KarenLukens
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Posts posted by KarenLukens
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The red arrows mark blemishes in the finish after inspection. Then the team goes back over the exterior and cleans them all up and gives the trailer it's mirror finish. Ours wasn't finished when we got there and there were red arrows all over, but by the end of the day, we drove away happy :)
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Cool Reed, I like pickups. What are the payload specs for your truck, fully optioned? WD hitch? Regardless of the brute power of the 6.2 liter...
I didn't see the need to go overboard, the Duramax was there, it was nice, but... I wanted a soft ride so I stuck with the High Country 4x4/ 5.3 ltr with the max tow package. It gives me an 11,000Lb capacity with 1000lb tongue weight with no weight distribution hitch, so I'm good for pulling the Oliver. The ML was great but with all of the anti-diesel environmental lawsuits, Mercedes didn't feel the need to sell diesels here in the USA anymore... So I'm sacrificing milage by going back to gasoline, but we have a nice comfortable ride that won't beat us to death like the Z71 or the HD Duramax packages, plus we will be able to take the 4wd roads that I love and have missed out on with the Mercedes. I crossed streams with water half way up the door in it but it was a lot lower to the ground then the new Silverado. This is my 5th Silverado and it makes 3 that I have sitting here right now. I've got a 76 crew cab that is our all around Ranch truck with the snow plow, then a built up 78 Step Side with lockers that we use for dragging logs out of the creek and stacking logs on the decks. Both of which are beasts and would beat us retirees to death trying to drive long distances in them these days. The Crew Cab was my camping vehicle for decades but there's no comparison between the rides from back then in the 70's to now.
The High Country is a good off-road rig with Limited Slip in the rear end and a push button Limited Slip front end, so we won't be having anymore problems on the trails that we find for boondocking :)
Hey that looks like our truck. Very nice. You’ll love it. Did you get the brown or the black interior?We got the Black interior Steve, basically I pulled in to the local Chevy dealer's parking lot in my Mercedes SL550 with the top down, Sat there until someone came out about 10 minutes later, told them what I wanted to look at and we went from there. They brought up the Duramax and a couple others and basically I chose this one with the Pearl white because it once again matches the trailer. This is a small town country dealership that lives off of its service, no salesmen run out to meet you in this town :)
It was a perfect, no pressure sale and Karen and I left the ML with them and drove away happy in our new tv later in the evening. This is the only dealership up here in the woods :)
Reed
Then here's a good PDF on the Chevy towing specs and how too's -
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After 4 years of driving the Mercedes ML, we hit 100,000 miles on it and traded it in today on a new TV. The Mercedes was a great TV and most of its miles were towing either our Casita or our Oliver. Well... out with the old and in with the new, I needed a good 4wd to cross the rivers and be a dual purpose vehicle with both our Hummer and the ML racking up the miles, so Karen and I picked up a Chevy Silverado 1500 High Country today and it's maxed out with the towing options and will be a good TV for us. It's replacing both, the Hummer and the ML and comes with an 11,000lb towing capacity and a limited slip differential in the rear with 4wd. We actually took it off road a bit for the test drive and made the limited slip do its job. Today, we will be picking up a new receiver hitch and then Saturday, heading to Ojai California for the Lake Casitas Fiberglass RV Rally, where Karen will be putting on her Cobb Grill demonstration and cooking some goodies for the gang :) Then she also has her "Karen's Coloring & Chat" that she puts on with the ladies, where they all get together for a few hours and have a great time visiting and coloring together. It started out just being an hour at this Rally last year, and it has become one of the women's favorite things to do together. Lots of friends, lots of great times, and the Lukens are heading south this time :)
Reed
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Here is my Stinky-Slinky alternative.
I watched this video on it -
and it looks like it would be a good system for certain applications, but your Oliver is designed to be able to just pull the hose out already connected, drop it in the sewer port and pull the valve. So the biggest con that I see is that you need to disconnect it from the trailer, here's my set up below -
That would be great for long runs though, I'd like to see one working in person :)
Reed
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If you feel like testing it, send me a PM and I will call you. You should have a test light or multimeter but if you feel like working on it, I just got home :)
Skip up to around 16 or to 17 minutes in this video and look at the valve positions. Then check both wires on the sides of the pump.
