Monday, May 21, 2007

Dripping wet on the Oregon coast

We are at Nehalem Bay State Park (map).

The big news of the moment is that both of our windshields are, again, leaking. We left Lincoln City yesterday in a light rain, and stopped for lunch at an overlook along the coast, where we put the dish up to get our mail and upload the blog and map links. That's when we noticed that there was some water coming in at one spot along the top of the upper windshield. Removing the sill trim also revealed water coming in along the bottom edge.

We rigged out our trusty towel arrangement (that we had hoped we were done with forever), finished eating lunch and reading the news, and continued along the coast through Tillamook. By which time, we had three dribbles coming down the inside of the lower windshield as well, and the upper was now shipping water in multiple locations along the top. I'm not sure what the issue is, but I have a sinking feeling that the 3M urethane adhesive that they used is just not the right product for this application. In any case, I sent off an email to Coach Specialties, and we will see what they can come up with.

At this point, of course, we are a thousand miles from there, and have commitments starting this Thursday in Seattle. So we will likely not get back to Alameda for any kind of repair until July. As long as there are no signs of the glass actually separating from the frame, we'll just live with it -- after all, we're used to the wet-towel routine by now.

Just to make matters worse, our throttle-position sensor (TPS) problem has returned. Frequent readers may recall that we spent a good deal of time (and money) at W. W. Williams in Tucson diagnosing an intermittent power loss, which turned out to be an intermittent open in the TPS return signal. Using a combination of existing spare wires, I bypassed the TPS return signal, patching it in to the common return line from the power-take-off adjustment (which is used to implement the high-idle control) at the "rear" junction box in the wet bay. That cured the problem -- at least until the last couple days. I've double-checked all my connections, and all seem secure. Since the problem is intermittent, I am at a loss to know what the next steps should be.

The rain has stopped, so we are mostly dry now, at least for a day or two. We'll continue our slow trek northward, ending up somewhere around the mouth of the Columbia today.

Oddly, although we've been on line all last night and most of this morning, the satellite has dumped us off in the last hour, and I can't seem to get enough of a signal to get back on. So this post, too, will be stored until our next stop.

2 comments:

  1. Will you be stopping at Infinity Coach this trip north? We're in Puyallup visiting relatives. We can offer dry camping, but you won't enjoy the trains. If you've got extra time, we can rendezvous. I'll bring the duct tape.

    Ron & Judie

    ReplyDelete
  2. You may find some useful info on the following website:

    http://www.psvglass.co.uk/technical.htm

    JC

    ReplyDelete

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