In the mean time I am backdating a few blog entries to catch you up on what has been going on.
We finally escaped from Portland, but we almost didn't make it. Since arriving in Portland it has felt like one thing or another popped up or broke that kept us in town waiting on something as parts arrived or loose ends were tied up. We actually had one failed attempt where we got as far as The Dalles and determine we were going to be a lot better off from a handling perspective if we installed a weight distributing hitch and a brake controller ... so back to Portland to wait on more parts to arrive.
We finally hit the road on September 12th. We actually made it as far as The Dalles again before we had our first break down. Fortunately a good samaritan flagged us as he drove pass that there was something amiss with our trailer tire. I had just repacked the bearings, so my first thought was, uh-oh what did I screw up now. My first thought was that I had not seated the bearings correctly and that was what was causing the wobble in the tire, so I snugged up the axle nut a little ... as I would later find out ... huge mistake, axle nuts should be a little loose, not tight. I only publish my stupidity here in the hopes this helps someone else out sometime. We still saw some wobble in the tire, so we pulled the trailer across the highway to the local Les Schwab in The Dalles. They confirmed that one of our tires was "off-round", which I have come to understand can happen when the trailer sits too long on one side as it had sat for the last couple of years. The heating and stress of starting this long trip had caused the plies to begin to separate and it had gotten worse fast. The thing I love about Les Schwab is they focus on quick customer service, so within an hour we had a set of new tires and were back on the road heading east. I did not think to loosen the axle nut now that we determined what the real problem was.
We pulled off the road near Hermiston and I immediately knew something was amiss. A pool of black grease from the wheel hub was all over the rim and the plastic dust cap that covers the hub looked a little like melted cheese. It was then that it dawned on me that I had not loosened the axle nut earlier in the day and that had caused the bearings to overheat. Later I heard horror stories about bearings fusing to axles and wheels just snapping off when this happens ... fortunately we caught it before anything like that happened. Of course I loosened the nut, but we decided once again to take it to the Les Schwab in Hermiston to determine what kind of damage I may have done before setting out on this big trip. I should get some kind of frequent flyer discount. Sure enough, the bearings on that tire were in pretty bad shape and took some coaxing with a puller to get them off. However, no damage was done to the axle, they had a new set of bearings and again within two hours we were ready to hit the road.
We decided we had all the fun we could take for the day, so we pulled into a campground in Umatilla nearby. Pretty much the only thing that anyone from western Oregon knows about Umatilla is that they have stockpiles of chemical weapons being incinerated there. Oh well, despite the town's dubious reputation, the campground was a really nice grassy field with a few trees with a great view over the Columbia river.
We contemplated returning to Portland a couple times that day, but each time, we figured nothing else could go wrong and there were services to fix the problems we encountered along the way, so we kept going ... and indeed it did get better from here.
No comments:
Post a Comment