Walter crippled again

When our wheels fell off, we had to have a shop in Odessa, TX put them back on.  Luckily they let us stay in their lot while they ordered parts and did the repairs.  But as soon as we left the lot, the hub started leaking again and every couple hundred miles we had to add gear oil until we got back to our homebase in Charleston.  Today we finally were able to get the wheels off and figure out the problem.  It seems that a gasket was not changed or tightened down when the rear seal was replaced (even this repair was suspect in our book), and thus was leaking like a siv.  This is such an easy repair (costs about 2 bucks for the gasket) which would have saved us headaches and about $100 on 6 gallons of gear oil.

Whenever you trust someone to do a repair, you expect them to do it right.  You always feel robbed when things go wrong.  In this case, I think the main thing that happened was there were too many hands working on our bus, and things got overlooked.  At least, I’m hoping this was the case because I don’t want to think that any of these three guys were intentionally negligent.

Having the rear wheels off again today has given us the opportunity to put on new brake pads and drums that were given to us by the amazing Larry of the RTS Bus Nuts group. He also gave us new air filters, fuel filters, and absolutely everything for the entire brake job.

It looks like we will be in Charleston for several more weeks while we finish up all repairs, including the install of a new water heater, fixing the pedal power system, and building out some more storage.  Soon we will be heading north.