Thursday, November 21, 2013, Expensive Maintenance Lesson in Salinas, CA

When the garage, Golden State Truck & Trailer Repair in Salinas, CA, opened at 8:00, I was informed they had a lot of work to finish before they could get to us. At 1:00, I reminded them we were still waiting and they looked at it then. They installed the drive shaft, but the engine would not stay running long enough to move off of the street, so they decided it would have to be pulled. I reminded them the coach weighs in at 32,000 pounds. They used a forklift truck to push the coach across the road at an angle (blocking traffic on the street), so they could then pull it in through the gate. The forklift had no chance of pulling the coach up the small incline from the street, but they tried anyway. Eventually, they got a Ford F-350 truck. I had my concerns about how much the hitch receiver could take but with all of the pushing and pulling nothing bad happened - again, I suspect we were lucky.

I started off describing the problem and suggesting we should just change the fuel filters, but they thought there was a leak and spent a few hours trying to find it. Finally, the third guy working on it asked how long since the filters were last changed. My guess was about 3 years (it could have been more.) That's when I learned they need to be replaced much more often. I had replacement filters in the basement, but I never thought about when I should change them. I was at Cummins having some work done a few months ago and the filters were never discussed. Never assume silence about maintenance means none is needed. I will ask lots of questions from now on when anyone is working on my coach.

He finally took the filter off of the engine and told me the fuel was "pretty dirty." When he took off the fuel/water separator filter we could see that the filter had disintegrated and the paper was in small pieces.

The paper and the fuel were black!  Again, I was very lucky that it was not the main filter that fell apart or I would have had some seriously clogged injectors. Since he had no filters in stock it was a good time to use those I had in the basement. The engine started and we let it run for a while to see if he could find the leak he was sure was there somewhere. After about 30 minutes he declared he could not find any leak. 

It seemed we were good to go, but I thought it should be road tested. The mechanic agreed, so we set off for a spin around the block. The coach seemed strong and was running great when we noticed a vibration. We quickly tried to decide if it was the rough road (which was really bad) or was it a frame alignment problem from towing, or the pushing and pulling, when we heard a big "THUNK" and the coach rolled to a stop in the turn lane. In the rear camera, I could see the drive shaft lying in the road.

I called the garage and they quickly brought their truck, picked the pieces up off the road and tied a strap to the front axle. They pulled us back to the garage through some pretty heavy traffic with me at the wheel. Shortly, alarms went off because the air pressure was low and falling fast every time I used the brakes. The engine was running so that I would have steering, but it clearly was no longer providing air to the brakes. I started picturing the brakes seizing up when the air got low enough, but we made it back with a little pressure to spare and they assessed the damage. The U-joint was a total disaster and the yoke was broken, and the drive shaft swung around like a club pounding the air lines before it fully disengaged from the transmission. It was too late to fix anything that afternoon so we got to spend another night at the garage - this time inside the gate.

It may not sound like it, but they really treated us very well.