In the wake of a successful debut of the Jayco, we had a new hitlist of perhaps less urgent things to get done for the following month’s trip.

Our 2004 RAM 2500 truck has been a workhorse. Wifey commuted to work with it until we moved out in the country. It has hauled horse trailers, several RVs, utility trailers, etc. I love that it runs essentially the same 0-60 time with or without a load attached.

However, in the last few years, it has developed some troubling transmission symptoms. If it sits unused for a long time, couple of weeks at least, it wont immediately move when put into gear. One has to shuttle back and forth between Reverse and Drive a few times to get it to roll. More recently, it developed a more worrisome issue wherein it would seem to be stuck in 2nd gear, especially if you were engaged in even modestly aggressive acceleration. You could often kind of force it to shift by manipulating the throttle, but it was not reliable. This made towing the Jayco trickier than it had to be and, surely, the extra weight of towing something can’t be helping whatever is wrong with the transmission. Store this note away for a few minutes.

We returned with the Jayco on Sunday, October 20. On Wednesday, October 23, me and about 25 of my IT Infrastructure Team coworkers were all laid off work. In a Teams call.

I spent most of the week reeling from that and starting the job hunting process, something that I am WOEFULLY out of practice with. I’d been with this company for 21 years, with the previous company 18 years and literally had a weekend off between those two jobs. I haven’t had to actually hunt for a job for nearly 40 years.

By the weekend, it was time to get on with the camper.

I replaced all the rear marker lights. The new wiring does not presume that the metal skin is grounded, so I wired the ground to each light.

I upgraded the light over the rear bed to an LED light/fan combo. It has a remote, which is obviously intended to be used from below. It throws a LOT of light and the light’s color temperature is adjustable. The fan is nice, though on high, it vibrates a little.

Speaking of fans, I manually wired 12V to the roof vent fan and verified my fears, that as mounted, it was going to pull the screen into the blades and sound like a chainsaw. I fabricated a simple bracket and flipped the fan over. I also flipped the fan blade on the motor so that it could run in the proper direction. The red sharpie arrow no longer applies. 🙂

Since I was playing with 12VDC stuff, I mounted the DC room light.

And the outdoor light, which doesn’t look very bright in full sun, but it is on.

With all these 12 volt devices installed, it was past time to install the massively oversized 12 volt converter, starting with adding a 110V outlet in The Hole.

It will one day be slightly taxed by charging a battery, but for today, 45 amps is about 42 amps more than necessary.

November 1 & 2 was a major IDPA match. It was fun, though I didn’t place or win anything. Coolest logo and match shirt ever, though.

Wifey went to visit friends in Oklahoma on that Saturday and I had plans to continue working on the Jayco and perhaps do some work in the workshop to get ready for some winter blacksmithing.

Trouble arose on the trip home from the match on Saturday. I was only 30 minutes from the range and still an hour from home when my car developed a leak. It leaked oil and connecting rods out of a hole in the side of the engine block.

Luckily for me, this spot on the road was only 20 minutes from where we camp with the Jayco and the incredible people there came to my rescue without hesitation. They loaned me one of their cars to get the rest of the way home. The next morning, I rented a U-Haul tow dolly, returned their car to them then picked up mine and towed it home. At this point, I am still not sure exactly what I am going to do about it, junk it or attempt to repair it.

With the next Love’s Way outing rapidly approaching, we are suddenly in a rush to get a bunch of stuff done in time for the weekend.

I replaced the kitchen faucet and the shower wand and finalized the installation of the water heater, bringing the last of the plumbing to a close.

The kitchen sink was a handy place to record the video of the shower wand in operation.

I added a terminal block specifically to distribute DC power, complete with its own fuse.

I added a light in the ceiling of The Hole.

I added the switch for the roof vent fan to the 12V ceiling light.

Importantly, I installed USB charging outlets by each of the beds!

You recall we had concerns about the transmission on the truck. I had been doing research into the issue and found two solutions, either or both of which could be our problem.

One is a hydraulic pressure regulator solenoid and/or pressure transducer. These are internal parts, but they can be reached by removing the pan on the bottom of the transmission and they are generally not very difficult to replace. There are commonly available parts kits that include the pan gasket and a replacement transmission oil filter, which you have to remove to get to the solenoid anyway, so you may as well replace it. In all, a couple of hours work and 7-8 quarts of fairly expensive automatic transmission fluid. It is unclear if this will directly address the 2nd gear slippage, but it definitely addresses the lack of motion after the truck sits unused for a while.

