Sunday, June 14, 2020

Day 130 - Chehalis, WA

Today was a 300 mile travel day that proved to be somewhat stressful. First, the hydraulic pump wouldn’t come on to pull the slides in. The leveling jacks use the same pump and when I tried them, it worked. So I tried the passenger front slide and it came in as it’s supposed to. The passenger rear slide also came in, almost. It stopped with about an inch to go. I tried shorting the contacts on the solenoid but the pump wouldn’t run. When it did run, it ran fine. Hmmmm.

After breakfast and coffee, I went back out with my voltmeter and the solenoids were working fine. I traced the wires and found the nut holding the cable to the pump was loose. After hand tightening it, the pump worked fine and the slides came in.

We got a late start but we headed out. About 5 miles down the interstate, the check engine light came on and the engine went into “limp mode”. I looked for broken wires on the engine, checked the coolant level, oil level, and drained some fuel from the water separator/fuel filter. All looked fine. After looking online, the most likely solution was add more oil. I added two quarts and we took it for a test drive. All the way to Chehalis, WA. No more check engine light. Who would’ve thought that two quarts of oil would be the solution. It’s now slightly above the full line...

2 comments:

  1. Oh my, that was a stressful day! Thank goodness you are McGuyver!

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    1. I did look up the manual procedure for the slides and it wasn’t trivial and it required a hand winch. The jacks don’t need the pump to retract as it just opens valves and springs lift the jacks up. The check engine light was a complete mystery as the Cat engine uses a non-standard OBDII connector. And the little LCD interface on the dash asks for a passcode to display diagnostic messages.

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