Service Seminar - Routine Maintenance Pt. 2
At least once a year, it’s a good idea for any RV owner to give their coach a little extra TLC. Not only will this practice improve the longevity of your RV, but it will also provide a safer and more enjoyable ride for you and your loved ones. Beaver Coach Sales & Services is here to help you along every step of the way. Our Service Manager and Master Certified Technician Sean Lakin, and Owner Ty Kelly, will be your hosts. Together, they will be sharing expert tips on procedures such as treating your slide-outs, awning maintenance, filter replacement, and more!
Ty: Hi, I’m Ty Kelly with Beaver Coach Sales
Sean: And I’m Sean Lakin Operation Manager at Beaver Coach Sales and Service.
Ty: We’re here to finish up a follow up on what Ryan and Sean had going a few weeks ago. We have a list of questions, probably the most common questions that clients come up with calling in over the phone around the country and out here in our service department. And I believe where we left off we were talking about slide-outs and slide seals. One of the questions we have here is how do you remove snow from the slide outs without causing damage?
Sean: That's a good question, so first of all you want to make sure you're safe, it’s going to be cold outside and slippery so you want to make sure you have a nice, firm foundation for your ladder and it's not rickety before you climb up it. And secondly, once you do get up there, most coaches have some type of a topper on it over the top of the slide box and the materials on them can get pretty brittle when it gets cold outside, in extreme cold it turns almost ridged. And so you have to be really careful when you're sweeping them off, if you strike them with something even as soft as a broom sometimes they'll crack or shatter a hole in your awning which is no fun and can cost hundreds of dollars to repair. And then I just start in the middle and work my way to one side, then to the other side and once you clear the snow off, the awning can roll up properly. If you don't have an awning over the top of your slide box it’s kinda the same thing. What you're doing is ensuring you are not dragging a bunch of snow into the coach when you bring your slide box in, because what you'll get is, if you're driving down the road, the first time you hit the brakes you'll get 60 lbs of ice cold slush on the back of your neck and nobodys going to have a fun day doing that. So basically you just have to be careful and make sure you clean it completely before you attempt to run the slide box. So that's pretty much it for snow.
Ty: Now I’m envisioning the guy that says “honey, you watch out the door and I’ll run this thing in a couple inches at a time and see if the snow just falls right off.”
Sean: It almost never does. You could try it, if it’s powder snow, you might get away with that but usually motorhomes aren't the most insulated domisyals so you get a little bit of heat escaping so snow gets trapped in between the roof space and the awning so you get a little sheet of ice and the canvis doesn’t like to roll up on itself. To get a canvas to double in size you really only have to add it’s thickness to the service of the canvas, it can cause damage or lock your slide box up.
Ty: There you go, don’t try that again. OK what about lubricants for slideouts? Do you need to use anything?
Sean: Basic maintenance for a slide box is not super complicated stuff depending on the mecinizumes. Some of the mechanisms are a little more complex but for your basic rake type slide system that pushes and pulls from the bottom with either a motor or hydraulic, you want to make sure that you are lubricating any gear tight mechanizmus. Just hit them with some white lithium grease, it won't attract a lot of dirt. It has some stain power in them so it’s not just going to drip off or dissipate or evaporate. So that's what we tend to use the most of. Electric types we’ll almost always have some type of a rack system, hydraulic has the same timing gears on both ends. If you have shuntech there's usually not a whole lot of lubrication involved you just want to inspect them occasionally if there's any signs of wear that would maybe indicate somethings loose or somethings out of alignment. Some of the HWH type, the lateral arm slides where the mechanism is bolted to either side of the box and there's a bunch of teflon rollers in there and lubricating those with white lithium grease will also keep them from rattling and keep them running smoothly. Just basic stuff like that. Cleaning the slide seals, you don't need to go through any strange mesures just soapy water on a microfiber towel or rag and you can wipe them off. There are products out there that you can spry on them but the fact is neciligatlbe, I can’t really say one way or another if it extends the life or not. Usually the slide seals circume to the sun long before any of those things would really protect them or they would get torn or physically damaged. Make sure they are clean, the side of the slide box being clean is more important than lubrication of the actual parts of the mechanisms that extend and retract.
Ty: I have one more slide question here, can you drive your RV with the slide out?
