Note: Since the caravan ended, we have reverted to logging total days and total miles on the road trip.
The day the Caravan ended we blasted out of New Orleans and headed to Red Bay Alabama.
The reason for this, is that it is very difficult to get good repair work done outside of the manufacturers factory. The RV community is very aware of this problem and is awash in horror stories – particularly involving RV dealerships.
In any event, after a hard days drive, we ended up in Red Bay Acres, a RV resort in Red Bay Alabama close to the Tiffin Factory.
Red Bay is widely known as Tiffinville since the factory is there, the factory service center is there and there are many independent shops – staffed mostly with experienced, skill Tiffin people who focus is the repair the various issues that come with Motorhomes.
Our first morning we re-located to First Class Glass to get the windshield replaced. While we were there the legendary Ashley Herrington came out and serviced the troublesome Aguahot. We had to spend the night in First Class Glass to let the windshield adhesives set.
The next day we pulled out and went to Freedom RV Power to get the Spyder panels fixed. One of the panels was pretty straight forward, water intrusion had shorted out a row on numbers. The pad was replaced with a special add-on cover to protect it.
The next problem was the main panel inside the motorhome. Since the start of the trip, it had been giving us problems. Unfortunately that pad controls many functions in the motorhome. It needed to be fixed. I had been working with Spyder Customer Service. The problem was quite intermittent and I was getting quite frustrated.
Freedom RV power was puzzled by the issue. Some phone calls were made and pretty soon a couple of Tiffin people from Red Bay showed up and they had with them something that (I think) was a CAN Bus analyzer. They plugged the analyzer in (wouldn’t let me watch) and then started digging into the wall.
What apparently happen was that during the initial build of the Motorhome, there was some rework in the floor near the panel and one of the wires to the pads (3.5 mid bath and the 10.5) got cut. So the factory put in a terminator and ran both pads off a single set of wires.
Ok, fine.
But apparently one of the old wires was left and the blue line started arcing against something. Hence the intermittent loss of comms to the panels. On retrospect the problem did seem to start after that wall had shifted a bit during some heavy mountain driving.
They think that will fix the problem. They said if it doesn’t, bring it into Red Bay and they will snake another CAN bus wire up to the pad – what you said. Apparently, that snake job is non-trivial
We also needed our levelling pads replaced in the rear. One was bent and the other was just missing. They had both been broken since before we go to Bemidji. We had pre-arranged for Doug Evans of Masters Design RV \to order some replacement pads, called RV Paws, that were more heavy duty than the original equipment. The shipment was delayed, so Doug called Tiffin and got them to take us in on short notice. It turns out Tiffin has started installing RV Paws on new Motorhomes since the Lippert (OEM) pads are widely acknowledged as being inadequate.
It made for some very busy days, but we did have a chance to do some touristy stuff. We had a choice between going to the Coon Dog Cemetery or to Tupelo Mississippi to see the birthplace of Elvis. Jerald voted for the Coon Dogs, but Claire voted for Elvis so she won.