Is This Character-Building?

The journey begins. We get towed from the Walmart parking lot.

I know that everyone likes a disaster story. How about a double-disaster story? Even better. Well, friends, that’s the story I bring to you this day.

Let me start at the first sign of trouble. That occurred last Saturday morning. We’d just driven our motorhome over the mountains of northeast Utah, into the southwest corner of Wyoming. A beautiful drive. But things didn’t sound right when we drove off the highway to get some groceries at Walmart in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

I stopped at a light and noticed the rig was searching for fuel. It was heaving and chugging, something we’d never ever experienced before. We knew there was trouble lurking in the heart of the beast and determined to get parked on the outer perimeter of the Walmart parking lot. After I shut off the engine, I thought I should try to re-start it. Nothing. It cranked and cranked. But there was no sense the diesel fuel would ignite.

My heart was racing as my mind went through all the permutations that might cause this condition. I had plenty of fuel in the tank. I thought it was possible the fuel filter was clogged. I decided to call our roadside support system. They promised to send a mechanic as quickly as possible. He showed up four hours later and changed my fuel filter. That didn’t solve anything. The mechanic said he needed to get his computer so he could plug into the engine to diagnose what was happening. Unfortunately, he hadn’t brought it with him. He left with promises to return in a couple of hours. He called after two hours and said he wouldn’t make it back until the following morning.

When he showed up on Sunday, it took about 10 minutes for his computer to issue a diagnose that the engine would not start because an oil pressure sensor on the fuel pump sensed there was something critically wrong with the fuel system. (Please remember this piece of information. It will come into play in another week.) He said the motorhome would have to be towed to a repair shop where something so serious could be handled.

Not going to happen on a Sunday, of course! I called back my roadside assistance company to relay the news and to ask that they organize a tow truck for me. They took eight hours to get back to me – and that was after I made three phone calls to them, asking if I had been forgotten.

Monday at noon, however, a tow truck arrived on the scene and, after two hours of preparation, including the disassembling of the drive shaft so the rear wheels could rotate freely, we were on our way to the authorized Caterpillar engine dealer in town.

When we got there, we were told no one could look at the motor until Wednesday. We asked if we could live aboard in the parking lot. The owner said we were welcome. We would not be able to live aboard the rig once it was pulled inside the shop, however.

We set up house on a hill overlooking the town. I checked our propane tank and noticed that we were between a quarter full and empty. We knew we needed to get a refill but, of course, we were unable to drive to a propane filling station. We drove the car over and were told the company had a policy that forbids using their trucks to fill motorhome propane tanks.

Now I began to whimper and whine about how I would make a note of that on the letter that I planned to write for the sheriff to find when he opened up our motorhome and found two old people who had frozen to death. My dry humor seemed to work and the young woman asked her boss if there was a way we could have fuel delivered to our home which was about 200 yards away. The boss was kind and said she would make an exception for us. She could not figure out, however, how to bill us because they had no mechanism for billing a mobile customer.

We had a full propane tank within the hour. And the women were still trying to figure out how to bill me two hours later. I came up with the simple solution of asking them how much the propane was. They said it would amount to $57.68. I handed the cash to them and said they could find a place to put it.

Tuesday afternoon, we were visited by the in-house tow driver. He wanted to move our rig inside the building a day early. We would have to pack up and move to a motel. We scrambled onto the internet and found a relatively cheap motel that was 10 minutes away. We gathered up the two cats, the litter box, food, our clothes and headed out.

Wednesday morning dawned bleak, with hail and sleet. We rounded up the cats in their cages and, after breakfast, arrived at the repair shop to find nothing had been done on our rig. The boss told me a commercial trucker had come in on an emergency and they take precedence over motorhome retirees.

By Wednesday night, however, he had plugged in the computer and determined our high pressure fuel and oil pump was bad. This meant, he said, that pieces of metal from the disintegrating pump most likely had entered the fuel rail and we should plan on replacing all six injectors. He had neither the pump nor the injectors in-house and would have to ship them in overnight from as far away as Lansing, Michigan. Do it, I told him.