Sean: You can probably once, pedestrians and oncoming traffic beware. If your coach is disableed and you have to move it a very short distance, like hundreds of feet not hundreds of yards or miles, you can drive it with the slide box out and just roll it from one bay to the other and we’ll do that sometimes if we have to. Customers will come in with issues that wouldn't allow us to get them all the way in or retracted, so we’ll move them like that occasionally but we try not to just as a rule. It obstructs you view out of your mirror for one and for two, the slide boxes now are so much bigger and deeper than they used to be so you're almost doubling the width of your coach and most people don’t have the situational awareness to maneuver something of that magnitude in close close quarters, and use spotters if you have to do something like that.
Ty: And it takes multiple spotters when you do that. It’s amazing how poor your visibility really is. OK, let's go on to engine oil changes, can I change my oil myself.
Sean: Yeah, you can. I think the biggest thing that would probably keep someone from wanting to change their own oil is that you have this massive amount of waste oil you have to dispose of. Usually you're catching it in a large drain pan then having to pour it into smaller containers and transport it to a landfill or wherever you can to get rid of it. It just becomes a huge hassle and there's no real way to pour it into the smaller containers. So yes, you can but it's dirty, I don't know whose had used diesel oil on them but it's not like engine oil where you just wipe it off. It’s got a lot of carbon in it, its’ black as night and it won’t come off your skin, if you get it on your clothes their basic runid. You can do it but you mind as well let the guys, grease monkeys, in the pit change your oil for you.
Ty: And when you come in here and see what they look like you'll know why you don't want to do it. They never get clean.
Sean: Yeah, when I was a chassis guy, I pretty much had a permanent black ring around my bathtub at home.
Ty: So someone does want to change their own oil, what's different about RV oil and where do you get it?
Sean: There's nothing really different, there are ratings that manufacturers recommend for curtain engines and as long as the oil meets their specifications you can use whatever you want. You can use synthetic if you want or conventional so long as it meets the diesel turbo specifications like rotella and della and stuff like that. I think the biggest argument out there is how often do you change your oil. Because when an engine manufacturer builds a manual say for a partictual engine they base a lot of their calculations on a truck driver because a majority of their engines go into the long haul trucks, so everything is a fairly high mileage or annually. Everything will be, “check transmission fluid every 50000 miles or annually.” The technological advancements have extended the life of the oil when it used to be that the initial function of an oil change, your very first oil change, weather it be your transmission or engine, was to remove all of the metal shavings that were left over from the milling process, get those immediately removed from the engine, transmission or differential so they didn't go on to cause more problems later on. With the technological advancements everything that is milled and machined has such tight tolerances that unless there’s a major problem in fitment, a torque setting or a bearing that goes bad we don't see a lot of those metallics coming out the pan like we used to because the intervals for oil changes on those items have increased dramatically. Commins, if you look at one of their programs in their book, your initial oil change is at like 25000 miles and if you go to their program and send in a sample and stay up on it, they can extend it even beyond that. The average coach owner isn’t going to drive their coach 25000 miles in a year so they fall into that “or annual” category so that's up to the discretion of the owner. There’s different engine manufacturers and even different engines in the same manufacturer that might have different oil change intervals and as well as the difference of fluids they are using, synthetic vs conventional.
Ty: Now this next question, I’d like to know who this was because I wanna not take his motorhome on trade. He wants to know if I need to change the oil in my generator.
Sean: Initial oil on a generator can be between 25-100 hours depending on the manurgafar. I definitely need to be servicing your generator. When we see a catitrapic failure of a component on the engine side of the generator it’s usually due to lack of maintenance. There are different maintenance intervals for each generator and each one of these has a specific amount of hours that you're supposed to address those issues. We have one that's right at about 1000 or 1500 hours and that’s really important because your doing things like setting the valve or changing the thermostat, belts and hoses can get soft, things of that nature so you differently want to keep up on the generator maintenance. It’s one of those things that there really isn’t a substitute for, if it goes out in the field there's really nothing that you can do short of plugging into 50amp service to do the same job as the genny.
Ty: It's interesting walking through the shop you see that generators aren’t that big, but you see them all torn apart and I’ll ask “what are you guys doing?” “Doing a 1000 hour service on a generator” It’s a major deal. That thing is torn apart!
