We’re back at Sandpipers. We only stayed up by Corpus for four days. We mostly just birded on the weekend and still added 43 birds for the year. It was a good stay. We had a doctor’s appointment on Friday. That was okay. We did the Big Day on Sunday. That was good. We drove home Monday.
Good to be back home. The lake has turned into a little bit of wet grass on the far side (from us);
…just wet enough to attract a flock of white-faced ibis.
We’ve had a little bit of rain, but nothing over half an inch at a time. Now it’s just hot and humid. Summer weather. What we’ve been waiting for. I hear some thunder rumbling out there as I write this though. I checked the weather radar. Cells sliding up from the south out of Mexico. A little rain for us. So far the heavy stuff is staying on a track to our west.
We have a mystery with the bus; a rattle coming from underneath while we drive. Any time we take it for any service, the technicians always notice it, but no-one can locate it. The chassis guys put it up on a lift and can’t find anything loose. The suspension and steering is all still tight. It’s kind of a loose-sounding rattle, metal to metal, just a little bit of slop; not very much. It doesn’t seem to be tied to engine speed or wheel rotation. It’s just a clunking rattle. It resonates up from the floor.
I got a brainstorm yesterday and invited Brother Tom over for dinner (and a ride in the motorhome). If the trained professionals can’t find it, it must be time to call in a more persistent diagnostician. We don’t need to fix it ourselves, we need to figure out what or where the problem is so we can direct it to the right person to fix it. While I drove, Tom prowled the interior. We narrowed the noise down to a general location; somewhere in the neighborhood of the front axle or forward. It’s definitely low; it’s not coming from anywhere above the floor. It doesn’t seem to be any of the slide mechanisms. We can’t really narrow it down to one side or the other. It seems to be central.
We gathered as much information as we could, then brought the rig back to the park for the visual; to try to find something that matched up with our clues. I thought I had it a couple days ago; a folding aluminum outside step that I had stored up against the steel side of the hydrohot unit in the right front bay. I rattled it back and forth where it sat. It sounded good; like maybe our problem. I took the aluminum step out of the cabinet and left it on the ground, but the noise was still there when I test drove the rig. No difference.
So when we had the bus parked, I raised it up as high as it would go on the suspension so we could look underneath it. There really isn’t much up front of the front axle except suspension and steering (which we’ve already eliminated) and the generator cabinet. The generator slides out the front of the coach on a motorized drawer. We looked underneath for a loose bracket or support. Nothing. We slid the cabinet out and tried to shake the whole thing from the front, but couldn’t get a rattle. We looked at a broken fitting that is supposed to be attached to the fiberglass front panel, but I already knew about this. It has been broken for a couple years. We’re not looking for a metal to fiberglass sound, we’re looking for metal to metal. Wait a minute. We’ve had this rattle for a couple years. This fitting is loose, so it might be rattling against the fiberglass. What if we push it the other direction? It rattles against metal. That’s it! Metal to metal. Just under the floor. Just to left of center of the coach. Not visible to the technicians trying to find it from underneath. The sound could resonate back through the frame. It fits. It totally fits! We figured it out.
It was time to go back to the house, fire up the grill, and put dinner on. After that we went back to the bus and duct taped that loose bracket to death. No more rattles will emanate from that tape cocoon. We could have taken the coach out for another test drive, but why bother. This is the perfect explanation. Why take a chance on screwing up a perfect explanation. Besides, by now it was hot sweaty summer weather out there. We can take our victory lap another day.
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