Newbies no more

Update on our travels. No longer newbies! Oh, my goodness the things we have learned that we did not want to learn!

From smoking our brakes going downhill from Pemberton to Lillooet up to the things we learned today! The brake issue was because the brake controller worked on the horizontal and not the vertical, the way it was installed. Once we readjusted it, we haven’t had problems with that anymore and we did do some pretty terrific grades between 100 Mile House and Whitehorse and return.

In Fort Nelson, before we left, on my walk around inspection, I noticed that one of the trailer tires was going flat. Great! Fortunately there was a Kal Tire shop there and the tech kindly changed our tire for our new spare that we had bought just for the trip. Our rig came with a spare but we wanted to have two with us and we bought a brand new one for “just in case”. When he was changing that tire, he noticed that the front tires on the rig were not wearing properly and thought perhaps the front axle was bent. He told us we could continue on to Peace River, Alberta, a 7 hour drive away but not to go further and be sure that we had things checked out there.

My son lives in Peace River and he recommended Lonetech, a trailer repair service, as the place to have our axle checked out. That tech said that the axle was within tolerances but that we probably had the original 2007 bias ply tires on and that they were separating and we need to get them replaced asap. Great!

He referred us to K&L Tire in Grimshaw. They checked the tires and said, yes, we need 4 new ones. The ones we had on probably had been unsafe from the start and should not have been left on the rig when it was sold. Newbies! Huh. They looked ok but we should have had them independently checked.

So we bought four new tires. Then when the tech was putting them back on, he, out of habit, let go of the tire when it was sitting on the stud and instead of hanging onto the stud, it fell off. That’s when he saw that the holes in the rim had enlarged. At some point in the rig’s history, someone had not torqued the tires down and had driven many miles without torquing the tires. It wasn’t us. Don, faithfully every morning before we left checked the torque.

So we ended up having to buy four new rims too. We were told that we could have been driving down the road and one or more tires could just have come off the rig. Nice.

So, our learning lesson for the trip so far, is when you buy a rig, have the brakes, tires and rims independently checked over by someone other than the RV Sales Service Centre. Slap us with a dead fish for not even thinking of this. The RV dealer where we bought the rig, in my opinion, was negligent, knowing we were newbies and knowing we were going to be driving across Canada. I can’t believe that their technicians could miss things that were so obvious to others. And, if that is the case, everyone be aware!