Then here's a couple pics out of the owners manual.
Reed
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I watched it rise over Donner Summit tonight :)
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When we had the suburban water heater I was thinking how great a pull tab off of a beer can would work there in an emergency... Lol. All kidding aside though, at least these are little issues and we have a great core crew of owners with the combined knowledge to bring all of these things not only to light, but how to fix them.
I thought Jason was service manager? Man they sure have had a lot of turnover at Oliver this year... Anita said that Jason was elsewhere in the plant now and Richie has Jason's old phone number... so I'm definitely not up to snuff on the who's who... Anita still leads them all in customer service in my book, she answers the phone and does everything she can to help.
In my last job the old saying was, "It's not who you know, it's who you're related to..." A lot of the management was related and if you weren't part of that inner second family, that in no way was related to the Owners, your first step into management, was your first step out the door... I'm feeling that we have a lot of this going on at Oliver also. Some people hold on to their job because they're unknown family, not because they actually have the ability to do it... When the employees lead their bosses around by their hand and still can't teach them their job, that's usually where the problem starts... We had a new guy come thru my team, I told the foreman that they needed to not hire him because he was an accident waiting to happen and that he was going to end up killing someone... He was all attitude and no brains. Still he got hired because I later found out that he was the bosses new son in-law and as usual was advancing quickly like the related always do... We were asked not to tell the owners that he had a relationship with the management team and then a few weeks later he was in the lab making top dollar with his cousin... There was a piece of duct tape stuck to the bottom of an "S" roll, we grabbed him, pulled him away as he was trying to reach up and grab it, took him aside even though he was supposedly my boss now, especially in his eyes, we once again took him to the foreman (his father in-law) and told him what had happened... He was going to have me fired for treating him like that being he was family... but after 20 years of doing the hiring myself for the Owner's, even unrelated in any way - I was way out of his families reach. Then a couple of hours later low and behold, he showed back up on the floor drunk after going out to lunch... neither of which wasn't usually allowed... Lol... He kept going back and staring at that piece of duct tape, once again my friend told him to walk away and quit thinking about it...
The next day he made sure nobody was around when he went to pull that piece of duct tape off of the 6" S roll and the roll won. It sucked him in thru the drive breaking his arm every 3" all the way to the shoulder and then it held him there about 7' off of the ground with the hydraulic rolls still spinning and held him tight in place until he had almost bled out with part of his arm now a piece of paper. The white paper suddenly turned red... After dieing a few times on the way to the hospital, he got smart... He never came back of course and sued the company for millions of dollars and now lives in a big house, while supporting his family with his winnings and the company is no longer in business. So I've always wondered who really was the smarter one there? Lol.
The S roll was 3 - 6" x 22' long rolls in the shape of a triangle, designed to keep a belt tight and rolling straight in our paper mill. His shoulder and neck kept him from being sucked completely thru, he lost all control of his arm and still thru his own stupidity became a millionaire... The family made a ton, his father in-law got fired and us little people stayed on until the mill was shut down by California regulation.
I'm just say'in, when the employees tell you that a member of the family needs to be gone or is an accident waiting to happen... it's best to listen, regardless of how destitute the poor little cousin is that can't even hold a job at McDonald's...
I'm not trying to say or insinuate anything here, as an owner I have a vested interest in this company, so I care! The Oliver's are all good people and this is just one of my old stories that has nothing to do with them at all :)
Reed
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No, John's not going to have a white wire to the negative bus because his is newer then mine... His disappears under the bathroom sink like mine, I'm sure. I think that once you plug in your trailers 7 pin to the tv, if it's charging, the voltage should jump up immediately on the SeeLevel to around 14volts, but either way, if you can discharge the batteries a bit, maybe down to 12.4, as soon as it's connected to the TV, it should jump because it will be registering the total voltage being put out by the alternator if it's grounded correct. Yesterday, I called and left a message for Richie to call me back for all of my issues that I have going on and to get all the parts that I need, so hopefully today, he might call me back... I figured that I would start with him being he is the new sales manager, I think? I talked to Anita and she gave me his phone #, then I left a message.
