[Richard]

"This trip has been without any coach issues"

It summons the curse of the the coach deities, and brings in Murphy's grandpa for good measure. 

We are 4500 miles into this years tour, and except for a nail in a tire, have been without major incident. I had puffed up my chest and bragged to Rhonda about how effective the winter projects had been in producing a smooth sail. 

So, the baby boy (all 6'3" of him) and his significant other flew into Montana to stay with us at Glacier National for a week. On the first night they arrived, the son flushed the half bath potty in the middle of the night and it jammed. I awoke in the morning to step into an inch of water. Oops. 

Ok, first step is send them and Rhonda out hiking so I can dry out the basement. I have a small wet dry vac so that helped get the water out of the basement carpet, and for good measure I removed all the basement ceiling foam panels to let the underneath dry also. That wasn't too bad.

Next I decided to rebuild the sequence valve in the potty cause it was sticking. This is where the curse hits. I put in new o rings from my o ring kit obtained at Harbor Freight. I could not get the valve to work properly even after three rebuilds and installs. I can tell you that the first time the removal rebuild and install took over an hour. I can know do it in fifteen minutes. But all the effort was to no avail. I finally figured out the o rings that I had were not sized as marked in the kit. I now suspect either poor quality control or that they simply put the closest metric o ring in the SAE kits. 

Just to make things interesting, I remove the top on the working potty to check a dimension on the valve, and I hear air. Lots of air. It's coming from where the air supply fitting screws into the valve. Ok, that seems simple enough. Remove the tubing, tighten the fitting, and air leak should go away. Well, that's what should happen but not when the valve body (old style, black injection molded version) actually has split where the fitting is screwed in. Those of you who play with fittings know they are tapered, so when you screw a tapered fitting into an already split part, the split grows. Now, we have a leak that the aux pump can't keep up with. 

So, a quick recap. Two guests, no potties, one stressed Richard. 

Ok, so the solution appears to be to drive to the nearest hardware store and obtain proper 3/4 X 9/16 X 3/32 orings  Oh yeah the nearest store is in Browning, 35 miles away. And oh yeah, that's the closest place our phones work too. So off we traipse to get the o rings. Like an idiot I did not take an old one. I thought that as the lady fished them out of the parts bin that they didn't look like the right size, but I clearly saw the size printed on the lid.

I don't like to throw money at problems, but I knew the split valve was FUBAR (fouled up beyond repair) so while ordered a new valve from Mullaney, I said send TWO. 

Drive forty miles back to the coach and install the o rings obtained at the hardware store, hoping to get one functioning potty. I have dead ended the air lines to both so the air doors will work and at least we can shut the doors at night. Reassemble and lube the valve, install, and voila, the same negative result. It doesn't seal off at the end the stroke. I may have invented some new bad words at this point. 

We take the kids back to the airport and I get more o rings at HD. When we get back to the coach, the sequence valves have arrived. I take one of them apart and measure the o rings. Yep 3/4 X 9/16 X 3/32. Hmmm, the Harbor Freight  o rings don't measure out to be exactly this size, and guess what, neither do the hardware store o rings. Arrrggh. The Home Depot rings do measure to be the correct size, however it's a moot point since I now have new valve assemblies. 

The new valves had the potties functional in about thirty minutes. So don't worry that we were holding it for five days. 

I can't tell you how happy Rhonda is to have indoor plumbing again. 

We have returned to cell phone land and internet, we are in Kalispell tonite. 

Never will I utter those words again.