservoir and refill with the new DOT 3. From there I went under the coach starting with the rear pumping out the old fluid making sure there is always enough new stuff in the reservoir so I will not get any air into the lines. This entire project took me less than 2 hours.

By this time, it was time to start hibernating. If was already November. And camping season was definitely over. So I am putting my coach to rest for the winter.

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