Well we made It out of the spring rains and mud at the little house on the prairie long enough to head up to Summit County, CO for a long weekend at the ARRL Rocky Mountain Division Convention.
That's the good part. Well there's a little more good...
Colorado and National Parks in that area are still in "mid season" between skiing and summer activities -- so we elected to stay at the very fancy Tiger Run RV Resort in Breckenridge. It was very nice. It's Summit County and it's all about real estate up there, so bring cash. Ha. A three night stay was about $200. But we knew that going in, and it was all part of the plan.
The venerable old 2001 Dodge 3500 Cummins was (once again) up to the "Ike Challenge" and towed the trailer no slower than 55 all the way up both sides except where there was construction eastbound and the speed limit was 50.
EGT does get high enough that you should know the Cummins limits... I'll leave looking those up as an exercise for the reader, since that's always a controversial subject. Let's just remember that aluminum melts just above 1200F and you can make your own decisions from there. Heh.
(And if you're unaware of what the "Ike Challenge" is, look up the YouTube channel of "The Fast Lane Truck" and "Ike Challenges" there. Ike is the Eisenhower/Johnson Tunnel on I-70 just east of Silverthorne, CO -- and if you want to know if your rig can tow, both sides are a bear of a towing challenge for any vehicle.)
The bad news.
We rarely park on asphalt or concrete with the fiver, and perhaps this has been going on a while, hard to say, but I noticed a small drip leak coming from the area of the low point drains under the kitchen island on the concrete pad. Thinking a valve might have been slightly open, I crawled under there (a significant downside of the kitchen island concept -- those two drain pipes and valves couldn't be in a worse place to get to...) and checked. Uh-oh.
The water wasn't coming from the valves, it was dripping very slowly down the outside of those pipes.
So. We have a leak somewhere.
Obvious stuff was checked of course, no water under the sink or running down either feed or drain pipes above the floor.
It didn't APPEAR to be grey (or black water) water but -- kinda hard to tell with the grey from just the sink.
Didn't have a lot of time to fiddle with experiments so I shut off the city water supply and had some in the tank so we kept the pump off unless we needed water for some reason, just in case we had a blowout somewhere that was getting worse. Switched it on when we needed it, and used the kitchen sink sparingly.
Drip slowed but never completely stopped. This could be because maybe the insulation under the coroplast is soaked, or... Who knows. Ugh.
So it looks like I may have to drop the coroplast and get to hunting to see where this is coming from. Thinking about it, it seems to be worse if the island sink is used but I couldn't really nail it down. I can run some basic tests and watch for the leak in the dirt driveway now that I know it's happening.
The other bad news is we have another short jaunt scheduled over the upcoming holiday weekend and I know I have very little time before then that I can work on dropping the coroplast and hunting around. Probably won't get to it, really. And if things are like usual around here, there won't be an open service shop bay anywhere until fall.
It'd be really nice if when I do drop it, this is loaclaized to the island and isn't running back from "something else" forward. It's of course in the hardest possible part of the trailer to get at. Grrrr.
Otherwise the shakedown cruise went great other than I need to go up and lube the TV antenna gears. They're obviously clogged up with our prairie dust. It was being a pain to raise and it came back down easily enough and then jammed. Don't really need it -- we'd rather watch a movie, but I was checking out "all systems". Most likely just needs lubed up.
Seeing the old truck, Bubba, happily hauling 12,000 lbs of stuff at wide open throttle and 28 lbs of boost was fun again, though. Man that Cummins can pull! Whole truck rides great pulling that big trailer and the engine feels like it actually has some work to do! Was also a good workout for the new/rebuilt injector pump. Seems like it'll hold up on a longer trip!
Happy campers overall. Always maintenance on these rigs, and nothing on them is built to last or even designed to handle the banging around a trailer gets when towing.
Had a "whoa" moment towing it also today coming home. I was low on fuel and knew I could probably make the Ike and all the way over to the other side of the mountains but I don't fully trust that gauge. Started to head into the parking lot surrounding a fuel station with diesel and before getting to their overhang I read "13.0'". We're higher than that by a number of inches with the optional forward A/C we had installed and over by a little even without it.
So no fuel from there. And mountain fuel stations are notoriously small. I just decide to head on over knowing the size of the tank and my usual towing mileage (10.5 MPG, very consistently). Worked out fine. Fueled on this side of the Rockies in a west Denver suburb and then headed for the prairie.
All in all. Not that bad. Everything else ran and worked well.