The "Mothership"!

Our service appointment for Newmar at the "mothership" was scheduled to start on Wednesday, 8/23. The pre-arrival information indicated that the coach would be picked up by the technician between 6-7:30am. We were ready a few minutes before 6am... and waited... and waited...

... and waited...

We had a factory tour scheduled for 8:30am, for which we were supposed to arrive by 8:15am... so at about 7:30am, I first went over to the customer service waiting area to check. The lady at the check in desk did not have us on her list - uh oh. She said she would start looking into it, and I went back to Gracie to review the emails I had received. The pre-arrival email communications had been really difficult to understand, so I thought maybe I misunderstood something... but I went through the information and had a confirmation email for service to start on August 23 (sent August 22, last year!). Carl took a printed out copy of that confirmation and went back to the customer service front desk -- he talked with a service manager and they were working on finding a technician to work on Gracie. Carl let them know that we were leaving to go to the factory tour and the service manager said that they would get Gracie moved into the shop while we were gone.

Parked in front of us in the service center "campground" - this is the service trailer they brought with them to the Tampa Supershow Rally to be able to service customer's rigs onsite at the rally.

We drove over to the factory tour location -- we were the last participants to arrive, got our safety vests and headphones and receivers, and joined the others in the meeting room.

In the meeting room before our tour began -- some of the paint schemes for rigs.

The tour began with a couple of videos in the meeting room...

We weren't allowed to take pictures on the tour... some things of note:

• We started in the chassis area, where the chassis from Freightliner and Spartan are brought in. They build the STAR foundation on top of the chassis (https://www.newmarcorp.com/why-newmar/newmar-difference/chassis-overview/). My understanding was that they use residential home construction techniques in their building.
  
• In this area, they also build in the items at the base of the coach - water tanks (fresh, grey, black), and the floors. The tile is laid onto the wooden subfloor that is eventually transferred onto the foundation. The wooden subfloor is cut out in all the strange configurations needed for the floorplan of each coach so the tiles can be appropriately cut and laid too.
• The coaches are moved through the factory by means of air hover pads under the tires - when it is time for the coach to move to the next station, the hover pads are energized with air, and 2-3 guys push the coach sideways to the next station (20' or so) and successfully stop it too!
• Once done in the chassis area, the partially completed units are driven to another building where the upper frame is installed (metal studs) and the house is assembled. The fiberglass is adhered to the outside and the coach ends in the paint area. All those fancy paint designs are done by wax-paper-like templates adhered to the outside of the coach.
  
• I think we heard that 7 coaches a day are completed, and that it takes about 21 days for the building of a coach.

After the tour, we went back to the service center, officially checked in with our service technician (he had a list of the things we wanted serviced, and just wanted clarification), and then...

... headed into the "Pet Lounge" at the service center.

A little nicer than the Freightliner lounge from the previous week.

Miss Kitty got under the flannel shirt again -- she was burrowing into the sleeve -- kitties like being in close places!

We got into the lounge when most everyone else was gone to lunch -- when all the dogs came back, it could get noisy at times! Miss Kitty added her own meows to the mix -- she was *very* vocal. The other folks in the pet lounge said that they had never heard such a vocal cat! We were surprised that she was not intimidated by the "dawgs" there!

The parts department is located here at the service center -- we had actually been here back in 2020 when we needed to get an actuator for one of our slides (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-show-and-repair.html) when Gracie was in for repairs at a shop in Elkhart, Indiana. We had brought a list of replacement parts that we wanted to get and found some of them here at the parts department...

... one of the main things we wanted was replacement bay door latches. There are two different types (different rigs need different types), and then a "left" and a "right" of each of those, so we had to take the latch off of one of our doors to know exactly which replacement part we needed.

This is an example of one of the broken ones -- the part at the top gets bent from the door not lining up properly and then the latches don't latch -- and it just gets harder and harder to get them to stay closed.

Putting the new latch on...

... close up -- the new latches are built more robustly -- so we're hoping they will last better.

So... the service center is doing repairs during the day, and we're doing repairs in the evenings! We should have a brand new rig by the time we leave here!