[Richard]

All of this conversation about the air system motivated me (with Jon's help) to change out the air dryer cartridge. Well that and the MIL is with us this week, so I needed some outside activity.

Anyway, I was prepared for the cartridge to take some coercion to spin it off. I was unprepared for what happened. Two strap wrenches in tandem would not budge the cartridge. I took a hefty screwdriver, put a notch in the rim of the cartridge, and then angled the screwdriver in the notch. Hitting it with a two pound engineer's hammer moved the cartridge.

About one whole turn before the cartridge seized. The funny thing was the cartridge would move back and forth about 1/4 of an inch, and it was clear the seal had broken loose. Hmmmmmmmmm. After an hour of unsuccessfully trying different techniques, the only thing I knew to do was to rip the skin off the cartridge and see what was seized. Using a side grinder, pliers, screwdrivers, and a few swear words resulted in access to the real problem. The plate with the threads for the center boss is not an integral part of the cartridge skin.The skin was loose on the bottom plate of the cartridge. If you look at a new cartridge, this will make sense. After gaining access to the plate, we could put the screwdriver on holes in the plate and use the hammer to finish loosening it.

You can imagine that this butchery resulted in ten gazillion of the dessicant beads falling into the blow off valve body. Jon helped me disassemble the valve body to clean out the beads.

It's kind of funny after the fact. But I did have that feeling of "commitment" when I first penetrated the skin of the cartridge.

Thanks Jon for the help and moral support.