Bay Doors and Batteries

Aside from the somewhat frequent reprogramming of the MCD shades, I keep referring back to this post for help, the maintenance of the coach has been limited to the big detailing effort. I’ve almost finished claying and waxing the machine. It is a big job.

We had a few issues with some of our bay doors and with our batteries.

This bay door required outside help.

What happened? Well, take a look at this little bit of plastic.

It was a plastic spacer that was used for the bay door mechanism below. A very odd choice of material for a spacer. It shattered and the bay door fell about a quarter inch or so out of alignment.

I couldn’t tell from the mechanism where the spacer needed to be inserted on this bay door.

And I did not have the spacers for this door. I wasn’t sure how to disassemble the mechanism to make the repair.

I found only one other bay door in our coach with this same plastic spacer. It was on the opposite side. Both of the bay doors provide access to the main slideout tray. Looks like Newmar needed a bit more distance to allow the doors to align properly. You can make out the white spacer below. It looks like a set of white petals between the u-bracket of the arm and the bracket that is attached to the sidewall of the bay.

There was also the battery bay that needed some attention.

I called a friend for help. Two of them. Bobby and Lance.

They were able to quickly deal with the broken spacer on the bay door. And they were also able to deal with the corrosion in our battery bay.

The battery bay went from this:

To this:

B&L Service used a chemical product to provide corrosion resistance to the terminals. You can see the reddish tint on the terminal posts. It was a quick job and reasonably priced. I had maintained the water levels in the batteries so they were all fine. I did not have any issues with the batteries maintaining their charge.

I need to invest in a few tools and chemicals to deal with the battery bay myself in the future.

Lance, of B&L Service, told me that coaches are just like boats. The maintenance tasks are unending. The most common repairs for them include air conditioning units and toilets.

The final bay door that was causing me some trouble was this one.

Whenever we opened this door, it would stutter as it moved along its track.

A bit of lubrication to the travel rods and hinges solved that issue. I did not need any help for that job.

As we are sitting in the same spot for a few months, I will need to exercise the generator and do some other lubrication and tightening of bolts. Otherwise, the systems in the coach are all stable and operational.

For now.