Sean: It physically has to be removed from the unit in pretty much every case because the manufacturer of the motorhomes don't give enough room on their slideout trays if they slide out at all. To get the generator out far enough to get all of the access panels off of it to get deep enough into all of the components. It’s a big deal!
Ty: So now we’re going to jump into how long do the filters last? I suppose that would go along with your oil change.
Sean: If you're changing the oil, you're going to change the oil filter. If you're changing the oil filter it’s probably not a bad idea to get the secondary fuel filter as well. That’s what catches the smaller particles that are going to directly wear on the injector needles and seats. Basically you have to imagine that the fuel is being pushed into the cylinder at thousands of pounds per square inch. Any sediment or anything that’s solid mixed in with the fuel acts as an abrasive and basically wears the needles and seats out and that’s what makes an injector bad. When an injector wont shut off completely and that’s what causes the fuel pressure to bleed down too hard starts and things like that are directly related to the injector oil. So changing that filer, the primary fuel filter, a good rule of thumb, every other oil change you'll see sediment in the bowl or water. If there's water in the bowl on almost every one of those primary fuel filters there's a mechanism to release it whether it be a littler twisty valve or a button you push and it pumps fuel to the system and opens the valve and lets the water escape.
Ty: How many filters are there? Don't you have at least one on the transmission too?
Sean: Yeah, on the Allison transmission there's two internal filters on most of the types of Allisons we deal with. Engines have one or 2 oil filters, the fuel system will almost always have at least 2. You have a primary which basically catches water and the large pieces of sediment and then it moves to the secondary and that picks up all the little stuff. Your aqua hot’s got at least one filter, usually they'll have 2, your engine cooling system will usually have a filter, hydraulic systems typically will have at least 1 filter, and the air cleaner for the generator and the air cleaner for the engine and the fuel filter for the generator, so it’s quite a bit.
Ty: There was a question about do rvs have cabin filters like your car has?
Sean: Some of the RVs that are built off of an automotive chassis have cabin filters just like their automotive counterparts. The larger class A diesel motorhomes generally speaking have a cabin filter for the dash air conditioning and heating.
Ty: If you live on a dusty, dirty gravel road is it easy to change an RV air filter as it is in a car?
Sean: In some cases changing an air filter on a rv is extremely easy, and in some cases it is extremely difficult just kinda depends on if the engineers thought about the guy that comes behind him and has to service it. I remember the old Donaldson on the gillin chassis, it was a 2 minute replacement. There were 4 plastic wing nuts you removed, the base would come off, the filter comes out and a new filter goes in. On some of these units you're pulling brackets, u-bolt and moving hoes to get access.
Ty: And they can be monstrous.
Sean: They can be 25 lbs and 3 feet long so it just depends on the unit.
Ty: Okay, hopefully that covers all the filter questions. Back to awnings again, we talked about slide outs and topper awnings, what about removing stains from your awnings? Is there an easy way to do that? You get sap and pitch and just stuff out there in the RV parks.
Sean: There's basically two different kinds of canvas, one is like a tarpon material it's a poly and then the other one is like the sunbrella type material which is a kind of more like a fabric like a canvas and the stuff that's more like a tarpaulin material, it doesn't generally last as long, the sun's a little bit harder on that stuff, it's not as pretty and that's why on the higher end coaches they usually will use the more canvas stuff. Cleaning it, I mean you can use things like goo gone and a citrus based remover. There's two types of stains, one's gonna be water soluble and then the other one is going to be an oil base something like a pine tar or something like that if you park under a tree and so that kind of stuff is your goo gone or your citrus cleaners that'll break down the tars and allow you to remove them. If it's something like mold or whatnot depending on the severity of it there are a lot of different aftermarket cleaners, carpet cleaners and upholstery cleaners that you can apply to those. I know some people use baking soda and peroxide mixture, stuff and that'll tend to bleach the fabric and leave a big unsightly stain where you were trying to address a stain in the first place. So I'd say read the bottle and see if it says anything about color fast fabrics and bleaching.
Ty: One of the things, we started an entire upholstery department just because we stitched so many awnings. We sent all these awnings out to be re-stitched and brought them back and just the labor of delivering them across town to have them restitched and brought back we found it to be easier to do in-house, so that's kind of what got our upholstery department going. Is there one fabric that's better than the other for staying together? Is it the thread that's used?
