"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

The RoseGarden has been silent for awhile. That’s mostly because preparations have been underway over the past few weeks for the snowbird trek south, to where hopefully the snow won’t fly.

The Vehicle

In early October our chariot was taken to the dealer for a thorough check, to ensure everything was ‘ship shape’ for the long journey.

Two days later Big Blue had a ride on a flat bed carrier back to the dealer after becoming totally disabled. Seems somehow they managed to damage an axle while removing/replacing a wheel bearing.

Two Piece Axle

Did you know that if your ride has a broken axle, you don’t move in any gear, and only the park brake will hold it from rolling away? Thank goodness for zero deductible extended warranty.

Pop The Hood

Five days later driving in traffic at speed right after leaving the dealer, the hood pops up the first notch. The bang and flapping gets your attention real quick. Wondering what else was messed up, I figured I would check the oil since it just had a fresh oil change with filter.

Oil That Is

Returning it to the dealer – again – at my request they did another oil/filter change. The story was it was only .3 litres over. Well guess what? This grey haired fogy knows a bit about vehicles. I measured the dots on the dipstick prior to returning it.

.3 Litre = 1.75 Inches

The dots were exactly an inch from the low point to the full mark. The manual says it needs one litre if it is at the low mark. It was overfilled to 1.75 in over the full mark. Point 3 litre overfilled? Yeah right. Better than fiction, or is it friction?

The morale of the story is don’t wait to the last minute if you are departing on a long trip. My ‘check for the trip’ took about a month.

And departing with a vehicle that has never given one second of problems, I wonder – what else did they mess up. I am about to find out.

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License