Motorhome is at Newmar

We spent the night in the motorhome in Newmar's parking lot.  This morning we were up bright and early at 5:45 am so we would be ready for someone possibly knocking on the door at 6:00 am.  Well no one showed up until around 7:30.  All I can say is I hope they do better repair work than they do at scheduling and communicating with customers.  When Carl Miller showed up at the door he said well we thought you were suppose to be here either last Monday or today so they told me to come over and see if your here.  We said the 30th has always been the appointment date but would have loved to have come up Monday if we could have and then we showed him our confirmation letter we received from Newmar.  We were planning on hanging around Nappanee for the day and driving the motorhome back to Warsaw in the evening since our appointment was only scheduled for the day.  However Carl said they have a recall item in addition to the three issues we had and that item involved replacing a cluster on the dash that by itself could take from two to six hours depending on how things went.  We told him this is the first we have heard about this needing to be done.  We added a third item to our list which was asking them to adjust a door that was very difficult to close and the customer service person told us she would call us back to see if it could be worked in to our one day appointment.  That was yesterday and she never called us back like she said she would.  What we basically learned this morning is that no one at Newmar seems to talk to one another or to their customers.  Carl said the customer service person should have told us about the recall work that needed to be done and the need for the appointment to run into the second day.

The good news is everything on the car worked great and we had no issues towing it behind the motorhome.  We drove back to Warsaw today since they needed the motorhome over night but hope to be able to pick it up in the morning so we can leave for South Carolina.

Smaller vehicle is ready to be towed to South Carolina

Well since we got the Chevy Equinox we have been installing the features needed in order to tow the car with the motorhome.  We finally finished everything up this week.  We put on the tow bar assembly which is tied into the frame and actually replaces the front bumper.  The bumper is behind the plastic thing you think is the bumper.  In order to install the tow bar assembly we had to remove the front part of the car.  We also ran air lines for the breaks and wiring and diodes for the rear lights.  In addition I put in a switch to one of the fuses so instead of pulling the fuse when towing the car all you have to do is push a button and the circuit is turned off.  We tested things a couple of days ago and everything worked great.  We would like to tow it on a short trip before taking off for Gafney, South Carolina at the end of the month to attend the Freightliner school.  Below are a couple of pictures as I was getting into the process.   I got so involved in doing the work I forgot to take any more pictures of the process.


These are the before pictures

 

This is after the front end plastic stuff has been removed.  The white metal piece in front of the radiator is actually the bumper. 

These are a couple of close up pictures of the installed tow bar brackets where two square base plates hook into and then the tow bar on the motorhome attaches to each of them.  These are fairly well concealed unless you are looking for them.  There is one on each side of the front license plate bracket.  All of the major components we installed are hidden behind the front facia.

 

Everything went smooth except the trailer hitch we put on.  We ran into a little issue there with a couple of holes that were suppose to have nuts welded behind them and didn't but we were able to overcome that fairly easily. 

 

Huli was my helper and I couldn't have done it without her.  This smaller vehicle is great to drive and weighs less than half of what the truck weighed.