Karen wants to drive to Tennessee to get the things fixed and I'm almost ready to go that route myself. We have one window latch that the screw was stripped out and we found it in the gutter a couple months ago. We called Jason back then but never followed up on it. Basically most of our problems deal with their stripped forward screws or stripped out holes for the blinds catches. Then I want a new stainless steel bolt for the back bumper that they stripped and forced down cross threading all the way. I couldn't find a stainless steel bolt that size here in town, and a couple other small issues like the wires on my 7 pin that they left exposed. Most of this stuff I can fix but the window latch is questionable, just because I'm not sure about how they want to fix it. Then there's the Solar...
Reed
It would be nice to have a list of who's who at Oliver with all of the personel changes since January.
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Oliver Customers, Most Oliver trailers that were manufactured in 2015 and all prior were intentionally wired so that the trailer brakes and charge wire would be grounded through the tow vehicle at the ball. This is a common practice in the industry. With this wiring configuration, regular maintenance of your ball hitch is required to ensure that no rust or corrosion is creating a bad connection. It is recommended to use dielectric grease on the ball. The grounding process was changed in late 2015. Now the brakes and charger wires are grounded directly to the frame. The brakes and charge wire will work through the ground in either configuration.
Our hull#200 is a 2017 and until I added the negative jumper directly to the frame, my trailer had never charged. Nobody ever mentioned dielectric grease to us, but our tow ball has always been greased and has never seen rust. What we did see was a bad ground registering only 9vdc at the 7 pin connector and now that it's been corrected our batteries charged while driving for the first time ever, yesterday. Plus we were able to take off the "TowReady" LED light trailer adapter for the first time also and the brakes worked much better then before.
Being that a simple ground/ voltage test showed immediately that we weren't properly grounded at the 7pin connector, then a quick direct ground jumper wire made the trailer come alive without the need of a 7pin adapter anymore, and our trailer brakes needed a much lower setting with the new ground, our results speak for itself.
Reed
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It's nice to see the picture, I guess I can't see the pics in the story because I'm not a member? Anyway I've seen a few of them but the sock pic is great! You should post them all on your profile page :)
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I just tried John’s suggestion on hooking up my TV to my trailer. The battery read 13.1 after a full day of sun being parked in the drive, I hooked up the Tundra and it went up to 13.3 and no further after 20 min. ?? Any thoughts on that? I towed all day on my first outing with the fridge on DC and in the evening I was in the mid 12’s (12.3 to 12.6) I was concerned if I should be concerned
If you have Solar, that could be what took it up the 2/10ths, if it was charging with the TV when driving, then you should have been at full charge unless you left the fridge on DC for a while after you parked. I'm going to call Scott tomorrow to see if there's a reason for not grounding it properly.
Reed
Good News
I towed Goldilocks home today with the temporary ground wire hooked up and after 2-1/2 hours, we are fully charged at home for the first time. Plus this was without using the tow ready LED adapter for the first time also and everything worked great.
I ended up taking my Tekonsha P3 down from 5.6 to 3.8 also and it gave me perfect brakes, no ifs, ands, or buts. My suspicions were correct in that having proper ground would really change the brake setting. The brakes were strong and there was no lag, they were nice and crisp compared to before with the tow ready and improper grounding. So basically, all of the trailers need this basic fix because proper ground really affects everything in a positive way :)
Reed
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Hull #268 looks great :) Did Oliver set the brake controller for you?
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Definitely like 1&2 the best. If you didn't need to go round, you could just add a tail to #2 to make the logo a flying snowball...
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In heating mode, right now it's seems quite a bit louder and it sounds like the compressor but this is the first time using the heater itself since we installed the easy start. I will run both and test the difference today before we leave, the AC has gotten so quiet that it's really nice but we haven't had to run it in the last couple of weeks. If there's a major difference between the two, I can video it. We never had to run the AC at night this summer as we were on the Oregon Coast for most of it or boondocking with no hook-ups, so that might just be it, running while sleeping, you know. It does run great with our old 2000i. Thanks for responding so quickly :)
Reed
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Then today, after helping a friend replace a broken spring on his trailer caused by a bubble in the steel during manufacture, he gave me a telescoping ladder. So I dug back into the archives... (the closet) and made a space for it against the front wall.
