Strolling Amok

Ahhh, West and Wewaxation at Wast!

Ready for… Laundry Day, don’t you think?

Originally posted 4/11/2013

Well, the process is over. Pull a wheel and hub. Head into Wickenburg to drop off the hub for bearing removal and replacement, and get the tire dealer to swap the rubber donut for new. When a hub is ready, pick it up and return to install it on the trailer and pull another. Rinse and repeat. It took several days because service on the hubs couldn’t be instant. Total, $844.22 for four tires, three bearing sets with seals, and the labor to pound out the old and pound in the new. Plus, a spare bearing and seal set to carry on the road.

See the label still on the rear tire? I’m done, with about and hour and a half to go before sunset.

Just for morbid curiosity, I also pulled the new hub that had been replaced in Quartzsite. Expecting to find an abundance of grease, I found everything clean and dry, with just a whisper of clean grease wetting the tapered rollers. That’s not the usual practice. The mechanic here expressed his preference as, “If a bearing fails that I put in, it’s not going to be for lack of grease. These things heat up.” I slopped more in with my grease gun and a weird stem that is handy for reaching into such areas. So I’ve done all I can do, and it’s now merely a matter of hub touchy-feely and watching for tilted wheels once I hit the road again.

But that won’t be right away. I can stay here for up to another week if I like, and I’ve been concentrating on getting the repairs done. I’ll likely do laundry and food shop soon, as well as tour the area and walk around Wickenburg, which is a peculiar little town. Much of it is modern and relatively upscale, and some spots here and there are kind of eclectic Old West in their own way. But, I have yet to climb out of the Furd, apart from the two repair places involved. I can say that the people I’ve dealt with as well as those wandering in for one reason or another are “un-urban”. Low key, open, and they’ll just wander over  Read more…

El Cojinete está Muerto

Umm, the hub is not supposed to droop down like that.

Originally posted 4/6/2013

The title to this post means The Bearing is Dead. This is the second wheel bearing to disintegrate, this one 115 miles after being lubed and reinstalled. The good news is that the hub did manage to be able to be pulled off after a few hearty yanks, and the complete bearings (less loose tapered rollers) came off with it. That’s far superior to what happened on the last bearing failure. I wasn’t able/willing to pound out the bearing races held inside the hub, and made my way to Wickenburg to find a shop that could apply the necessary brute force. The automotive shop in Wickenburg wasn’t really open, this being Saturday, but people were there so I dropped off the hub and they’ll get to it Monday. I also need to drop off the rest of the bearing parts so they can try to match up what I’ve got.

While in town, I picked up a 2-ton floor jack on sale for $25, a replacement fire extinguisher for the trailer ( the 25-year-old one registered zero on the pressure gauge), a metal file, an abrasive sponge, and some fine grit wet/dry sandpaper. But let me describe how I got to this point, with the trailer wheel up and hub off. I didn’t want to try to hoist the affected wheel with the crappy scissors jack again, so I figured I’d press the F-250’s jack into service. That didn’t turn out  Read more…

Smartweigh: Geekoid Nirvana

Originally posted 4/5/2013

George and an accomplice read scales and note the numbers on a clipboard.

Originally posted 4/5/2013

Had Dickens been at my Smartweigh at the Escapees North Ranch in Congress, Arizona he would have summarized it as, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Although the Smartweigh is a safety-oriented number-crunching exercise, with terms like GVWR, GCWR, and GAWR, I’ll try to make the explanation of it as understandable as possible. The Executive Summary: As far as the numbers go, I’m looking good – much better than I thought. The bummer is the remaining three “original” trailer tires themselves, and the weight distributing hitch. Even though I’m not overloading any tires, it would be a real good idea to lose some weight. I’ll show you why.

The Escapees’ Smartweigh system is much better than your typical truck stop scales, which weigh the tow vehicle, the trailer, and then both. All that does is give you a “yes, no, maybe so” result that tells you if the individual units are overweight.

A typical North Ranch street. Wide and paved. Housing ranges from park models to modular to conventional.

For $55 for a truck and trailer weigh-in, the Smartweigh test coughs up individual loads on each tire. Because RVs typically load their tires and suspensions very near their load carrying limits, and do not distribute those loads evenly, it’s common to have an RV weigh in under the maximum limit, and yet be overloading one or more tires. In order to get “worst case” numbers, the RV is supposed to go into the test with all fuel, propane and fresh water tanks full, while all waste tanks are to be empty. This is the normal travel mode.

For the record, the majority of RVs tested so far have overloaded something beyond its limits. That presents a safety problem, sometimes a legal liability problem in case of an accident, and it accounts for many interesting, unplanned road adventures. It’s a fair question to  Read more…