Sean: A lot of it is the thread. A ton of it is the thread and you would think that at some of these companies that have been in business for a really long time, I don't know if it's an expense issue or if it's just they don't invest a lot of time in research and development but there are a lot of issues that arise from just having the thread get eaten by the sun. It gets so dry that you can just pluck it apart with your fingers and it does seem like the manufacturers are now catching on because if you look at a lot of their new fabrics, their heat seems sealed and they have the no stitching on them whatsoever. I think that was a big issue for them probably on warranty units if you live in a place like Arizona, California or New Mexico where you're getting a lot of heat and a lot of sun, it's just basically annihilating all of the stitching on the awning canvases. We use a good quality fabric, then we did our research and we came up with a really good quality thread that will fight the effects of the uv on the thread. Then we build our own awnings instead of trying to repair them because inherently what happens is you restitch the awning and six months goes by and it rips again and then you have an angry customer because they just paid a lot of money to get their awning repaired and it's hard to guarantee how long something like that'll last. Whereas for just the extra cost of the fabric we can install a brand new awning.
Ty: Right next door we have our upholstery shop and it looks like a sail making shop in there, it's a big table with a sewing machine in the middle and we do stitch a lot of awnings. Debris build up on your awning. How important is it to get it off of there versus just letting it go in and out how will affect the awning?
Sean: Anything that is left on top of the awning that will eventually get maybe perhaps wrapped up in the awning, it'll increase the size of the roll exponentially as it rolls up and so you end up damaging things, you jam the awning roll in its little metal housing. If it's a biological thing like leaves, that'll rot and in the process of rotting the leaves it's also going to rot your canvas so you definitely want to make sure that before you retract your awnings that they're as clean as you can get them.
Ty: Now the wind. We see these awnings flapping out here in the breeze and if you're out camping and it's going to be windy, at what point should I bring my awning in or run my slide in so my toppers don't have a problem?
Sean: The toppers are pretty short they don't catch as much air as the patio awnings so I would definitely say that if you're experiencing wind and you see that awning buffeting outside, if it's moving up and down, most of the awnings, if you have the feature engaged if it's an option, have a wind sensor and so once the awning moves so many degrees and so many seconds it's an accelerometer that I believe that gerard uses and some of the other companies use now. They used to use an anemometer which was the little whirly gig on the roof that was always missing one cup so it was more like a wind direction monitor, so they don't work if you don't have all the cups so don't rely on that little sensor if you don't have all the cups. So definitely retract your patio awning. We have seen in our own parking lot a little micro burst where you get a 45 mile an hour burst, that little mechanism it can't react fast enough to draw the awning in and it'll take an awning all the way to the other side of a motorhome as we've seen it happen. So if you anticipate high winds definitely don't leave your rig unattended with the awning out. At least if you're there you can make an attempt to bring it back and if you're going to leave and go to dinner or lunch or something or go play golf, run your awning in. The slide boxes, I think the biggest thing with them is if you're expecting an ice storm or something like that or super high winds in excess of 50-60 miles an hour and you don't need the extra space, probably wouldn't be a bad idea to bring them in. You can hear them out there fluttering in the breeze, they'll get stretched out and the seams will tear.
Ty: All right let's move on to tow vehicles. Can you charge your rv battery from your tow vehicle? I'm assuming that must be a pickup pulling a tow behind not a not a motorhome pulling a tow vehicle.
Sean: If you're towing a trailer and your tow vehicle is rigged with a charge wire and you're towing your trailer it's also rigged with a charged wire, then the answer is yes. That's something that is specific and even if you have a six or seven way plug on the back your vehicle, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a charge wire ran to the back bumper. Same with your towing vehicle. If you're in a motorhome and you have a towed car but a charged wire is not necessarily installed from the factory, you want to check and make sure that you have a charge wire. You may, on some units, not even need it because when you shut the key off it kills everything in the car and so in some of these units when you tow them you have to tow them with the key in the accessory position or in the on position so then you do have systems in the car that are active so if you don't want to arrive at your destination with a dead tow car, then you definitely want to have a charge wire installed. In the process you want them to put a diode in as well because when you shut off your coach you don't want your coach to draw off your tow car and kill the battery
Ty: It's very common to have folks come in here with their towed car and it’s dead. We see it way more than you would think so I'm actually surprised how many people have that problem. I've actually traveled with people that have to stop every so often and start their car and charge it, so that is a really important thing. Can you back up with your tow car on.
