September 12th - Homer came Home and Got a Couple More Needed Repairs

I picked up Homer from the shop yesterday. He now has new front brake pads and rotors, new rear brake kits, new rear wheel cylinders, new water pump, and a new timing chain cover. Additionally he got an oil change and his license renewed.  He is good to go mechanically.

When I got him home I noticed the front lower corner on the passenger side of the house had pulled loose. Here is a picture.

It is pretty easy to see this isn't right. This lower corner cap is just a plastic transition piece. The white in the picture is the torn caulk. I think the corner just pulled loose from old age because there was no sign of anything having hit it or caught it at anytime. I jacked Homer up and got under there to make a repair. It was easy to push the corner back into place but it was quite another to get up in behind it to drill holes to reattach it to the supports, one of which had pulled loose from the floor above. It took close to two hours to get it fixed. Most of that time was spent crawling in and out to get different tools.  (I need a "runner". I used to do that for my dad.)  Here is a picture of the repaired corner.

I now have to decide if I want to re-caulk it. The caulk had been painted blue when the motorhome was built. I can't get blue caulk. If I re-caulk it I'll have to decide what color would look the least offensive. I may not even caulk it. It is totally on the outside so no possibility of any kind of leak to worry about.

Yesterday when I stopped to get Homer's license renewed I pushed the fob to unlock the doors. I was on the passenger side to get the paperwork and the door did not unlock. I could hear the actuator work and could see the button go up and down like it is supposed to. The door handle just did not unlock. I unlocked the door with the key, no problem. 

I decided this morning to look into this problem. My first thought was to spray the key with lubricant and work the key back and forth in the lock to make sure nothing at the key area was binding. I did that but it still didn't unlock with the fob. I then took the inside door panel off and worked the key lock with the key and used the fob button to watch how it all worked. Interestingly the key lock and the pull up button on the door do not work off the same rod. The rod from the key lock to the door lock was not moving at all when the fob activated the actuator even though the rod to the pull up button was working properly. 

There are only small cutouts in the door in this area so it was really hard to see if something had broken at the door lock to cause this problem. I really didn't want to take the door lock out and have all that mechanism with rods and actuator to deal with. I decided to just put it back together and use the key to unlock the passenger door as needed. I sprayed everything I could reach inside the door liberally with lubricant. It did not work for a while then all of a sudden everything worked as it should. I don't know why but I just put it back together and hope it keeps working.

We will put Homer in the shed since we are taking Marge to Albuquerque.