I put an old tee shirt over it to slow down the scratches, then put everything back into the closet, and now have my 330lb emergency ladder in place. Once again my 18" Crescent Wrench and 4" grinder got put to work, and this time they paid for themselves with our new ladder. I'm going to add v-mat to the top 3 sections that I don't need, to keep it from scratching the trailer when in use.
Here it is, tucked into its new home :)
Also, when we had the trailer built we had them add in a shower curtain bar like Buzzy's. We ended up not needing the shower curtain, so now it holds towels that need drying and then it doubles as a drying rack for Karen's clothes that need to air dry. Today was laundry day also, so emptying the closet was a quick and easy task.
Reed
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And honestly, whenever we bring something to light here on the forum, the next thing you know, Oliver is overwhelmed with phone calls from everyone wanting that part of their trailer fixed anyway, so they do know what we are talking about in a wildly roundabout way sometimes... It would be nice if they had someone on here but that's why they have the "Service Bulletin" section that they alone post in. They are just a phone call away when needed and I do like having this as our own forum where can talk about anything, just like this.
Reed
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Now that we have the easy start for the AC and know that it's great, how about something to quiet down the heat pump in the Dometic Penguin II?
It's that time of the year when the heater can get some use and as it sits right now, the heat pump really makes a ton of noise when it comes on. It was 34° here last night so we tried running the heat pump and both of us ended up waking up every time that it came on, so we switched over to the Suburban even though the temp wasn't cold enough to worry about freezing pipes. We have a stand alone in case of emergencies but it would be nice if we could take it off of the list and use the built in heat pump if needed. When boondocking, the Suburban works great, but when plugged in, the heat pump is really too noisy to use at night when trying to sleep. We really enjoy being able to just set the thermostat down to 56° when we go to bed and not need to worry about keeping warm :)
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Still not sure why a curved suction tube could not be inserted into the existing outflow fitting. Maybe the fitting is too small? Anyway, maybe we could meet in the middle sometime Reed and get the job done. There needs to be a Western rally/modification party! Thanks for all the advice and sharing of experience. Dave
It will fit as long as you can get to it, it should take around 30 minutes after you have the parts. To me, your original idea still looks like the best fix for your trailer. You can sweep some copper into a long 90°, slip it through the hole, then thread the connector over the top. Have you been to any of the Rally's there yet? There was an Elite at the Ft. Stevens Rally when we were there in 2015, then we met one of you guys down at Carpenteria, but didn't have a chance to get together after meeting. He walked over to our Casita and said hello :)
So who was in Carpinteria in their Elite in 2015 that we met?
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It's probably already Tee'd under the heater, which is already close to the bumper, so.... The line is already there. The line runs back down the curb side rail and connects to the stove, water heater and then the heater in the back, so the line has been ran and is in use right now.
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That's what I am waiting to find out Wednesday when we take off. In the Casita we ran the Tekonsha P3 at about 4 and we are at 6.8 for the Oliver and had to change the controller settings to make it work. I will be taping the brakes and will post the results.
One of these days Dave, either drive this way or we will drive your way and meet somewhere to fix that tank. Going in from the side will work also with the heater in the way of the top fix. With the 1" spin weld located on the side, the dip tube with a 90° on it will still slide in and hit the bottom, then we can slide the 1" threaded to 1/2" pex or copper bushing over and thread it in to the tank after positioning the dip tube to make the seal. It will work on the existing 3/4 also as long as there is a way to get to that fitting :)
Reed
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They sent us a package with the drawer catches and some other new parts that we never knew had been sent... Turns out that FedX dumped it somewhere else. But Jason sent us out a new package and Richie made sure that we got the tracking# and we haven't had a problem with communication. They don't have an accent in Howenwald, we are the outsiders there. Having worked with people from many different cultures, we have had no problems with dialects except in Georgia where the English language was completely different :)
We haven't emailed in a while, but it was fine. Anita has had Richie call me back once and it was business as usual and I've had no problems talking with any of them. I grew up Blue collar and I would fit right in just fine even with my California accent if I needed a job there. I enjoy the person to person engagements myself and have talked to many of them like brothers and sisters and I really have no problem waiting for a call back even a few days later after the weekend.