Sean: I can't because I'm not that good.
Ty: I just told the story, I've only tried it one time and it was successful. We were in the middle of Kansas and there was a Dairy Queen, we hadn't seen an exit for a long time and I really wanted to go to this Dairy Queen and a guy pulled in with a big boat next to me and we were stuck when we came out. I had to back up about 50 feet so I watched in the backup camera, fortunately on these newer coaches the backup cameras are awesome, and I watched the steering wheel in the tow car as I backed up and it did not move. But I've seen it done where you start to back up and once that steering wheel starts to go it goes really fast and it can be a mess quick. So what we will tell you is don't back up with a tow car on. Does towing a vehicle behind an RV shorten its life?
Sean: It's kind of an interesting question because while there are certain systems in the car that are being used, there are others that are not. Some tow vehicles won't even log miles being towed behind an rv, so I would say that the wear items that you would experience when it's being towed behind your RV would be bearings, if you have a supplemental braking system obviously you're going to be using your brakes, anything that's turning going down the road. Other than that, not really. Driving a car you're running the engine, you're using the transmission, you're exercising the differentials. The differential is still turning even on your towed vehicle if you're not going down the road with the engine running but if it's towed behind. So yeah, it doesn't hurt anything I would just say that you maintain your normal service schedule on your towed vehicle and just treat it like it was running. If you towed that thing for eighty thousand miles and at eighty thousand miles it requires a differential service and I'd go ahead and service a differential. Don't assume just because it's not being ran that it's not being worn, unless you're putting it on a trailer then you're not accruing any of that damage.
Ty: One thing I notice, we tow a Jeep Wrangler and it tows with the key off but when I tow it for hours and you get out and start it up and put it in gear it smells really hot, like something's hot in there, maybe one of the fluids.
Sean: It could be the differential, could be breaks if you've used the supplemental braking system.
Ty: I've often wondered what that was because it smells warmer than normal so it probably is. I suppose all that stuff's turning so obviously tires that's going to be a big thing. I think my car has been towed more miles than it's been driven and I think that's true with a lot of RVers. We have our tow cars and that's all we really use them for. I think that's really it for the tow vehicles, anything special about tow vehicles we need to know?
Sean: There are a lot of different braking systems and tow package components available out there from a multitude of different manufacturers, I would just say that if you're tempted to install some of those components yourself, I would seek some kind of guidance whether it be from the manufacturer. We constantly see issues with braking systems that are misinstalled, miswired, hardware where brackets are bolted to chassis that aren't properly torqued or they don't have loctite on them, It isn’t a bad idea to do a little pre-game checklist on your tow vehicle, stick your head under there and actually physically look at the bracket and make sure that the holes are not becoming oblong. We've had a couple units in here where the front end of the frame extension, it's like a unibody type thing so it's basically hardened sheet metal and it wobbled the holes out and then the bracket ended up ripping completely out of the frame extension and that's happened enough times that it bears mentioning for sure. We hear quite often, just because the nature of our business and the amount of customers that come through here, how many people have had tow cars detached from their motorhome. It's not as uncommon an occurrence as you think it would be and it can be catastrophic, not only for the driver but oncoming traffic or just some bystanders standing on the side of the road. So definitely stuff you want to pay attention to before you go out and haul your rig for hundreds of miles, just make sure your gear is up to snuff.
Ty: I have two experiences with that. One is when I first got in the business in mid 90s a customer was just taking delivery of their new vehicle and the stinger was in and they put the pin through but it didn't go through the hole, it went behind the stinger so they had it all hooked up on this new tow car and brand new tow bar behind the coach, and as they pulled out the stinger came loose and it was down a hill and the tow car ran into the back of the coach. Just right out here 10 years ago I was with a customer riding with him and he hooked up his tow car, I was going to go to his house to bring his coach back that he was trading in and his tow car came undone and we saw it in the mirror passing us on the right.
So that's about all we have, if you have questions send them in and we'll make sure we get to all of your questions. We really appreciate Sean coming and helping us out with this today. We didn't make it through all of these questions last time but we're excited to bring you this opportunity more and more often and as you have more questions we'll just keep this up and keep going. Thanks Sean for your time.
Sean: Yeah, Thanks to all you guys for tuning in and watching making it worthwhile appreciate it!