In for Repairs

It all went smoothly yesterday morning as we hitched up the fifth wheel and took it into the Orangewood RV service center in Surprise. Josie called her shop to inform them she would be about an hour late as she helped me with all the preparations. I arrived at the dealership at around 9 AM and the service advisor - Doug - wrote up the work order. At first, he indicated that it would be a week before they could look at the problem to diagnose the cause. No siree, you're wrong about that! This is our home, and we will not be sitting here for a week before you look at the problem. I suggested he talk to the service manager who made our appointment and committed to getting on the problem right away. He did, and they diagnosed the problem.

The slideout is being prevented from fully opening as a result of some damage (?) to the sub floor of the bedroom slide. In order to fix the problem and allow the slide to fully open, the floor needs to be repaired. The floor damage is news to us, as we never had any occasion to do anything to the floor. Anyway, they will contact the warranty company this morning to get approvals for performing the work.

At 3 PM in the afternoon, they moved our rig out to the overnight parking area where we had an electrical hookup:

As I was setting up the rig for the night, I heard the familiar "pop" that accompanied the hydraulic problem we had while at Lake Pleasant. Once again, a hydraulic line got snagged on the controller and broke a fitting on the new hydraulic pump. Hydraulic fluid was leaking all over the place and the service technician had to spread some kind of absorbing granules under the area where the leak was located. So now, we have the additional problem of repairing the hydraulics - again - before any work can proceed on the real problem. We have a guarantee on the work performed by the Mobile Tech that installed the new pump, but it may require more time to get parts.

We also had them give us an estimate on repairing the damage to our fifth wheel caused by the tire blowouts a couple years ago. That damage should be covered by our insurance, and the estimate is $5400 for those repairs. We need to decide whether or not to get that work done while we are here. It looks like we will be here for awhile, but we will know more this morning. We aren't far away from Josie's work, so her commute will be a short one while we are here...