OK, let me get this out of the way before I say anything else:  WE ARE FINE.

I continue to get daily emails from folks who are concerned that we might have been affected by the recent storm.  The media frenzy about the “devastation” in parts of Vermont has painted a really distorted image of the situation here, especially up in northern Vermont where it’s hard to find visible impacts from the storm.  At our current base of operations, the worst thing that happened is that my brother had to pull up the dock and boat lift due to Lake Champlain rising a few feet.

My previous blog entry was intended to make it obvious that we were relatively unaffected, but it seems to have backfired.  One friend even wrote, “OK, I read the blog.  You are safe, parent’s house is fine, the trailer is fine,  All sounds good. Now, what’s the rest of the story?”  Sorry, that’s all there was.  Any further drama will have to be self-created, and believe me, we’re good at that.

On Wednesday I took a roadtrip up to Plattsburgh NY, fifty miles away by car and ferry, to make a client visit to Colin Hyde Trailer Restorations.  About two years ago Colin opened up his own trailer restoration shop and has been doing quite well with it.  I spent a few hours checking out every Airstream in the shop and catching up on everything.  In the afternoon Colin donned his bunny suit and demonstrated how he can paint an entire chassis (in this case the restored/improved frame of a 1953 Flying Cloud) in less than an hour with just one quart of POR-15, using a sprayer and his “rotisserie” set-up.  The rotisserie allows the frame to be rotated in the air for ultimate convenience.  This is a much more efficient method of painting a frame than the old “bend over and brush” technique that many people still use.

It’s interesting to me to note how the vintage trailer restoration business has matured over the past several years.  When I started the magazine in 2004, there were only a handful of restorers out there and most of them didn’t know what they were doing.  They’d come out of the hotrod business, or evolved from trailer repairs, and frankly there was a lot of overpriced hack work going on.  Only a few really understood how these trailers were intended to work (from a design perspective) and so I saw a lot of horribly botched trailers coming out of “professional” shops.

Actually, that still happens quite a lot.  It’s pretty easy for anyone to hang out a shingle and say they are in the trailer restoration business, with no licensing, no real knowledge, and little accountability (since the customers themselves generally only see the surface of the work).  There are still a lot of hacks out there.  But a few have studied the history, engineering, design intent, period materials, and even philosophy of Airstream and other vintage trailer manufacturers.  Those people are doing the good work these days.

I’m very happy to say that most of them are advertisers in Airstream Life.  As one non-advertiser put it, “Being in Airstream Life sort of says you’ve ‘made it’.”  We don’t vet the advertisers for quality but I do find that when they are willing to make the investment in advertising their business, it indicates a seriousness and professionalism that usually carries over to their work.

Being at Colin’s shop (and MEL Trailer, C&G, etc., a couple of weeks ago) has reminded me of the work I want to do on the Safari.  After 100,000 miles of towing and six years, it has accumulated a bit of wear around the edges.  I want to replace all of the flooring with Marmoleum, refurb the Hensley (again), add another Vista View, wire in an inverter, convert to LED lights, re-upholster the dinette, rebuild our microwave/laundry storage, replace the curtains, repaint all of the steel (A-frame, bumper compartment, entry step), re-caulk all the roof openings, upgrade the stereo with MP3 input & better speakers, etc.  This will not be a quick or cheap refurb, but in the process I expect to renew the trailer so that it is ready for our next 100,000 miles. As I’ve written previously, I see no reason why a new Airstream can’t last a lifetime with proper owner maintenance (including annual leak tests).  Like an airplane, a periodic refurb is to be expected.

This week, however, I just need to get ready for our upcoming trip. The Safari has been stored all summer, and now it is covered in spider webs and debris from the cedar trees overhead.  I’ll need to get on the roof and wash it down, lube & inspect the hitch, check the tires & reinflate as needed, re-organize tools that have gotten spread out over the summer, and re-stock.   That process has already started, and we’ll finish this weekend so we can depart on Tuesday.

The trip plan is already growing.  I had planned to zip back across the USA in a relatively straight line to economize on fuel (diesel is running $4+ per gallon up here) but there are too many things to do.  I like to treat every trip as if it might be our last, just so there are no regrets.  Or to put it another way, I’d rather regret spending a lot of money on fuel than regret passing up once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunities.  So our route currently brings us west through NY state, briefly into Canada, then down to western PA, near Washington DC, a stop in NC for service, a quick stop in central AL, and then Florida.  From there, we may spend a few weeks in Florida or we may head west toward home, depending on circumstances.

After a long pause at home base, you can’t just assume that the trailer is completely ready to go, especially when the next trip is an expedition.  We aren’t just going camping for the weekend, we’re going out for what will probably be an 8,000 mile trip and a total of 100-120 days of occupancy in the Airstream.  For the average Airstreamer, that’s several years worth of use.  So I look at the car and the trailer in that light, and try to consider what might go wrong with them in the next few months.

