Always One More Thing

It has been a little cooler around here the last couple of nights. Down into the mid-teens for our friends to the south. That means we are keeping the heat on at all times and even making sure the tankage is warmed at the coldest times. Not a big problem as our rig was built to handle the cold weather and everything is supposedly kept warm enough to stop it from freezing up. In my last blog I was getting the outfit ready to head to town to have the windshield replaced and that went as well as could be expected. Sure am glad I had that piece of glass insured though, or that $3200.00 bill would have surely given my heart a good test. But the trip in and out was not so trouble free. No I haven’t broke the glass yet, but long time readers will remember that while we were coming home from Texas in the spring of 2009 we had an overheating issue as we crossed the Dakota’s. It only shows up once in a while and that just makes it more frustrating. Early this summer I had the rig into Freightliner to have that issue looked into but all they could suggest was that it might be the thermostat. They changed that out and everything seemed to be OK. Well on the both the trip into town and the return from the glass shop the rig overheated. Probably nothing that I couldn’t deal with just by taking it easy on the hills but this thing has enough power to make short work of hills and it ain’t right.

So I gave the folks at the Freightliner in Red Deer a holler and they said bring it in Thursday morning and we’ll have another look at it and see if we can’t figure it out. Now if you have ever taken a vehicle into the mechanic you will for certain know what happened next. After a 5:00AM departure from Dogpound, I headed for Red Deer ready to nurse it all the way in. But as probably could have been predicted, nada, cool, no overheating, I cruised all the way over hill and dale to Red Deer at 70 MPH and never saw the gauge go over 195F.

Nevertheless I gave the service manager a good song and dance and he brought it into the shop and hooked it up to the computer. Now one saving grace to those computerized engines, at least the computer backed up my story that there is a history of heating issues with the rig. They scratched their heads for a while and suggested changing the thermostat again, but after some more coaching from me and a little more testing decided that maybe it might be the thermostatic fan hub. Now that little gem ain’t cheap either, $1000.00 and the closest one is sitting there in a warehouse just down the road from Graceland. Now old Elvis picked a pretty handy place to call home and I recalled from our trip through there on our way to Florida in 2007 that there was a horde of Fed-Ex planes landing and taking off from their airport the whole time we stayed at the Graceland Campground, just behind the Heartbreak Hotel, down at the end of Lonely Street. With a little coaxing I was able to convince the boys at Freightliner that if they could just get someone to run that fan hub down to the airport that Fed-Ex outfit could probably get it up here onto the northern ranges before supper time tomorrow. And that is what is going to happen. We hope anyway, the part should be in Red Deer sometime tomorrow afternoon and they will get right at putting it in.

I gave the mechanic a lesson on how to dig his way through the floor of the bedroom so that he can get at the top of the engine and hopefully tomorrow afternoon and evening he will be busy installing that hub. Till then our home is parked out behind their shop, plugged in with the heater running so it should be OK for the night.

Brenda and I, we will spend the night in the farmhouse, hoping that all these storms in the  mid-west haven’t messed up the Fed-Ex planes and that our home will be back down the road from Dogpound soon, so that we can get the final loading details done so we are ready to roll on schedule next week.