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Originally Posted by gonfercoffee
Phew! Now THAT'S a story; hope you have better luck with the new rig.
S&T
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We hold no ill will towards P.I. OR anyone. In fact it is hard for anyone to put themselves into the shoes of full-time RVers even though they may be building RV's for full-timers. If I was independently wealthy I'd probably be in a custom-built meg-buck Peterbuilt-like motorcoach, but I was downsized from aerospace at age 46 with my work being sent out to India (did I mention that I DO NOT FLY anymore?) ... so RV'ing & workamping was a great lifeboat plan compared to the alternative of starving. When you mix a former Test Engineer with RV'ing you get a lot of scrutiny of how RV's are built as I was used to building black boxes for military and commercial aircraft that still had to perform well after many nasty things have happened to them!
When we were trying to plead our case about the high cost of camping for 4 months waiting to get into the P.I. factory service center, Jack told us it wasn't their job to consider camping fees. Of course he completely missed the point, our normal living expenses were in control while we were able to perform our workamping duties. I am sure he was used to seeing thousands of retired folks with big fat pensions that allowed them to camp where they wanted for as long as they wanted without consideration to how much it would be costing them. Not us, when we were working on the farm we were eating out of the garden or hunting critters in the forest! When we could not go to our winter workamping jobs we were eating almost nothing and feeling real sheepish about having to stop at local food pantries!
When I tried to give Jack an idea of how much camping for 4 months costs (including missing out on all of those free employee meals back at the resort), he said he thought truck stops offered free RV hookups where we could stay for as long as we wanted!!! I guess it wasn't until then that I realized we were pretty alone on our 4 month journey in terms of whether we were going to survive mentally or to cave-in mentally like we wanted to the last week of our factory service ordeal.
In many ways it turned out good after that. No, we didn't get our custom-built toy hauler we wanted Bryan to start building for us. We had already spent that on camping at city parks and other low cost places like Athol, KS that offered no scenery at all. With our new coach we bought afterwards, we went exploring the back country USFS service areas where camp fees are rarely more than $6/night with no hookups. These were places that we could never fit into before. Our new coach was already had a pretty good boondocker setup, so we continued changing everything over to LED lighting and added the 250-watts of solar panels. After a bunch of camping @ 8,000 - 10,000' we thrived on it!!!! Getting up in the morning with the batteries still @ 94% full, having a week's worth of water/waste storage, and loving the combination of the mild mountain summer weather with bright morning sunshine. We were so successful at it we signed up to be full-time paid camp hosts at a USFS campground in S. central Colorado with no power hookups at all. The regular weekend folks there that have been coming there for years already were using solar panels and their generators. One would think the campground in paradise would be pretty noisy with all those generators running, but for the most part folks were running their generators less than two hours per day if at all. These folks do like us and spend most of their time out of doors rather than locking themselves in their coach all day.
All this has renewed our interest in getting another 5er, but not for the 43' toy hauler that would keep us out of many old forest service campgrounds. Instead we are thinking of a 26 - 28' 5er set up with the ability to tow our jeep behind us (which holds most of our bulky gold panning equipment). Since our dually truck can tow up to 21K lbs it would easily handle both the jeep & the Winslow 28TRW or the 28TRW & a utility trailer with a Kawasaki Mule, etc. Although I like the Mule idea better, Sheila really likes her jeep which goes to many places our dually truck cannot (narrow dirt switchback and low ceiling parking garages!!!). We might have to have both although I hate too much driving separately. Thank the Lord for family ham radio communications! There are tight places that we gold pan where I don't like taking the jeep that the mule would excel at (did I mention we use Iridium satellite text messaging so our relatives know we are still alive since cell phones don't work in many places we gold prospect?) ... so many choices, so few lifetimes to play with all of the toys! If we get the right combination of toys & 5ers we won't get stuck in any washout like Mr. Washout at least!!!! (Hi old buddy Tom, no slam intended!).
If we really like our current coach, why change? I am always looking ahead several years and although we are enjoying our current coach so completely, grand children are on their way soon (just learned that our first grand child will be a girl!!!). I do a lot of real-time stock trading, ham radio building, & things that swapping our dinette space around for a mixture of work, guest sleeping, & eating space is only fun on shorter trips rather than being out on the road for 13 months like we have with it.
Our first Excel was a 2001 28RGO, which only had 2 slide outs and not the 3rd slide out like the 28TRW. Before we bought our 33RSE, we considered the 28TRW in which we would curve out the two lazy-boy chairs to face the TV directly so I would have my desk inside the 3rd slide-out itself. This would keep the kitchen table free to be a table and the jacknife couch could free to be a couch or a bed.
One of the things that still bugs me is that our former IL Excel dealer told us that we were NEVER supposed to use our gray water tank to hold gray water!!!!! He said that if we just let our gray water drain onto the ground that the tank would have never broken (DUH!). He accused us of over-filling it on a daily basis. I assured him that we did overfill it once or twice, but our fresh water tank was limited in that we also had to divide it for use in the BW tank as well. We would empty our gray water tank into our blue boy and then take it over to the family farm septic cleanout. For us to hear that we should never be filling our GW tank beyond a few gallons probably reflects the fact that he was VERY frustrated (he sold a lot of entry level SOB coaches) with having to replace so many cracked GW & BW tanks over the years. Our current coach uses rotocast tanks and we have had no problems with capacity or leaking. We can stay out up to a week without too much of an issue as long as we do Marine showers and wash dishes in a bowel (to toss out to the bushes like the tent people do). But it would be nice to store 71 gallons of fresh water rather than our current 42 and so on. As to the broken GW & BW tanks, we had that problem on both our Excels. Our 2001 28RGO broke at the inlet pipe to the GW tank from our rear kitchen, but real slowly which meant the source was much harder to detect after battling a lot of humidity and wet basement plywood floors & insulation. Our 2009 33RSE broke at the center seam which meant it would leak like crazy just above half full. We were parked stationary on the family farm for a couple months just after our 2nd factory visit working for free on the family farm getting it ready for sale. That leak was discovered pouring out of the bottom insulation, what a mess! In my opinion the GW & BW tank does flex too much, even when the coach has been stationary, which causes the welded seam to split apart. Too bad that the factory does not take up Tom's advise to put in the extra straps or to use rotocast tanks which avoid that particular seam issue. I am not an expert here, I just see lots of room for improvement in this area on many, many brands of coaches.
BTW, when we were waiting to get into the factory in December 2011 we had some pretty ugly condensation issues to content with. We kept all of our closet and storage drawers open. With it getting down to nearly zero every night we had to slide our mattress down a bit or it wanted to grow mold up against the wall. Air flow was the key. The biggest air draft we had was necessary, the slots at the bottom of the door to the outside. If we ran the bathroom exhaust fan even these air slots were not enough as the BW toilet gaseous odors were still an issue if we did not also crack open an additional vent.
One thing that helps tremendously in winter is our current S.O.B. coach has snap-on flexible insulation covers for our ceiling vents, largest of windows, and skylight bubble. No more dripping of condensation! I plan to carry a lot of these cool ideas with me as we design our next 5er coach that will be our ultimate Boondocking machine.
Back to lurking and "Imagineering" for our next 5er.
Dave
SKP Full-timers since 2008
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