Tinkering with the RV

As I mentioned in the first post, Vince has been doing many small repairs on the RV, but the one thing that he's also done that's quite ambitious is to install the whole towing system on the RV and the jeep on his own, so I thought the project deserved its own post.

He spent some time installing the tow loops on the jeep, carefully cutting the steel around the bumper to make sure the tow loops look like they belong there in the first place. Next comes replacing the cable for the signal lights (*) so they're the neat coiled kind rather than the default straight one that sags. This involved reconnecting some cut wires to some new connectors--I confess I'm not all that certain what exactly he was doing. 😝

The last step, though, is to cut into the RV's break line so he can connect the air to the jeep as well to signal the jeep to break simultaneously (**). When I first heard that he was going to tinker with the break line, I thought it might be a bit crazy. However, Vince explained to me that in an air break system, the default is to break, so the worst he can do is that the RV won't move anymore, instead of being in my nightmare scenario of driving down a hill with no breaks! 😫

To access the break line, Vince needed to get under the RV. At first he tried just taking the jacks to their highest position, but it was still too low, so now he needed a way to lift the RV. At first he went to O'Reilly Auto Parts and bought some ramps since the ramps said they could hold 16000 lbs and 4x in the back would mean 64000 lbs, which should be enough. However, once we got back to the RV and Vince re-read the small prints, the ramps could only hold 4000 lbs each, so total of 4 can hold 16000 lbs--that's way not enough! So the next day after lunch we went to a lumberyard in Healdsburg after lunch, and Vince picked up lots of wood planks and went to work!

Since he was working in some of the mornings or afternoons on our test trip, he didn't have all the tools he needed, so working with the wood took significantly longer, but lo and behold, we got our new RV ramps! 

Here's Vince tinkering with the break line after the back of the RV is lifted. Note he was staying comfy with his "shop towel pillow". 😛

Et voilà ! The break line is cut. What can go wrong, right? 😬

Well, I'm happy to report that things look so far so good! Whew! Look at us blocking off all the lanes of this poor little gas station with our 40' RV and our tow vehicle. 😅

(*) Note by Vince: this is about making sure we wire the Jeep lights so that they work in tandem with the coach's. For that I had to install a tow wiring harness in the Jeep that lets the coach control the Jeep's lights. The wiring harness also came with a coach-to-jeep cable that was lame and hard to connect/disconnect from the Jeep side so I had to fabricate an adapter that let me use a spiffy coiled coach-to-jeep cable. All good now!

(**) Note by Vince: this is about installing a supplemental braking system for the Jeep, required in most states when you tow a car "wheels down". I chose the SMI Air Force One, a permanently installed system that provides proportional braking on the Jeep side when the coach's brakes are applied. The Jeep side took me a while to install and involved tapping into the brake assist system's vacuum lines. The coach side Jessica mentioned is about tapping into the coach's air brake system and inserting an auxiliary air pressure tank that gets fed by the coach, and can then provide the necessary air pressure to the Jeep without compromising the coach air brake pressure. As Jessica mentioned, the good thing about air brakes is that if the air pressure for the service brakes becomes too low, the emergency brakes (held open by the same pressure) will kick in and stop the coach. So worse thing that can happen is we get stranded on the side of the road :)