General Assembly is not in the cards

We are at the Choo-Choo Express Garage, a bus maintenance shop in Rossville, Georgia (map), a suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee. We arrived yesterday afternoon, after an uneventful drive from Anniston, wherein we saw just a tiny fraction of the tornado damage that occasioned my arrival in Alabama in the first place.

On Sunday afternoon I wrote that we'd be discussing the oil leak over dinner, presumably with a glass of wine, and we walked just three blocks to Ruby Tuesday. While they do have a full bar, you can't actually get a glass of wine on Sunday in that county; harumph. I'm not counting on it happening in my lifetime, but I will sure be glad to see these ancient blue laws, unconstitutional as they are, overturned forever. At least we then understood why there was a huge crowd at the Elks lodge when we pulled in to park -- it's the only place in town to get a drink on Sunday evening.

In any case, after careful consideration, we decided the leak was just too bad to continue another 300 miles to Charlotte, drip oil all over some campground or church parking lot for a week, and then have to figure out where to have it looked at. Being just 120 miles from Chattanooga, and having already missed our opportunity to again be delegates for our congregation, we bit the bullet and headed north yesterday morning, knowing it would probably spell the end of our General Assembly aspirations this year. I suppose I was holding out a slim hope that this latest leakage was something else entirely, and after a few turns of a mechanic's wrench we'd be on our way, at least able to attend a few days of the assembly.

The shop backed us into a suitable position when we arrived so that they could look at the bus first thing this morning, with a cool engine. We had a nice Italian dinner just down the street, wine included, with friend, fellow bus nut, and Bus Conversions Magazine chief executive Mike Sullivan, who lives nearby and shares an office with the shop here. The shop gave us a 30-amp shore connection, so we were comfortable overnight. As promised, first thing this morning lead mechanic Joel took a look at the leak.

It took him less than a minute to confirm our worst fear: the leak is coming from the end plate gasket, which is likely split. Unlike the last shop, he did not think there would be any benefit at all to just tightening the bolts, whether or not that involved first removing the alternator. He was also certain that it would continue to get worse over time. As I wrote here when we first diagnosed this problem, the engine and transmission need to come apart to repair it properly.

Sliding the engine out of Odyssey is an enormous undertaking, and we have studiously avoided it up to this point. When we needed (twice) to have the engine rebuilt due to dirt ingestion, we had the work done "in frame," without removing it from the bus. Even Joel was not keen on doing it, and he had me pull in over the pit to see if the transmission could possibly be pulled out instead. Unfortunately, the required 8" or so of wiggle room in front of the tranny is just not there -- the only way to fix this will be to slide the engine out the back.

The good news in all of this is that the shop rate here is just $55 per hour. Joel was reluctant to provide an estimate, given the complexity of removing the engine from the extremely tight quarters of Odyssey's engine room. When pressed, however, he figured it to be in the range of $3,000-$6,000. That's painful, but we can live with it, especially compared to the figure I had in my head of twice that amount, based on most of our shop experience being in areas where the shop rates are nearly double what it is here.

After settling back in to the parking lot, we discussed the plan over our morning coffee, and decided to go ahead with the work while we are here. Joel needs to get two coaches out of the shop ahead of us, meaning he can't start until perhaps the end of the week. And he is figuring 4-5 days for the work, which will have us here until at least the end of next week. Not only will we miss General Assembly, but we will need to cancel our Red Cross availability for the rest of June.

I've got a bunch of other maintenance projects that I can work on during our downtime here, including repairing the awning that broke months ago, a leaky parking brake valve, some kind of leak in the propane compartment, and the induction hob that crapped out right after the propane was gone. And we can both use a rest, with no real commitments on the calendar, especially before this hurricane season heats up. Whenever we wrap up here, we have no concrete plans. Perhaps we'll make our way to South Dakota, for a break from the heat while we conduct some business there. Or maybe we'll head to the Space Coast for the very last shuttle launch, if it is not unbearably hot.

Photo by lawrencechua, used under a Creative Commons license. It's really quite cute: click the photo to see a larger version!