This is a fan-ciful story of what we have go through occasionally to get things fixed on our coach. A couple months ago I was going through my pre-flight check of the coach systems and I discovered that the power steering fluid reservoir was not up to the mark. I fan-ticized that some creature was drinking the hydraulic fluid, but I decided that was absurd. Next I crawled under the back of the coach and looked for leaks and indeed I found a leak in the cooling fan motor. It is a hydraulic motor run by the power steering system.
My next project was to call and e-mail everyone who might be able to help me solve the problem. I finally found someone who seemed to know what I needed and I ordered a new hydraulic fan motor to replace the leaking one. It took a fan-tasitcally long time for the motor to arrive, about two months. It finally arrived last week and I crawled back under the coach to compare the new and the old motors side by side and decided that all was well.
Now I needed to find a fan-motor replacement service. Mostly I found places that were so busy that they couldn’t get around to our project until November. Now I don’t plan on sitting on my fan-ny until November getting wet and cold when I could be in sunny California or Arizona, so I kept calling until I found a little shop in North Portland that could work me in to the next week.
Today was the appointed day and I showed up bright and early at Terry’s Diesel Repair shop. I was assigned an eager young mechanic, Guy, and things started flying; hydraulic fluid on the floor; hoses and fitting all over the bench; and finally both motors were sitting side by side on the bench ready to move all of the hoses to the new motor. Guy brought us up short with the comment, “The shafts are not the same. ” Sure enough the new motor had a tapered shaft and the old one had a cylindrical shaft. Basically I had a perfectly good fan motor for somebody else’s fan; and the original motor that fit my fan, but leaks oil all over the back of the coach and front of the trailer.
The next couple hours were wasted trying to call the supplier and factory. Basically nobody had a solution to our fan-problem. We tried swapping the usable parts of the new motor with the unusable parts of the old motor. No luck, the new design has some big differences. Guy went over to the hydraulic supplier and found a replacement O-ring that fit the old fan motor. He was able to rebuild the old fan motor.
The end was a fan-tastic success. Everything got put back together and the motor is fan-ning away just like it should. Guy is the hero of the day.
By the way, I can give you a fan-tastic deal on a perfectly good, bran new, hydraulic fan motor.
On a very serious note; I really appreciate Guy and his boss, Benny, for sticking with me through a very stressful morning. I was looking at some rather poor choices and they were able to provide the correct solution to a tough problem. Thanks guys.
We have a new reader this week, Betty Reynolds, fellow retiree from Boise Cascade. Betty has been retired for several years, but she is keeping herself fit at the club. This brings our group to 70 readers. Remember that you can check out back issues of our blog right here.
Good bye for now from Gary and Judy. Still in Hillsboro, but not for long.
