Slooow going at Freightliner

I am once again on the street in front of L.A. Freightliner, after an agonizingly slow day in the shop.

I rolled in about 7:15, and they rolled the bus over to a service bay around 8:30 or so. By 3:00, they had just finished up the front wheel bearings, apparently due to difficulty removing the drums from the spindles. At least I have a clear reading of my brake status, though, something we've been thinking about lately. They are telling me 30%-40% left. Conventional wisdom is to replace at around 25%, so we have anywhere from another 10,000 to 30,000 miles in them before thinking about replacement. That's about a year for us.

They started to work on the tag wheel bearings, and managed to get the coach hung up on the wheel lifts. They tried to lift just the tags in order to put jack stands under the wrist pins, and the 10,000-lb rated lifts quit, unsurprisingly, as soon as any weight transferred from the drivers to the tag. At one point, it looked like they had 30,000 or so on the single pair of lifts, and the lifts refused to go either up or down. They ultimately had to do what they should have done in the first place -- put a second set of lifts under the drivers. By the time they sorted that out, it was too late to start on the bearings, so they put the coach back down and I rolled out of the shop around 4:00.

Our friend Tom, who is a salesman for the dealership, took me out to lunch today -- I think he is feeling a little sheepish about how much money we are dropping in the service department. It was very nice of him to buy me lunch (and get me out of the depressing customer lounge), and we are looking forward to another dinner with them when Louise gets back tomorrow evening.

The delay with the wheel bearings knocked out any possibility of me making it over to Prevost in Mira Loma for an alignment tomorrow, so I've canceled that. If all goes well tomorrow with the wheel bearings and the pinion seals, I will probably just stick with Freightliner for the alignment here on Friday. At this point, the earliest we can leave the L.A. area will be Saturday.

After I wrote about La Penita here, friends Bob and Shirley posted in the comments -- it looks like we are going to be too late to catch them there. They'll be leaving by way of Texas, and perhaps we can hook up with them somewhere en route. We'll see them in any case sometime this summer, when we get back to Washington.

I'm due back in the shop again tomorrow at 7am (ugh). With any luck, I'll be rolled back out in time to go down to Norwalk and pick Louise up from the Metro after her flight.