The Shakedown Trip

The infamous shakedown trip.

That was one of the major objectives for taking our coach, the Castaway, out on an extended trip, to find any warranty issues with the coach.

The good news?

After putting almost 3,000 kms on the coach, we have only a few warranty items from the shakedown trip:

Exterior

• Paint flaw on the driver’s side fuel tank cover
• Missed silicone sealant under the passenger’s side mirror

Interior

• Slight gap in a small section of tile grout (roughly half an inch)
• Lift of a section of fabric trim on entrance door to master bedroom (about 10 inches of trim needs to be glued back into place)
• Tile cracked under one of the recliners on the full wall slideout
• Full wall slideout is not settling properly, out of level and requires adjustment
• Kitchen sink is leaking

We will be taking the coach down to Newmar for a custom install of bedroom windows in the spring — we somehow missed that on our order — and perhaps we might have them address the warranty items then or we can work with our dealer on the warranty items before we put the coach into storage in the late September/early October timeframe.

We did have two other issues that occurred during our shakedown trip.

The Tire

It was unfortunate that we experienced a sidewall bulge on our first long trip with the coach. A sidewall bulge is an unsafe tire condition. Our dealer was very helpful in terms of how to best replace the tire and roadside assistance was clearly the most appropriate solution given our location. Our dealer worked with Coach-Net and they arranged for the service provider and covered the costs associated with sending a service provider out to our site in Petoskey, Michigan.

The service provider did not provide any warranty support and we are out of pocket $1,000 CAD to switch a new tire for another new tire. Lorraine is going to follow up with that service provider regarding warranty coverage and she will also follow up with our dealer. Hopefully we can get the tire covered under warranty.

The Engine Fault

We reached out to our dealer as soon as the engine warning indicator turned on. The dealer told us that we should be fine driving the coach on the yellow engine warning light. We also contacted Cummins as they are the warranty provider for the engine. They wanted me to run the diagnostic and identify the specific fault. The fault was SPN 3216 FMI 2 OC 1.

What I was told is that this fault code is set when the difference between the expected NOx ppm and the actual NOx ppm is greater than 200 ppm. The Cummins support person was concerned that this particular fault could lead to an engine shutdown.

I found out on the iRV2 forums that a number of Dutch Star owners have experienced this fault and, ultimately, the only fix is to update the software level in the engine. When we stopped at a Cummins dealer in Saginaw, Michigan, to resolve the issue, all they did was hook up a Dell laptop to the engine where they found the fault codes from when the coach had been built (they were never cleared) and the fault code that triggered the yellow engine warning light. They updated the engine software by connecting the laptop to a hidden port in the engine and once the update process was complete, the engine warning light was gone. The session at the Cummins dealer took less than 30 minutes.

Our coach was two versions back on the software. The technician was surprised that this had not been caught prior to delivery. Although the Cummins support person would not explicitly acknowledge the presence of a software bug, the technician in Saginaw told me that the initial sensitivity parameters set by the software needed to be “adjusted” to eliminate the fault and that could only be done by updating the software level.

Tomorrow I will share a few lessons that we learned in taking the coach out on a long distance trip across an international border.