The Co-op: Thankgoodness Thanksgiving is over

Yeah, yeah I know….. you have to take time off and man did Janie & I have a great weekend….. even took a motorbike ride yesterday    Remember guys… year round biking down here.  Which brings up something I wanted to tell you northerners about……… Winter is the time of year we wait for…. summer we suffer through!  Not only is it year round riding, you are also pretty much insulated from freezing water pipes in your coach, snow and all that…… I have 10 paved, 50amp spots to park coaches here on our lot.  Want something worked on?  Bring it down, we’ll do the work then you can store it with us till the weather breaks…. yes, it costs…. sorry everything does today…. $100 per month…. we can do your work, PM the coach when you are ready to use it and as long as it’s not 3am, I’ll pick u up at the airport.  We even have a vacation beach house available with reservations in Ormond by the Sea.  Take advantage of your GMC community, come and winter with us here at the Co-op.  Yeah, that WAS a commercial message but if I never said anything how would you know!  Hey and for a price you may be able to rent my Harley!  lemme think about that but still….. there are worse places that 15 miles north of Daytona in the winter……. gimme a call.

So yeah, the shop was closed… used to stress over that until you put it all in perspective…… everyone has or at least should have a life. 

You KNOW I couldn’t stay away from the shop!  After the accident with Ralph… no one hurt other than the front of Ralph and my tow bar.  Andy, after that tow bar sitting here for what 2 years….. I found someone who needs it….ME!  First I had to take off the bent up stuff on the car…. I ended up with this   A saw these cars with a winch on the front looking like this doing a technical climb!  May just leave him like that… we’ll see…..

Here’s a window tip if you own an Avion trailer like this one   Checking in the coach I found the same Hehr window lock bead rubber on the frames of the windows.  Of course also being shrunk in the corners I figured no worries….. we can reset the windows and replace the rubbers just like we do on the GMC’s…….   We ended up completing the job but I found 1 HUGE difference…. Hehr did use the same rubbers but the glass used in the frames is 1/8″ thick!  What does THAT mean?  There’s a thicker blob of butyl tape than the thickness of the glass!  Thank goodness we only broke 2 panes of glass and not the front curved ones!    Found a good source for flat custom tempered glass… first you glue in the piece like here installing small sections of the rubber to keep it in place.    Then, trimming the inside, we bagged off…sanded then satin black trim painted the frames AND paint on the rubber to keep it from shrinking so fast.  The bag off the frame to body seam… seal with black RTV…whipe the access and pull the tape….. let cure and this is what you get   The second glass was in their escape frame… no wonder the thin glass broke… the owner told me there were stories about this on their forum site…. that window too had to be glued in first   This process works on this 1/8″ thick Avion trailer window AND on a GMC window.  This process reseals the glass, replaces the rubbers, refinishes the window frames AND seals the frame to the body.  Takes us @ 1.15 hours per window to do this… materials are small money.    See it can be about more than just resealing the windows…… it can look good too!   BTW, the black overspray on the windows will be cleaned when we do the wash-up…….. also removing the grease pencil punch list we keep heads up on the windows…… where all windows will be scraped with NEW stainless steel razor blades… that makes’m shine.. clean!  I’ll do some final shots of the reworking when it’s delivered…..  Why wash it till then…. things get dust  on them around here…..

Finally… I wanted to answer a couple of Emails I got….. Got so many requests for the fuel bib and handle holder upper that I’ll need to make a production run this week…. stay tuned those that asked for them……..

Once again, I did not say you cannot drive your coach over 60….. I’m saying before you do be sure critical components have been checked and you have counter measures for WHEN something unexpected happens… THEN I would still not average over 60mph just to keep things a bit safer.  I had the cruise control on coming back from a WS Mariposa rally barroling through Texas in the middle of the night pulling that car trailer loaded with tools, parts, a compressor and the truing machine!  We all know these thing will do that but really… should we do that ALL THE TIME?  I have to tell you NO…. unless you are VERY sure and you have options…… there are few 40 year old land machines  (airplanes are a whole different story) that you can rely your life on!  Keep that in mind when you nail that Winnebago blowing over that hill…….. when will a part let go?  Of course let me know if you have any other questions on this but I feel after doing this for this amount of time you just need to be aware and vigilant because anything can possibly happen at any given time…. even without Murphy OR a Gremlin’s help!

The guys are here and I need to go….. we have another previous restoration coming back after thrilling it’s owners for 13 years… stay tuned for more on this one  …  You can go to the gallry page of coaches on the site here…. find “Texas Tux”  

    See ya tomorrow..

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