The other is a far simpler procedure. There is an externally adjustable tension setting for one of the tension bands. It is common for transmissions with 100K or more miles to need this band adjusted. The various YouTube videos describing it’s adjustment call it a 15 minute job, but most of them have the transmission out on a bench or the vehicle up on a lift. They are not being adjusted on the ground by an old fat guy crawling around under the truck. Still, it was not a bad experience overall and the difference is like night and day. The truck shifts like it is supposed to. We can defer the solenoid replacement for now, which is good since for the foreseeable future, the truck is going to be my daily driver.

With that particular thorn out of our toe, we continue working towards the next campout.

I cut and attached a top for the cabinet. It will eventually be painted, but I kind of like the woodgrain. Its just plain old plywood.

We applied this really inexpensive backsplash stuff from the dollar store to the walls around the kitchen. It took some extra effort to stabilize the actual material and to use better glue than it’s self adhesive stuff, but it turned out nice.

We got a nice big holding tank for sewage and I plumbed it for both black and grey water, but long term, we probably wont leave it this way. Our gray water output will be a lot higher than black water and we may be able to plumb a smaller black water tank directly into that outlet.

We got everything packed up and, while we didn’t leave as early as we had planned, we still got away reasonably early.

Then a new disaster struck.

You know how they tell you to always check your lug nuts before you go on a long trip. Yeah. Do that.

On the same highway where my car threw a rod, just two weeks and eight miles west of where that happened, the last lug bolt came out of one of the Jayco’s wheels.

I failed to get a picture of it before I pulled the wheel out, but it was laying at a weird forward angle, but it had been dragged on the pavement far enough to have a thumb sized hole in the sidewall. It didn’t look like the lug threads in the hub were damaged, so there was hope. I used one of the leveling jacks to jack it up enough to extract the wheel. The spring had obviously dragged as well and we found the gray water adapter half ground, but broken off a few feet behind where we had stopped.

Shortening the story from here greatly, we were able to replace the damaged tire at Walmart and use some standard bolts in order to get the trailer back on the road well enough to make it the rest of the way to Love’s Way, arriving five hours later than planned.

We used two lug bolts and two regular bolts in each wheel. As expected, we had to deflate the tire in order to convince it to fit into the wheelwell, so I am very happy that I threw my inflator in the truck before we left.

We stopped a couple of times on rest of the trip to recheck the lug bolts, especially since they were in an extra compromised configuration. At one stop, it was easy and comfortable to look around under there and investigate the totally not unexpected lean that the trailer was displaying.

The most obvious thing is that the spring is not connected to the axle, thus the lean. The axle is resting against the frame and the dangling Ubolt will later be found to literally just be hanging there. I am surprised that it stayed there for the whole bumpy trip.

Oh, and the tail lights stopped working. Brake and turn lights work, but no tail lights. The wiring for the lights passes right along the edge of that wall and over that fender, so it may have been damaged.

I did a lot of shopping online for replacement Ubolts and tie plates and later springs. It occurred to me that not only would it be wise to replace the spring because it would be prone to break where it got ground to smithereens, but the camper has always ridden really low and some new springs might lift it up a bit and help with the sewer connections and towing into driveways and all those kinds of things. Once I had some pretty good ideas on what to get, we also checked some local(ish) places and found what turned out to be arguably the best deal. I got two new springs that are a little heavier, new Ubolts and tie plates, all for $133, no waiting, no shipping. I did have to drive into Fort Worth to pick them up, but no biggie. I also procured 10 lug bolts, so it will get all new bolts and we will have 6 spares 🙂

We are planning to go install all this on Saturday and probably haul the camper back home for the rest of the work, like replacing the broken gray water fitting and other damage done in this excursion, besides the other pending work, such as installing a battery, replacing the seals in the toilet, finishing the interior trim.

So in just about exactly 30 days, I was laid off work, had my car blow up and nearly destroyed the camper. The one shining star is that just today, I got a really good bite on a job application, something similar to what I was doing and for similar pay. With a little luck, I will ace the interview and put a lot of this negative stuff behind us!