Never say you'll work on anything.. unless you are ready to back it up.

I was talking about rock crushers, sand plants, dozers of any kind, line boring, welding and machining, but a 1.2 million dollar bus what the..

Be grateful it's not rotted out floor on a manure spreader truck from a chicken or hog farm

I worked on one recently for a friend of mine. He had it back to the dealer every year (5 years) for service. Cummins engine, Allison, typical configurations. The drain plug had never been out of the engine, filters only. They charged him $1000.00 each time and half of the grease fittings never had a gun on them. They "fixed" both furnaces at a cost of $900.00 and never fixed a thing. One thing that I quickly learned about these fancy coaches, under the facade they are built no better than your typical Winnebago. They just charge more for the paint.

1.2 million... Wow! Sure takes "camping" to a new level!

motor homes are the worst! I used to work at a dealership that did some of that work. they'd pay us an extra $5/ hr to work on them. It wasn't nearly enough:Banghead

People that complain about problems on equipment have never seen how much and how dangerous problems can be on RVs.

I few years ago I had a customer that asked me to review a list of incidents and invoices for repairs on one of those rolling wrecks. He paid close to a quarter million and there was nearly that much again in warranty work. Front wind shield falling out on the highway twice, power steering hoses blowing in traffic, generator shorting out and electrifying the chassis, front end going out of alignment, brakes sticking on, engine cooling system plugging up and overheating the engine and on and on.

I might rent one for a vacation someday but I will certainly never own one.

Mike L said:

motor homes are the worst! I used to work at a dealership that did some of that work. they'd pay us an extra $5/ hr to work on them. It wasn't nearly enough:Banghead

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$5 dollars is NOT nearly enough for having to deal with the cheap made/put together P.O.S!!! I have worked on my fair share of them over the years & started last year to turn them away!! especially since there is a dealership bout 4 miles down the road from me

what was wrong with it this time??

I might take the manure spreader first, at least you can start by pressure washing it and then get rid of all the junk, on the RV you have to tiptoe around all the junk...

One of my worst RV experiences was a propane/ammonia refrigerator for a "friend". So basically he had hooked up the propane tank and cracked the valve and the regulator stuck and the fridge went up in flames, with the family inside the formeldahyde furnace on wheels. Somehow somebody put the fire out and they made it across country without food poisoning. Then I pulled the burnt mess out and got the 120v heater part working so the fridge would cool.

The funny part was this "friend" happened to manage a significant segment of the absorbtion chiller market, but of course neither of us really knew how they work. Only I knew that it didn't matter how they worked because the sealed system either wasn't the problem, or we weren't going to fix it if it was the problem.

wilko said:

Be grateful it's not rotted out floor on a manure spreader truck from a chicken or hog farm

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We don't have any hog or chicken farmers just cattle ranches and wheat farmers that tear up a lot of stuff. About the same thing just doesn't smell as bad

This guy is a good customer of mine. He had a cold water leak in the coolant system, dealership was running the bus to warming it up to pressurize system, could not find a leak. We went over there when it was cold, pumped it up and it showed right up

the stealership supplied us booties that looked like shower caps to wear over our boots when we got in. seemed like every one of those boat anchors came with white carpet !

He has a baby Mercedes RV, fully self contained. It will sleep two and seat eight, that he pulls behind the big bus.

I would never have done it except for he is a good customer of mine. Hopefully it's the first and last time!

It's a nice shop that he has anyhow!

I WILL work on anything! (provided its ok with my insurance company and legal) one of my sayings to my customers when they are wondering if I will work on something odd is: with your money and my time I can fix anything! LOL................TIO

i will never forget the customer of mine that bought brand new Newell custom coach to the tune of 1.5M picked it up in Oklahoma and left the factory at 5 after getting the full tour. well driving 75 mph down I-35 it let all the air out of the four corner air ride at 9pm on a Friday night and laid the chassis down on the high way. he said there were sparks 100 feet behind the thing till it ground to a stop.

$4500 later the wrecker company got it off the highway and back to their yard on a landoll trailer since it was 17' tall on the trailer it couldn't be transported back to the factory. a full month and a half later the factory finally had if fixed and payed the wrecker company a little over 10 grand for towing and storage and he picked it back up from the factory.

I've had to assist fixing an older manure tanker, years back before they had clean out doors on them, and the pumps were inside the tank towards the front, a very poor idea, what was worse anyone who'd ever buy one like it, if the pump locked up or quit the tanker couldn't be emptied, most of that vintage had holes cut into the sides somewhere to let the manure out so they could be worked on, the one I had to help with was used for hog pit manure for decades, the stench was so bad I almost fell over and that was outside the tanker, the repairs had to be done inside them, had to be the worst job I'd ever helped with up to then.

The next one I never worked on, helped with or had to do anything with, was just at the shop the day it came in. A rendering truck called into that shop, its winch wasn't working, which is mounted at the top, front of the box, inside to pull the dead stock into the truck, the winch brackets had broken and the winch couldn't be used, at the time it pulled in, it was a miserable hot summer day, and it turned out the truck was almost full of ripe bloated dead cows and pigs. The driver thought he was saving the guys the hassle of using a ladder to reach the winch, just crawl over the dead stock, sit on a dead cow and do the repairs...........................I was told later the guy that did it had a close pin on his nose and was sent home for the day when he was done. Was around another shop that had to do the same thing for another rendering company, but that time the truck was empty, washed out and the stench was still so bad, you could hardly breath when standing beside the truck, I told them both they were absolutely nuts for every agreeing to do the job in the first place, no matter what they got paid.

Their is a dead hog truck that sometime is parked at luch time about a 1/8 mile from a shop that i work in part time and it is bad. I always wondered what the driver smelled like after driveing it. There is a deil close to the shop and one day i was eating there when he came in and sat down to eat about 15 feet away. By the looks of his shirt and pants he had changed them just before he came in. After seting their for awhile i could smell him. I wonder if you could ever get that smell off you?

My worst one was a dump trailer that once a week went to a fish processing facility to haul off the unusables. Welding on that bad boy in August was a real treat. Btw it was a aluminum trailer