We had had two shades in the motorhome fail in the past few weeks - the spring in the mechanism broke causing all the fabric to deploy and pool at the bottom of the window. We called the company (MCD in McKinney, TX) to find out about getting replacement springs, and they needed to have specific information about the springs to be able to allow us to order a replacement. The lady I spoke with at MCD sent information about how to take the shades apart and access the spring in order to find out what we needed to order along with a parts and price list.
So, while we were at Indian Lakes, Carl took the first shade down and got the spring out to determine which replacement part we would need.
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| Getting in to the shade... |
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| Carl had plenty of help with supervision from Miss Kitty! |
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| Once he got the spring out, he found where the plastic had broken and decided to try repairing it before ordering a new spring (this is a picture of the repaired spring, we forgot to take a picture when it was broken...). |
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| The clear plastic piece right at the end of the spring is the part that had broken, so Carl used some glue that he had available on the rig to see if a mend would work. |
He fixed one shade and put it back up - it seemed to be holding well, so he took the other one down and made the same repair. It may break again, but we're hoping this will keep the shades working for a while. We have 11 of these manual shades in the rig, and each has two rollers (for a day-shade and a night shade). Since two broke in such a close period of time, we are concerned that the springs may only be designed to last 8-10 years and we may be seeing more of them fail soon. It would be nice if we didn't have to pay for new ones (at $35/spring, 11*2 shades, that is a bit of an investment!).
Carl is so good with figuring out solutions and implementing them. I am indeed blessed!
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