Reed
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Reed, you said: “When we tested the ground up at the 7 pin we were getting less than 9vdc, so it was obvious that we didn’t have a good ground,” By this do you mean that you connected the 12V out from the TV socket to the ground plug on the trailer and got 9vdc?? I did this and got 12.8vdc. Also checked continuity between the ground on the trailer plug and the trailer frame, and I had continuity. So maybe I lucked out. Hull 107, completed 11/15. Dave
No, we connected from the black 12vdc in to the white ground, both on the 7 pin trailer connector, then to the others and got varying results, not a constant 13.2 which is what the battery voltage was reading on the SeeLevel monitor. All were 12.4 down to 8.6vdc on the back up lights, which are the yellow wire on the center pin. From the black positive to the frame was 13.2, where it was supposed to be, where to the white ground wire, it was only 9vdc instead of 13.2vdc. We did lots of testing and as soon as we added the solid ground, everything came up and the car started charging the trailer for the first time since we bought the trailer in February.
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Hull #200 had the problem but...
I had continuity and 14vdc between the positive terminal and the trailer tongue, but the trailer wouldn't charge from the car. John and I are at a Rally together and after fixing his 2015, hull #92, he wanted to look at my 2017 Elite II. There are substantial differences and when we tried to trace the white ground wire back from the 7 pin, it just disappears into the vanity from outside and doesn't come out into the front right side dinette...
So I pulled out the schematic and take a look...
The white takes off from behind the vanity and meanders all around and then connects to the attic ground bar according to the schematic, so there is no direct ground to the frame that we could see. When we tested the ground up at the 7 pin we were getting less than 9vdc, so it was obvious that we didn't have a good ground, which is more then likely the cause of the problems that you Ford guys are experiencing. John had brought some 10ga wire with him, so we opened up the 7 pin connector, pushed the weather seal inside to make enough room to run a temporary ground to the frame directly from the white terminal and everything works now. I removed the Camco LED foreign car adaptor and tested it without and it works. We then brought John's truck over and hooked it up to my trailer because it has the voltage meter on the dash. Low and behold, the trailer now charges from the tv without the "Tow Ready" connector needed anymore, the lights all work and everything is working the way it's supposed to. Now all that I need to do is find out what happens to the white wire behind the vanity and then hard wire it directly to the frame or the ground bar beneath the rear Dinette seat.
So the answer for all trailer owners, not just trailers below 100, is yes, there is a ground problem that can easily be fixed. I'm sure that this is the main issue with the Ford Truck problems along with the trailer not charging for everyone. So I suggest, those of you with the electrical knowledge, check out your ground wire and make sure that it goes directly to ground out of the 7 pin connector on every trailer made to date!
I hooked up to the Mercedes and all is well now, I don't have a voltage gauge, so when I leave here in a couple of days, I will make sure that the trailer is charging without the tow ready. I'm thinking that it will not be needed anymore but an actual drive test will be the tell all. Right now the lights and everything work like they are supposed to.
Here's a pic of my simple temporary fix -
We simply ran from the white terminal inside the 7 pin back to the frame, then wrapped it in electrical tape for now until I call Richie and find out where the white wire comes into the trailer.
Reed
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I got both and use both, though the regulator will whistle and needs to be changed out one of these days because if we are running the fire pit outside full blast, it screams at us, but that's just another project on the list. It works and I prefer the back port because you're far enough away to not be bugged by the regulator whistling away... :)
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Greetings from Southern Oregon!
in Introduce Yourself
Posted
We just came thru Medford a few weeks ago :) My parents lived in Selma and we shopped in Medford, you know :)
Welcome aboard :)