What Was That Loud Noise????

The morning came at Flagler Beach with yet another great  sunrise but it was time to cross the street and move on over to our riverside campground site at Gamble Rogers State Park for four more nights. This morning I was also able to find another site someone had cancelled so we will move to it after our stay at our current site. Score…

That’s where the good luck ended… No sooner had we had stored everything away, fired up the engine and moved over to our new site we heard a loud “CLUNK” as we were lowering our levelers. We couldn’t figure out what it was at first but once I crawled under the RV for a further inspection it became quite clear where the loud noise had come from.

At first I was looking for a possible broken weld that might had separated under the duress of leveling the rig. But after looking at welds all over the rig I noticed some fresh black paint appeared to have recently flacked off. It was right at the top of the passenger side Atwood Leveler.

Upon further inspection the level leg was freely going up and down inside the part attached to the chassis of the RV. Something had clearly broken off inside the Atwood Leveler. After pursuing possible causes on the web many people who had problems with the Atwood Leveling Jacks had discovered a broken shear pin inside the motor and most of the remaining group had ended up having to replace the motor. Either way this was not going to be good…

Then I had a eureka moment when I found one person who had mentioned that a gear had broken between the motor and the leg severing any connection to it allowing to be easily lifted up and down by hand. So I called the maker of the leveler only to discover that any replacement would have to be custom built and would take 3 weeks after I ordered it. Sigh…

So on a lark I sent Tiffin an email asking what they might think my issue is. One of their techs called me from Tiffin and basically verified my dilemma stating that it required a new leveler. However, he said he thought they still had some in stock!!! After speaking with parts it turned out they had one and would be able to ship it to us in three days which was much better than three weeks! (You can see the broken part in the above left photo and the right photo attached to it)

So I ordered the part and then crawled back under the RV to remove the old leveler to get ready for the new one. There were just four bolts holding the leveler to the chassis. There was also one plug I unplugged that provides power to the leveler. I borrowed a 1/2 inch breaker bar to remove the bolts and after turning the first one it broke the head off cleanly – CRAP…

After reading the internet again about how to remove a broken bolt one idea resonated with me and I tried it out. It required me to use a punch from my punch set to place it on the broken stub and use a hammer to hit it in the direction it needed to turn to unscrew it. After 5 or ten hard taps the bolt began to turn and I was able to remove it. With three more bolts to take out I was hoping none of the others would break off. Lucky for me they didn’t so taking the old leveler out was fairly easy.

The only tip I can relay is that I used wood planks to place directly under the bottom of the leveler so when I took off the last bolt it wouldn’t fall down as the wood would support it. It weighs about 37 pounds so it could cause injury if left to free fall.

The new jack came in three days later after we had already moved to our new site. I unpackaged the new leveler and put the leg on by first supporting it and then getting one of the bolts in by hand. Once one bolt was in the other three were pretty easy to get on (including the new one I bought at Ace Hardware). I tightened them all down and plugged back in the electrical plug and was relieved it all went smoothly.

One thing I failed to mention is once we had the one leveler off and had to move it made quite a lot of noise. The alarms from the leveler controller are loud and can’t be easily turned off plus anytime it was put it in drive or by hitting the brakes the leveler motor would force a full retract and make a loud rattling noise. Not fun. Anyhow with the new leveler in I had to reset the alarm by turning it on then off and then hit AUTO to extract the levelers. SUCCESS! Of course I ran the levelers up and down a few times to ensure all was well.

We are glad I was able to get this part and repair the rig before moving on down the road… RV life is not always adventurous but it certainly is always an adventure.

NOTE: We are now outside of Melbourne Florida at Wickham Park.