Being only about two years old and well maintained, the car is pretty easy.  I had it serviced in December and I know it will need a maintenance stop again about the time I return to Tucson, so I’ll get that done when I’m back.  The Airstream, however, is much more complex.  Checking it over before a major trip takes the better part of a day, but I usually spread it out over a week or so, just in case I run into something that requires parts.

I start with the easy stuff, by simply using all of the systems in the trailer and verifying that they work as expected.  Eleanor wanted to practice her demonstration meal in the Airstream last night, so that gave us a chance to run the hot water, stove and oven, air conditioning and vents, and lights.  Everything in the kitchen was fine.  Separately I checked the shower, bathroom plumbing, windows, doors.

You might think it’s unlikely that something like plumbing would go bad while the trailer is just sitting, but actually that’s exactly the type of thing I suspect the most.  In the past I’ve found that the toilet seal has begun to leak during storage (which lets sewer gas into the trailer, not a pleasant thing), or that a water pump has died over the winter.  It’s obviously much nicer to discover these things a week before launch, rather than letting it be the first memory of your vacation.  Fortunately, this time the inspection turned up nothing awry.

Even seemingly maintenance-free things like doors and windows often need a little help after storage.  Usually it’s a matter of the hinges getting squeaky, or the seals beginning to stick — things that are easily remedied with a little cleaning and lubrication. There’s a good feeling that goes with checking all the systems and tuning up the small stuff, so it’s a practice that’s beneficial for your mental state as well as the Airstream.  The guy who wrote, “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” wasn’t talking about travel trailers.

After the systems check, I start running through the routine tasks.  This includes filling the fresh water tank, dumping the holding tanks, getting a propane re-fill, lubricating the hitch, charging the cordless drill batteries, plugging in the TPMS (to check the tire pressure), and putting the tools back in place.

That last item bears explanation.  Do you have in the trailer the tools and parts you’d need to:

• remove a flat tire and install the spare?  (Does the spare have air in it?)
• temporarily or permanently fix a dragging belly pan  (rivets, drill, rivet tool, washers)
• replace a burned out clearance, brake, or tail light  (screwdriver, spare bulbs)
• clean corrosion off the main ground wire, or the metal tabs of the 7-way connector?

I find that the tools tend to migrate away from the Airstream during periods of storage, and need to be put back before a big trip.  So I never take anything for granted until I’ve located the part/tool and verified it’s where it should be in the trailer.

At each step of the routine tasks I have a chance to see if anything has come loose, begun to leak, gotten rusty, or been misplaced.  If insects have made nests in the furnace or water heater, or if packrats have chewed the electrical wires, this is the time to catch those problems.  I also check all the critical and consumable supplies like grease, silicone spray, and maple cookies to see if they are running low.

This time while I was puttering around I spotted the fire extinguisher in the Airstream and wondered if it was still functional.  It’s the original equipment, installed in 2005, and it has been through probably 100,000 miles of travel, which I’ve heard will eventually pack the dry powder to the point that it might not work.  A pair of replacement extinguishers (better ones, in fact) were just $30 at Costco, so I bought them and put one in the house kitchen, too.

While kneeling at the front wheel to fiddle with the TPMS, I took the opportunity to scan the underbelly of the trailer, and spotted a loose aluminum plate.  I’m not yet sure what this plate does (center of image), but regardless I’ll be under there later today with the drill and rivet tool to put it back in place.

Riveting up loose parts or areas of the belly pan is an easy job once you get into your working clothes. I recommend keeping the cordless drill, an assortment of small drill bits (1/8″ – 5/16″), and some buttonhead pop rivets and/or washers in your tool kit, because belly pan rivets have a habit of letting loose at inconvenient times.  (It’s caused by dissimilar metal corrosion — the aluminum rivets are drilled into the steel frame.)

Another problem I found was that the sewer hose was getting a bit elderly, and my cardinal rule of Airstreaming is “Never trust an old sewer hose.” They’re like the brakes on your car, you replace ’em before they break.

I wrote up a bunch of “springtime de-winterizing” tips in my book about Airstreaming (see page 74) and believe it or not I do actually take my own advice once in while, so I have checked the 9-volt batteries in the smoke detectors and inspected the hitch receiver on the Mercedes.  This time the smoke detectors were fine but the digital clock was blinking.  Replacing its batteries reminded me: did we have a bunch of AA and AAA batteries in the trailer? Yes, we did.  More “small stuff,” but all good stuff.