We returned to our motel and asked to stay another night. The cats were not amused.

Thursday came and went and we were derailed again by a commercial trucker. But the boss promised that he would have us fixed by Friday at 10 a.m. Come then and be prepared to test drive the rig, he said.

We went back to the motel and paid for another night.

Friday came and there was a torrential hailstorm. The hail was like a million Styrofoam beads. We sat in the waiting room until 12:15 p.m. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked through the door where customers are not permitted. The sign on the door says all work will stop on the shop floor if customers enter the work area. I found the boss standing beside my great white beast of a motorhome. He asked me for a key to open the fuel filler door. When I opened it, he took a compressed air hose and rammed it into the tank and plugged the remaining space with a cloth. He explained that there is no priming pump on the Caterpillar motor. He said he couldn’t get her primed. And this was his work-around.

While he was doing this, one of the mechanics was spraying ether into the air intake of the engine and another mechanic was cranking the engine. It caught, coughed, and then died.

They went back to the computer and the computer was saying: remember the oil pressure sensor on the fuel pump sensed there was something critically wrong with the fuel system. Well, you have to change that sensor when you install a new fuel pump. Thank God they actually had a sensor in stock. The moment they installed it, the computer sensed all was well and permitted the engine to start.

I test drove the rig and everything seemed to check out. I paid the bill with that magic plastic card – a mere $4,300. And we loaded all the stuff of life from our car and headed out into the gloomy afternoon.

Oh, but remember, I promised you a double disaster? Well. It’s waiting for us 92 miles down the road.

All was well for 91.8 miles. Then all hell broke loose. Red lights, orange lights, buzzers and bells went off on the dash. As luck would have it, however, we were 100 yards away from an exit on the expressway. I pulled off and drove the rig 150 yards into a Flying J truck stop.  Bells were still clanging when I stopped the rig. A trucker ran up to my window and said, “Do you know you’re spraying oil out the back of your rig, sir?”

I walked back there and found our Honda Fit coated in black oil. The entire rear cap of the motorhome was blackened with sprayed oil.

I called the truck repair place that had obviously messed up the repair. I reach the owner and he said he would make it good if it was caused by his people. He also gave me the phone number of a diesel repair shop in the town where we stopped. I called there at 5:40 p.m., expecting to be told I was out of luck because the Memorial Day holiday weekend had started and no one would be able to help us until Tuesday. But no. They said they’d send someone out in an hour or so.

And this brought Sheldon into our lives. Sheldon arrived in his truck and, within an hour, he uncovered the cause of our second disaster: an O-ring on the connection of the new oil pump had been installed improperly and had disintegrated. 

Before he started the engine, Sheldon poured three gallons of oil into the engine. Even then, the oil was low by about two quarts. But it permitted him to crank the engine and check for the leaking oil.

He returned to his shop, located another O-ring, and a spare, happily. For, when he took the pump assembly apart he discovered a second O-ring also was badly installed and was crushed. He reinstalled the pump. I called the owner of the original truck repair and he said to fax him the bills and he would make me whole.

We set out on Saturday morning with fear and trepidation in our hearts. But Sheldon seemed to have fixed the problem. No more red flashing lights and bells going off. We took the car to a car wash and emulsified the oil coating. Then, when we got to Cheyenne, Wyoming, we found a truck washing place for the cleaning up of our rear. Unfortunately, the residual oil on the radiator and other parts of the engine found its way back and re-coated the rear so that part of the nightmare remains.

Now, of course, I question the entire week of madness. Did the pump break down and send metal into the fuel rail? Did the injectors need to be replaced? Yes, the sensor definitely needed to be replaced. But that was a $134.10 part. We'll never know, of course, because the mechanical wizards do their work in secret, behind that closed door. What the customer can't see, he can't really question.