Some Motorhome Maintenance on our Winnebago View

Steve is happiest when he has something to putter around with.

Motorhome maintenance is always at the top of his list. He has done all of our maintenance on any of our rvs, vehicles, lawn equipment etc and rarely does he ever rely on a repair shop.

For those of you who don't know him, Steve's career before retirement was handling all of the maintenance on the large equipment used for groundskeeping at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay. He took part in their interior construction and repair projects as well. He also went to school to be an electrician. From there, for his last 5 years with the state of Wisconsin he handled all of the maintenance of the equipment and grounds and services at High Cliff State Park.

Now that he's retired, he is able to put more time and attention on his OWN things he says!

One of the first projects he wanted to get done on the new-to-us Winnebago View was to lube all of the slides and then condition all of the rubber seals. Even though it was slightly drizzly yesterday, he was looking for something to do. 

It's very important to only use products that are intended to maintain the slides and the rubber seals. Using the wrong product can cause gunking up of slide motor gears or deterioration of the rubber seals. 

He said the best way is to spray it first onto a rag and then wipe it on, rather than just spraying willy-nilly all over the place and making a mess. Both of our slides are in perfect adjustment, so there are no repairs needed. There's one small piece of rubber missing on one corner of one of the seals. We may find a way to patch it, or he may just order a whole new seal and replace that section. But for now, he is watching it for any signs of leakage during the rain. So far so good.

While he was outside doing that, that's when I was inside stowing away some more items and photographing my storage solutions I mentioned in yesterday's blog. 

I had kicked on the heat to warm it up, and tried out the electric heat strips up in the air conditioning system. They worked great. But then Steve wanted me to also kick on the propane furnace which blows through the bottom vents near the floor. He could hear something in there buzzing around making a funny noise in one of the vents. Sure enough, there's a big chunk of styrofoam! 

So here he was on the floor, unscrewing the vent grid with his Leatherman tool that he always carries in his pocket, and removed the hunk of styrofoam. Just think, that stupid piece must have been in there ever since the rig was built in 2016. Now it's in the trash.

Although this isn't technically maintenance, it's a project that we're going to do. Previously, we had wired in a 50 amp outlet on the side of our garage to plug in our last motorhome. Now, this motorhome is only 30 amp. In the meantime Steve used the portable surge protector and a dog bone adapter to change from 50 amp down to 30. He said he will pick up the materials to swap a new box over to 30 amp so we can hook it up directly. Maybe we can sell the 50 amp box on marketplace. 

Another electrical project is on the horizon, this time inside of the rig. We really don't have any USB ports within the rig other than one adapter in a cigarette lighter up on the front dash. We like to camp a lot just using 12 volt DC and not be plugged in at a park to shore power. We need to have some other ways to charge our phones rather than with 120 volt AC wall outlets. We had added three extra 12 volt DC cigarette type outlets to our last motorhome. Then we still have to pop in the little adapters to plug in the cords for charging.

This time Steve decided to buy the surface mount USB charging units, rather than cutting big holes into the cabinetry to recess the 12 volt outlets like last time. This will work well with our Samsung phones because they have the fast charging option. Also with the "C" type connections. They only need a very small hole through the woodwork or the wall to run the two wires. The rest is all surface mounted. That way, if technology changes in the future, or types of charging needed, we can easily change out to a new wall mount unit rather than having big holes from recessed ones. 

We ordered up two of these from Amazon 

and they will be here next week:

The link is:  https://a.co/d/28KGsUP

The next upcoming project on our list: we want to have Borg solid stems attached to our tires rather than the flexible braided kind. We want to add our Tire Minder TPMS, (tire pressure monitoring system). 

The Borg stems are said to be the best alternative to the braided ones. The braided ones can be sheared off or leak. The solid stems seem to be much more reliable. We had them on our last two motorhomes. The inner dually wheels need to have a valve stem that extends out in this manner shown below from someone else's picture. 

So once we order the Borg stems we need to find a tire place that's willing to put them on. It seems that they need to be bent in a certain manner from the inner dually wheel to be able to come out the middle of the access opening on the outer dually wheel. Some tire shops will do it, others won't. I guess at the Borg company there is a person named Kelli who will supply the exact information for the tire installer to follow regarding the bending as well as the right torque for installing them to the rim.

I guess they need to be bent like the one on the left, not the one on the right. 

So that will be one of our upcoming projects.

Also the simulators, or commonly known as hubcaps, can actually pivot or spin on the rim and shear off those braided stems, especially on the rear wheels. So we removed the simulator caps for now. 

We have joined the online groups for View/Navion owners of these particular years. It seems to be a problem that the simulator caps go flying off. Some have even resorted to buying thin metal wire ties and attaching them to the rims so they don't pivot. Our previous owner actually attached metal tabs right to the hub bolts to try to prevent it from spinning. But then it makes it harder to remove the simulators in case of a tire change. 

So we think we might go without them for a while. The rims are pretty good looking just as silver painted rims. We will see.

The very last item on his agenda is to do an oil change and replace the cab filter. He was careful to get the proper ESP oil rated specifically for the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter engine and the proper Mann filter. 

If the weather gets a little nicer from this wet cold sleety icy snowy icky stuff, he will get that done possibly by the weekend. I hope he can do it on Saturday. 

It is his birthday on Saturday, and he turns 65! He is going to totally enjoy being able to spend the day working on his new birthday present toy --- the Winnebago View!!!