The Goliath Fuse

We've spent the last two weekends aboard the fifth wheel; making changes, adapting and customizing, and claiming the space as our own. We have also learned a lot ... as we will surely keep doing, and as I'm certain so many people do when they embark on a new venture.
Last weekend we learned about electricity and this weekend we learned a tiny bit about relaxing in our new home.

Last weekend we picked up the coach and pulled it out the the St. Vrain State Park at Barbour Ponds. All of 10 miles from home, but still far enough from home to provide a bit more experience for us hooking up and getting set up in a campground. It's a familiar place to us now, and that helps a bit with any apprehension about trying all this new stuff.

So, here's part 1 of the saga:

We set up to meet with our very good friends Roger and Vernelle at the campground to give a tour of the coach and share some lunch. It's likely the last time we'll get to visit with them before we leave, and we were happy that they agreed to meet us at the campground. We arrived at the campground just a few minutes later than anticipated, and pulled past out assigned spot to take on some fresh water for the weekend. They arrived a few minutes early, and finding our spot empty just decided to hang out and wait for us. We were 40 feet away, but on the other side of the coach, they didn't see us, and we didn't see them :).

Finally, Robin noticed them and we had a good laugh over the whole thing. We got pulled back into our spot, and I began to level the coach by retracting the landing gear (the front feet) while Robin went to the rear of the coach to drop the aft stabilizers.
At the exact moment Robin pushed the button to lower the stabilizers, I unexpectedly hit the up-stop on the landing gear and suddenly everything quit. The control panel wouldn't light, the buttons did nothing, and it was inappropriately quiet. Inside, the 12 volt DC lights still worked, but the rooms would not slide out and we couldn't get any action out of the stabilizers front or rear. So much for show-and-tell; we couldn't invite anyone in if we couldn't get the thing opened up.

I remembered being briefed that the coach was protected with self-resetting circuit breakers should something overload, so I reasoned that if we'd overloaded the circuit trying to do two things at once, it'd only be a matter of a couple of minutes until we could continue on. ... ... .ten minutes ... ... fifteen minutes... , ... ? OK, we all started puzzling it out and after searching for several minutes to try to find a breaker to reset, or a fuse to replace, decided we'd go to manual extension if we had to. It'd be good practice for us anyway, and those fancy handles hanging on the wall had to be good for something, no?
So, after some experimenting, we got the front landing gear to work, and got the rear stabilizers down. It really wasn't all that hard to crank those particular gears, and as a side-light I learned how to lower and loosen the spare tire, but we still didn't have a solution to getting the rooms slid out. We crawled all over looking for a handle, socket, or some connect point that we could crank the rooms out with, but nothing was apparent. Alas, it seemed there was nothing left to do ... except to read the owner's manual (ouch!). Now ... you see .. the owner's manual was inside the coach, waaaay up front, and when the coach is closed up there is precious little open space inside it.
I managed to hike myself up on the kitchen counter and scoot under the cabinetry until I could clamber down on the furniture up front and get to the owner's manual. We sat down with some snacks acquired from the fridge ...( it was an incredibly foresighted design that allows us to get to both the fridge and the bathroom while the rooms are slid closed ) ... and began studying the problem.
Everything indicated an electrical failure, but try as we might we couldn't come up with a blown fuse, or a breaker that needed to be reset. Roger and I looked everywhere, pulled all the fuses and looked at them, cycled ll the breakers, disconnectede and re-connected power to the coach, and nothing changed.
Then I read that we could extend the room 'manually' by inserting a special bit into a drill motor and spinning the hydraulic pump with the drill. Well, well ... guess what we just happened to have packed in the tool box :) The corded 3/8" drill is a heavy-duty job, and it took all of the heavy-duty part to get the rooms slid out. The 'special' bit was a 1/4" hex-headed bit .. just happens to be what you get when you turn a phillips head screw bit round the other way (grin) I could barely hold the thing in place as is had to be awkwardly placed and held and offered a lot of resistance against the hydraulic pressure. Nonetheless, we got the rooms extended in less than 5 minutes and finally invited our friends aboard!

The first thing I did (after opening a beer, that is) was to get online and see if anyone on the Montana Owners Club website knew anything about this particular dilemma. My answer was immediate, and I returned to the battery compartment (where we'd looked for several minutes and seen nothing) and finally found, by touch, a small 30 Amp in-line fuse hidden from view along a main power feed wire, way in the back and virtually invisible, but quite blown.
We made the trip to the gas station, got more fuses and were back in business in short order. My thanks to those Montana owners who've been-there-done-that and are willing to share their help online. A tiny little greenish spade-lug automotive fuse brought the 38 foot long, 13 foot high 13,000 pound beast to its knees.

I now have four spares.

The weekend continued wonderfully and we had another pair of visitors the next night. Larry and Pam came out to see us, and during the course of a wonderful visit we consumed a fair amount of the brew (mostly Moose Drool :) ). Well, shortly after said goodnight to our dear friends, Robin and I found ouselves running out of water from the fresh water tank ... maybe something to do with all those flushes by the boys ??? ... It was late, but we didn't want to spend the night without any water, so we gathered every inch of hose we had and it managed to reach to the faucet across the street from where we were parked. We learned to use the gravity-feed fill port this time, as the last link of hose we had to make the distance did not have a connector on it, so we just fed water into the filler port and all worked out quite well considering the improvised set up we were using. We were also thankful that it was late; hence no traffic running over our hoses, and dark .. so not too many people saw us.

We purchased some additional hose this week :)

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This weekend we pulled the coach in front of the house Friday afternoon and took up our usual 52 feet of curb space. Friday evening and Saturday after work were pretty busy, but we did get the mattress pulled out of the coach and into our bedroom ... not an improvment!

I spent most of the day Sunday drilling and sawing and running wires and routing the pneumatic hoses away from coache's hydraulics and successfully installed our sleep number bed into the new bedroom. Yahoo!! Now we will have a high degree of comfort in the coach while we spend the remaining four work-weeks on the rather over-firm factory RV-quality camping plank .. ermmm .. mattress. It'll make getting the RV and spending time there all the more inviting!
Robin and I completed several other projects this weekend; hanging a picture, installing a Blu-Ray player, mounting a magnetic knife rack, hanging our lovely Ship's Bell, fixing some cabinetry, applying some wall-paper border (with sailboats and airplanes, of course) and arranging kitchen and living spaces.

We also had a lovely dinner with Rob and Sue, our friends and the camp hosts for the park. We saw an amazing Harvest moonrise and slept well in our 'new' bed.

Another great weekend!

Only four more to go.