Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Yesterday, Lisa started working on the Rolling Stone. She used "Liquid Wrench" to get the nearly-frozen screws to loosen up, and she had access to her full set of tools, which allowed her to get the fasteners loose. This meant that she could get the bracket that holds the air intake filter off, and get closer to the ignition system. She also took off the "doghouse" cover from the inside. It's still very cramped inside the RV's engine compartment.

( Identifying Potential Issues )

One other possibility was that something was wrong with the fuel feeds. If that were the case, the engine would start if you sprayed ignition fluid into it, but would die shortly thereafter. Lisa tested that. She sprayed fluid and after getting clear told me to try to start it. No luck. That's actually good news, because it points in the direction of the ignition system (distributor/rotor/coil), not the fuel system.

All of the parts (Ford Motorcraft brand) are available from O'Reilly Auto Parts. We'd have to order them, but their system says that they'd be here the next day. We'll place an order once Lisa is ready to start moving on this.

After work today, we tried starting the Rolling Stone and it started right up, so we decided to go with Plan A and simply drive to Yerrington to collect the RV from Wild West Chevrolet without turning off the RV, then driving home.

The minivan was waiting. They did a lot of work on it, replacing the condenser (the most expensive part), which had been leaking, an AC hose assembly (second most expensive), and bunch of other parts. There was a whole lot of labor on this as well. The total cost, including some difficult to source parts and labor, was over $3400. The total cost including the work done in February: $10,300. Still cheaper than buying a new car, but also painful.

Speaking of painful, it took us a whole lot longer to get home than expected, for reasons I will explain tomorrow. However, the Astro ran just fine, and produced lots of nice cold air for the whole trip. Lisa and I talked about how much more comfortable the Winnipeg road trip would have been last year had we had working AC and didn't have a Service Engine Soon light on for the entire trip.

( And We're Home )

I am too tired to write about the problems we had with the Rolling Stone, so I will save that story for tomorrow. For now, suffice it to say that I'm very glad I keep my AAA dues up to day at the AAA plus level.

No winners on our lottery tickets this time. I have $8 in winners from the previous draw. I have six months to collect them, and I'd rather wait until I'm going that way (at least somewhere in California) to cash them rather than make a special trip.

Using the Rolling Stone for errand-running is harder than it might look. The RV doesn't handle very well, even with a steering stabilizer, and it's clumsy to park. When we were dropping the recycling, I managed to back into one of the dumpsters. (No harm done, thank goodness; I was going less than 1 mph.) Parking is always an issue with the RV, and so making a bunch of different stops around town causes stress that is not always obvious. Today, I found myself feeling badly out of sorts, and have called off all further planned chores that I'd hoped to get done today. Besides, it has been snowing off and on again, albeit that nothing is sticking.

If I'm really lucky, I'll get to bed early today.

Amtrak canceled trains 5/6 (the California Zephyr) west of Salt Lake City due to the severe weather conditions out here. I can see that it would have been pretty difficult for them to get through. Interstate 80 has been closed most of today, and I've not seen many trains of any sort here. Thursday was the last westbound Amtrak coming this way before the cancellations. The westbound train was running more than nine hours late, and we were following its progress on Amtrak's Track Your Train map. The train came to a halt at Darwin siding (east of Fernley), but we did not hear anything on the radio scanner to explain why. Venturing out into the howling windstorm, we could see lots of red blinking lights down the tracks. After maybe an hour, the wind had subsided a bit and Amtrak finally came through, but the blinking lights were still there, so we got in the Astro and drove down to Main Street Park (former home of the Bottlecap Gazebo). We could see lots of fire engines and a bucket truck on the opposite side of the tracks, but no obvious fire. Lisa then noticed that none of the houses in that are were showing any lights. It was too dark to take any photos, but the next morning when I ran out to get some milk, I saw what appears to explain the emergency vehicles, the lack of lights on the houses, and the extra hour of delay that afflicted Amtrak.

( The Next Day )

Although the Rolling Stone is ready to be collected, we told Big O not to expect us until Monday. There's no sense trying to drive that RV in a wind storm.

Edit, March 3: There had been a bucket truck out there the night before when I couldn't take pictures, but I've had it pointed out to me that there was no bucket on the truck in this picture and it was actually a pole truck designed to hold a pole in position like this pending a proper fix.

When we had to swap in the spare tire on the Rolling Stone back when one of the tires failed, and after we replaced the four main tires, we were left with a problem. One of the carriage bolts, or rather, one of the fittings on that bolt, had failed, and we could not re-mount the spare on the bracket on the rear of the RV. It turned out to not be a simple fix. Most hardware places at which we checked didn't have the part we needed. We had to keep the spare tire inside the RV, which was highly inconvenient. It's a good thing I didn't need to use the vehicle for sleeping.

Anyway, yesterday, Lisa was finally able to put together a solution. It's not the perfect fix, but it works.

( Back in Action )

The spare tire needs to be replaced. It has cracked sidewalls, just like the main tires. We should, however, be able to buy another tire from TireRack.com, and because they have a warehouse at the industrial park between Fernley and Reno, we can go pick it up from their will-call dock at a discount. We already know the small shop near our house can mount the tires without a problem. Now we just need to get around to doing it.

I called Wild West Chevrolet in Yerrington this afternoon to check on the minivan. The good news is that they haven't forgotten about me. The bad news is that some of the parts needed to repair it are difficult to get and that they are still working on it.