OK, at this point I’ve checked all the systems, verified that the tools and parts are in place, checked for items that may have failed or been damaged during storage, serviced the items that are due, and replaced all the maintenance consumables.  Meanwhile, Eleanor has been packing the household items, which is an even bigger task.  On Wednesday we’ll cross-check each other as we get to the home stretch, and deal with prepping the house itself for its vacation from us.  There’s much more ahead …

Have you ever noticed how we rarely bother to look at the things that we trust with our lives?  People will go hurtling down the highway with an 8,000 pound trailer strapped to their butt and never check the tire pressure, even though a blown tire on the tow vehicle can mean a disastrous end.  And few people ever look at the connection between trailer and tow vehicle, the thing that keeps the trailer from becoming an unguided aluminum missile.  I’m talking about that ugly chunk of welded metal underneath called the “hitch receiver.”

The hitch receiver gets bolted on either at the factory or shortly before you buy your first trailer, and then generally it never gets examined again.  Most of the time people get away with ignoring the receiver because they don’t do much towing.  But if you tow a lot, or you tow heavy trailers, you really need to take a look at this thing once in a while — because what you haven’t noticed can hurt you.

I’m saying this because it seems like about once or twice every year a friend of mine reports that he discovered that his hitch receiver was in dire condition — and sometimes this fact is discovered too late, as you can see in the picture.   That’s a Class V Original Equipment hitch receiver on a late-model truck, and it is ripped clean off.

This happened at low speed, right after exiting an Interstate highway.  That’s when receivers usually fail, because the stress encountered from sharp turns, dips, and potholes is usually greater than the stress on the receiver when cruising on the highway.   (Andy Thomson talked about this in one of his recent articles about towing, which was published in the Winter 2010 issue of Airstream Life.)  The apparent causes of this failure were metal fatigue and rust — the owner lived in a northern climate where the roads are salted.

Last year another friend reported that his hitch was “bouncy” and I encouraged him to examine the OEM (Original Equipment) receiver.  He took it to a local hitch specialist, where they found it was riddled with serious cracks.  The receiver was replaced that day with a far superior aftermarket brand.  Both of these friends are long-term, experienced Airstreamers, but they just never crawled under the truck to take a look at this crucial equipment.

That’s why I advocate that every travel trailer owner take a few minutes every year to conduct a simple hitch inspection — or have it done on a lift by a mechanic.  Today I took a few minutes to do mine, and it was very easy.

The tools are simple.  I used a cordless drill with a brass wire brush attachment, and a second wire brush with a handle (not pictured) for the tight spaces.  Those tools are to clean up rusty spots.  A bright LED headlamp and a flashlight are needed to closely examine the corners and crevices, and a can of spray paint can be used after inspection to make the receiver look new again.

When underneath the car, I looked for shiny lines on welds that would indicate a recent crack, rusty lines against painted areas that might indicate an old crack, broken welds, bent metal, and loose or rusty mounting bolts.   This took me about 10 minutes, as I lay beneath the car and carefully studied every weld with the flashlight.  (A magnifying glass can be useful if you have trouble seeing things up close.)

If you want to see what cracks in the receiver might look like, click here.  This picture is from a GM OEM hitch, not my vehicle.

I also studied the receiver box itself.  Notice in the picture of my hitch (above) that there’s a strengthening collar on the back end.  This is a common feature in receiver boxes.  However, receiver manufacturers seem to rarely put a strengthening collar on the front end of the receiver box, even though both ends endure the same stress.  For this reason it’s a good idea to take a close look at the front end of the receiver box to ensure that the box itself it not splitting or cracking at the corners.  The picture of a splitting receiver box (at right) is not from my tow vehicle!

If you look closely at the picture of my hitch (above, before cleanup), you might see that there has been a small amount of elongation of the hitch pin hole, making it slightly oval.  This is caused by the hitch pin shifting slightly under load, which is a sign that it is not a tight fit.  This amount of elongation is not a problem in my opinion but I’m going to keep an eye on it.

Once I was done, it was time to clean up the hitch.  My goal was to remove all the surface rust and repaint so that if a weld broke or a fatigue crack formed, I would be able to spot it immediately.  This is where the wire brushes came into play.  I scrubbed the rust until the metal was shiny (easily done with the cordless drill attachment) and wiped it clean.  Then I inspected the spots I’d cleaned once again, just to be sure I hadn’t missed a possible crack or broken weld.

I had two leftover cans of spray paint, silver and flat black, but decided to go with the black.  A few sheets of paper and some blue painter’s tape masked off the car’s bumper while I sprayed.  Since I expect to do this procedure annually, I wasn’t super fussy about the paint I used.  It will get removed or at least scuffed up next winter when I inspect again.

This spring, when you are de-winterizing your trailer, take a few minutes to do a good inspection of your tow vehicle’s receiver.  It has to manage thousands of foot-pounds of torque from the torsion bars, and goes through thousands of stress cycles every time you tow.  I don’t think there’s any other part of your tow rig that has to bear up to so much repeated stress.  By the time you can feel something from the driver’s seat, it may be too late.   If you don’t want to crawl under the car you can take it to any hitch specialist and have them check it for you.  Prevention of a problem is easy, and it’s well worth the effort!