Sometimes its hard to find your bearings!

Wow what a few weeks it has been. There has been so much progress on Marilyn and so many challenges along the way. So here's the reader's digest version of the story. Ron came down to help with the trailer and we created a schedule of things we wanted to accomplish in the 6 days he was here. Well as some of you may have guessed by knowing Marilyn, she had a list that was much different than ours. Her list contained methods to create setbacks to our list. It's a complicated dance of love and hate with Marilyn. We had a few major goals:

1. Replace/repack all the bearings and shocks, and check out brakes and axles to see if they needed to be replaced

2. Get the AC up AND installed and running

3. Get the rest of the running lights installed and running

4. Get one wall installed and complete the electrical for that one wall

Well that didn't happen so .. here's what did.

Ron planned on the bearing to take a half to a whole day. Well you know, the first one is kind of slower as there is a learning curve involved. Oh.. in the learning curve we learned that you have to DROP the AXLE to replace the shock. GOOD PLAN. Ugghhh.. I was so frustrated. The bolt holding the shock on wouldn't come all the way off without hitting the frame. The only way to remove it was to drop the axle. Well hey.. it's only 4 bolts per side, per axle. So 16 bolts.. no big deal. Well, it did require an impact wrench that apparently needed to be stronger than the hulk. So long story short we spent at LEAST a day running around for parts, tools, and consumables. And that's consumables like gloves and axle grease as opposed to alcohol. So task one took almost 4 days and included some additional gotchas. But we did work on some other things in between. There was also one of the bolts that was welded to the frame that decided to break on us, so he had to deal with that as well.

Also we (Ron) added bearing buddies to make the grease maintenance easier. Thankfully the brakes and axles were good to go.

The AC. Well first we had to prepare the area but getting off any only goo. As I have spent time working on Marilyn I have grown to love WD 40 immensely.

Then Ron and Brian had to build a frame on the inside for the AC to attach to and Ron added a second layer modification to get the frame to line up exactly.

Now.. How do we get that darn thing up there? Well, we had a plan.. but as plans often do it changed in the middle to Ron basically pushing it up and me holding and pulling it up with tie-down straps. Now you will notice there are no pictures of this as we were both pretty much fighting not to end up in the hospital OR drop the AC. Well at the end of the day we succeeded at both. Volla!

Now to get it installed. Well, you cant put the caulk down and then just slide it over or you would ruin all the caulk. So basically Ron held up one end while I caulked, set that end down and repeated on the other end. All the while me not being super comfortable on the roof as there is NO room to move at all with the AC up there and plenty of opportunities to meet the ground at a rapid rate. Ok.. so AC is physically in place and Ron goes back to finishing up the axle stuff while I wire it to test it and such. While most of the wiring is in place none of it is connected to either end to make it hot. So I wired it to the box and got it running without issue.

I think its super cool that it displays the temperature setting on the AC and obviously that is before I updated it to Fahrenheit.

Also, we were able to get most of the running lights, brake, and turn signals replaced and working (I think we still have the two front corner lights yet to replace).

We were also able to get some more insulation up and get the template for the first wall done.

With all this work Ron had about 20 minutes left to relax and take a dive in the pool. I can never thank him enough for his help, knowledge, and extreme patience. He has clearly earned a marking somewhere on Marilyn to commemorate all his hard work.

We also got the water access door installed, the shore power inlet tightened up, did some troubleshooting and resolved an electrical problem.