Speedy Status

It is almost time to get back on the road with Speedy, so it is also time for an update.

Speedy limped home from Texas last spring. The front end was creaking badly when it go warmed up and we'd almost shredded a tire from abnormal wear early into the trip back. I was time time for major service.

Unfortunately, we didn't know how major it was going to turn out. We replaced the rear tires—that was the easy part. The front end needed a new ball joint, new idler arms, a new drag link and alignment. We thought that would fix the problem so we did a bit of a shakedown cruise by driving up to Maine. The steering was still awful. It almost seemed worse than it was in Texas. It seemed to have several inches of play in the steering.

This was strange since we'd just had several steering components replaced to remove play in the joints. I had Ellen turn the steering wheel while I looked under the hood to find the play. Sure enough the steering column rotated going into the steering box, but the shaft between the box and the drag arm didn't. The one remaining large unreplaced part of the steering system was quite suspect.

In Texas, I had attributed the wandering to the really strong consistent crosswinds and on the trip back there was the trailer to consider. Those excuses no longer applied. It was time to bring it back to find the real problem—but we didn't get there quickly (or cheaply).

The day before the appointment to look at the steering, I was using Speedy for some errands and it just stopped going. The engine was running fine, but suddenly went into neutral. After it cooled down a bit, I tried again and it moved but not for long. After a couple of more repetitions of this I managed to get it home. There was a transmission problem. Our normal mechanics, Mass Tire, don't do transmissions, so it was off to find a good transmission specialist. One was to be found in Weymouth, right on the route to Mass Tire. I'd passed Ted's Transmissions dozens of times without noticing it. They had lots of recommendations and seemed pretty busy. Ted seemed to know his stuff. It was time to ship Speedy off to Ted for diagnosis and treatment.

Sure enough, the transmission was toast with a trashed torque converter and leaking seals. A rebuild was in order and a week later Speedy had a better than new transmission...and our wallet was a lot slimmer.

When I picked up Speedy, Ted told me that he had taken it out for a test drive and found that it was basically unsteerable, confirming our own opinions, so it was off directly from Ted's to Mass Tire. I insisted that they take it out on the highway for testing at speed. I got a call the next day saying that the mechanic that did that got so scared driving it that he put the flashers on and limped back on the highway at 30 mph.

The result was a new steering box, replacement of the shocks (again!), replacing the other two tires...and more wallet slimming! It turned out that the shocks that were put on in Texas were not the heavy-duty RV shocks we'd had installed previously, but lighter duty models that were much too soft for a fully-loaded Speedy. We decided that we would finally go with the Bilsteins that virtually every experienced Roadtrek owner ends up with. The heavy-duty Michelin XPS RIB tires had become so scalloped from the long driving with the compromised steering parts that they also contributed to the wandering. They had been remounted on the rear.

While the XPS RIB is a heavy-duty, stiff, commercial tire, It wasn't available in a traction tread, which is why we hadn't used them as rear tires, so they had to go. We replaced them with the same Firestones as we'd just purchased to replace the worn rear tires. This has the added benefit that we can now rotate tires through all four wheels and equalize the wear.

We'd had one more maintenance item done, some body work. There was a bit of rust near the passenger side rear doors and I had managed to back into a tree on a short trip to the Cape and cracked the fiberglass storage door on the driver's side. There was also a large strip of flaking paint on the driver's side body. This was not entirely necessary, but we idid the work after the first go around with the steering repairs when we'd thought all was cured and we could get this not-absolutely-necessary work done. As it turned out, we probably should have put it off a bit longer.

We also did a few minor upgrades. I installed in-dash USB charging ports, since we have several USB devices that we travel and I added a fixed RAM-mount for the iPad on the console. We also built a new bicycle rack based on a Stowaway swing-out rack that allows us to swing the bikes out of the way to open the rear door. I built a custom bike rack platform that mounts on the Stowaway base with the idea of adding a box next spring and mounting the bike racks on the box to give us additional storage for the next big trip.

Speedy finally seems to drive in a straight line.  In the handling department, it's no sports car, not even a Subaru, but Ellen is willing to drive it again. This is important for our upcoming winter trip (see next post).

Time to go back on the road.