Slowly Working on the Plan....

After several frustrating months of phone calls to Arrow Wrecking and Service, leaving repeated messages with the service persons there I am done with being nice. I sent out a "here's my offer" letter to the Balboa's since they have just ignored me. All I asked for was the cost of the engine and the time for the rental of the space used to store "The Long Hauler" in Floriday.

With that check I can get another engine, ship it to FL to another shop and fly down there to actually work on the SECOND swap for the RV!. I located another 1977 Dodge Coachman Camper Van that is for sale. The camper part was ripped off and all that's left is the frame and cab (and engine!!!!). My PLAN is to get this van cab, extract the engine, ship it to Florida and do the swap.

My bet is that this return road trip won't happen until March but so be it! I need to beat Arrow Wrecking and their crappy service! I can do a better job than they did.

Here's a link to the running donor van from Joe in Sherburne, NY. His project was to strip and redo this RV into the band road-trip van but it didn't happen. Glad that he posted this on Craigslist! His patience and good nature are appreciated.

The Plan: get this van, extract the engine and ship it to FL to the new shop I'm working with. Fly down there to help install it and then drive it back to NY. The irony is that the shop in FL is a block from the knuckleheads the fubared this last repair. He's also the same guy that provided me with a replacement carburetor for the Dodge that weekend you read in the previous posts.

The Heart of Darkness

It's been a few days since I've posted and I have to tell you that the "Crazy" has been in full effect these past few days. Going from a late-night tow truck ride, staying in Daytona on the beach with the fam, driving down to the in-laws for a "memorable" visit and then going back to get the RV only to be sentenced to a 5 day purgatory of 100 degree heat index days in a non-a/c RV with now shore power is something that I would like to avoid in the future.

The repairs that Arrow Service and Wrecking performed were totally undone by the fact that the engine they received from KLQ was not the "runner" that was promised. After all the effort and pushing the new swapped engine just couldn't do the job. After warming up, the oil pressure dropped so much the engine would blow up if it was pushed to hard.  I even located a new 2 barrel carb from a shop a block away to replace the failing carburetor! Thanks Bill!! That left the oil pressure issue to be resolved. 

Now comes the hard part: negotiating with KLQ to honor the warranty, get the labor covered and put a re manufactured engine back into the "Long Hauler". If you paid someone to install an engine wouldn't you expect it to work or get something that did? So would I.

 The Long Hauler sits in a storage yard awaiting a new engine now. Thanks for all the folks that donated to the cause through GoFundMe. It's appreciated.

Even the Wall Street Journal is Talking about it!

Check out the article in WSJ this week! It's as if they are watching us....
Vintage RVing!

The waiting game

The "Long Hauler" should be ready by the end of the day on Monday, later than we expected and if we had known we could have saved a lot of money just going to the grandparents instead of hanging around in Daytona paying for rental car and hotels. That's all behind us now that we are at the grandparents and awaiting the OK for the RV to be done.

The shop pulled the engine and found the issue:

This is the view looking down to the camshaft... well at least most of it. There is a section missing (middle hole)where a part of the cam just cracked and fell into the bottom end of the engine. Let's say this is not a good thing to have such a large chunk of metal bouncing around in your engine. Bad things happen. The part wedged into the crankshaft and seized the engine. Solution? New engine. The good thing is that these old 360 V8's are not that expensive to get and there are no complicated electronics to hook back up. Arrow Truck Repair is doing the work right now.

Plan "B" is to drive back up the East coast back home and save the cross country trip for next year.

A Change of Plans

Sometimes life tosses you a few curveballs and it's how you deal with them that make all the difference. The RV gave us some issues on the way down and now we're in Daytona Beach waiting for Arrow Repair to fix the RV and get us back on the road.

With nearly a week delay that means we're going to have to shorten our trip. The cross-country dash will be shortened and we are still figuring just how short it's going to be.

Stay tuned!

 Let's just say the Tioga is going to receive a new heart this week.... Hope that and a few other extras included will get her completely ship shape for travel! Thanks for Arrow Towing for helping out and getting us back on the road (we hope!).

The First few Days

We finally left on Monday after spending 2 solid days on the weekend, fixing and patching, cleaning and sorting. You know how things happen in "threes"? Well they do. 1) the driver's side mirror decides to fall out and shatter while entering Watkin's Glen, 2) we hit a BIG pothole on 80 and damaged the exhaust header, 3) the windshield wipers decided to bonkers. Then we get to Rachel's brother's house on Staten Island.

Let me tell you. NEVER drive an RV on Staten Island. The roads are horrible and you spend more time dodging potholes and dips and bumps. We never saw so many "BUMP" warning  signs on the highway down to NY!

With #1 we stopped into a Auto Zone and bought a mirror and two wide angle mirrors to replace the one that bailed out. The camo duct tape really sets it off...

With #2 there wasn't much we could do except live with it until we could either fix it or find some shop to repair it (more on this later).

With #3 it was 2 trips to the local to Janet in MD auto store to get the right clips to put the wiper arms back in sync. Our kids wound up spending a couple of days with Marco and Leo! Alex took his bike out for the first bike trip and wound up with a flat in 10 mins.... flat! Could          not       resist.

We do still have the electrical gremlins bothering us. The alternator that seems to not work as hard as it should (only 65 amps so no wonder). My kids managing to drain my 3 12V battery power system in 2 days flat. and the wierd things the RV does when the voltage is low.

Chalk it all up to getting to know your RV better..

Now, onto the #2 item details!
I finally had it with trying to fix the horribly loud engine with the broken exhaust. The next morning after making it to Rachel's sister, I called around to find a shop to help weld it or do what was needed to make it better. Not so easy with an RV. I did get to one local shop, "Renaldo's" and the owner said he couldn't do it but to "follow him". So, I do and he takes me close to the airport to see "Carlo". Carlo runs Airport Auto and his crew got me in and 5+ hours later we have a new header gasket! That's what was wrong with it! Well, okay there's lots more "wrong with it" but hey, take the good where you can get it!

Tomorrow am we set out to Williamsburg then onto Kitty Hawk, NC! Last note for tonight, a request to put a curtain on the bathroom rear window has been placed. Talk about a rear window alright! Truckers definitely are in for a show...

Oh, just shoot me now.

There's nothing like trying to update stuff in an old RV that will just leave you thinking: "why couldn't we just play 8 tracks in the thing already???"

I bought a nice JVC radio for the RV. Cheap (about $65). Now the issue wasn't so much getting it installed it was dealing with the insanity of the knucklehead that installed the 8 track am/fm radio in the first place.

There is a gaggle of white and green wire (I know now that is speaker wire) all over the driver's side floor and each speaker in the van has been rewired to what was the old radio jack.

ALL WRONG. NOTHING WAS WIRED RIGHT. NO MATCHING WIRE COLORS.

The radio is nice enough to tell me the speaker wiring is wrong and it will shut down. WHA!

It's just faster to rip out all the speaker wires and just redo it all with new wire before the trip. Oh, Boy!