I continue to have to use the Rolling Stone as my regular vehicle, which is expensive, and probably about to get more expensive as I'm pretty sure that the RV needs an extensive brake job. The brakes still work, but it's unclear how much needs to be done. Also, with the Big Orange Van offline and the Small Orange Pickup needing a bit of reconfiguration if it is to carry more than one person in it (and person 1 is always Lisa as I can't drive a manual transmission), we are running out of spares for me to put the RV into the shop for repairs.

How long before the dealership gets the parts for the Astro, nobody knows.

That wasn't a very big snow storm, but it did leave about 3 cm on the ground here in Fernley. It was bigger in the mountains, where chain controls over I-80 reached from the western edge of Reno all the way down to Colfax overnight. Today was clear but cold, so lots of snow did not melt.

( Nice Winter Day )

Lisa offered to make spaghetti if I could go get some ground beef, so late in the afternoon I gingerly coaxed the Rolling Stone over to Grocery Outlet. That's how I learned that the main roads, including Interstate 80, were clear. Parking lots, however, were another matter, and I took it very carefully getting out of the store's ice-and-snow-covered lot with no mishap.

I count myself lucky that I don't have to do a lot of traveling.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, my dentist recommended removing and replacing two crowns. The cost per crown is $1800. My insurance only covers $1000/year. So today I took a half-day off from work to drive to Reno and have the first crown removed. We'll do the second one on January 2, when my dental benefits reset. They will then send the casts off to the lab to be done, and when they come back, they will install the new crowns. Until then, I have a temporary crown on the first tooth.

This will actually be the third crown on that tooth, because it was crowned once, and then the crown had to be removed to do a root canal on that tooth and a second crown installed. That's the only root canal I've had.

The removal procedure wasn't too bad; nowhere near as bad as the original root canal. I now have the removed gold crown here with me. I expect to take this and the other crown and see if there's any money to be made by selling them for the gold value.

I was grateful to discover that there is on-street parking near my dentist's office, because maneuvering the Rolling Stone into the spaces in their parking lot is tricky, whereas on-street parking is relatively easy.

After paying the $800 that's my share of the first treatment (thank goodness for my healthcare savings account!), I thought I had enough time to get the oil changed in the RV. It has been almost four years since I changed the oil in the Rolling Stone, and while for much of that time I didn't operate it — there was a year where it moved less than one mile — I did think I should get the oil changed. I had a 3 PM chiropractic appointment in Fernley, but I had several hours, and I've rarely been at Jiffy Lube more than an hour, so I headed over there.

It took them nearly three hours to get the word done. There were only three vehicles ahead of me, but one of them must have been immensely complicated. Once they had the RV on the block, it did not take that long, even though I also agreed to have the rear differential fluid changed. It looked awful: dark and sludge-like rather than the relatively light, clear oil that it normally should be.

I called the chiropractor when it became clear that I wasn't going to make the 3 PM appointment and they told to come at 4 PM. I though that would be fine, but as I didn't get out of Jiffy Lube in Sparks until after 3 PM, I though I was screwed. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of traffic working my way from the shop to I-80, and the afternoon crunch hadn't happened yet. Once I got clear of Sparks I put the pedal to the metal, which is something I really do not like doing with the fuel-hungry 460 engine, but I did not have any choice.

Luck seems to have been with me: I made it with five minutes to spare, and the chiropractor's office was running slightly late anyway, so all was well.

So as I said, this is the first of two crown renewals. For most of the next month or more, I'll be living with temporary crowns in the upper right and later lower right portions of my mouth.

Besides my needing to catch up on the lost sleep from SMOFCon, I also had neglected to restart the fireplace when I got home, so I stayed in bed where it was warm and did not get up yesterday until after 11 AM. I could not stay in bed all day, as much as I wanted to do so, because I had an appointment with the GM dealership in Yerrington to take in the Astro and try and fix the several different issues, starting with the computer reporting an EGR failure even after we replaced it. Also needed is a new muffler and a look at the air conditioner, possibly including re-connecting the rear lines to the front. There's also the rattle that we think is due to those disconnected lines.

Anyway, later in the afternoon after I pulled myself together, Lisa and I convoyed to Yerrington (about 50 miles each way, with me driving the Rolling Stone and Lisa driving the Astro) and delivered the minivan to the dealership. We explained all of the issues we want them to investigate. I signed a disclaimer acknowledging the issues involved with working on older vehicles and that it could take them a while to diagnose everything. That's why we had waited so long before putting it into the shop; our travels are done for a while, so we can give them plenty of time to work on it.

We then drove home to Fernley in the RV, which will need to be our van-about-town until we get the Astro back. It's not ideal, but it will work.

One of the things holding up our attempts to repair the Astro was that when we started to use the Rolling Stone as our temporary transportation, we discovered two problems, both with the windows. The driver's side window would not roll up or down. That wasn't a show stopper. The passenger window, however, would only roll down and not go back up again. We were able to push it back into place temporarily, but it appeared that the power window regulator (the part the makes the window go up and down) was in trouble. We did a bit of searching, and to our surprise we found an exact match for our precise year, chassis, and model of vehicle, and it was even for the Chinook RV conversion. If you're curious, here's the video:



Watching this video made us feel much better, as Lisa was sure she could make this repair.

The doors on the RV have a whole lot of fiddly bits on them, and you have to take everything off to get down to the bare metal of the E350 that Ford sold to Chinook for the RV conversion. After taking off the large number of screws, caps, molding, speaker brackets, etc., Lisa finally was able to get at the nuts that hold the regulator motor in place. With me holding on to the window to pull it up while she worked on it, she was able to get the motor loose, and we set it out on some papers (misprinted signs from Pemmi-Con, as it happens) to take apart the regulator.

( What a Mess )