Another maintenance task

When we were at the farm in May, we retrieved our large torque wrench to be able to check the torque on Gracie's lug nuts. Since we had had the front tires replaced in January, and one of the rear wheels was also removed to correct a leaking valve stem, we wanted to make sure that the torque was correct on those wheels specifically.

When we were at the farm, Jimmy taught/reminded us how to use the torque wrench. It has settings for us to be able to torque at the rate that is recommended (450 foot-pounds). He recommended that we release the setting when it is not in use to maintain the springs in the instrument. We also needed to get new sockets as the lug nuts on Gracie are not the same size as what Miss Doozie (Dwayne's and my coach) had. Jimmy helped us get lug nut covers off 3 of the nuts while we were there on the farm (he could just grab them with his hand and had enough strength to pull them off)... we didn't have that capability, so we knew it was going to be a bit of a chore. In addition, it is better done when Gracie is sitting fully on her wheels, not on the jacks with the potential that one or more tires would be off the ground. We decided to work on it last Sunday before we left Paul Wolff campground to move to Pine Country for our required time out of the Forest Preserve campground.

On Sunday, we had to be out of Paul Wolff by noon, and were not able to check in to Pine Country until 1pm. It was about an hour's drive, so we could take it easy, leave right at the required exit time, and have a relatively easy drive to Pine Country.

But first, we wanted to have Gracie all closed up and ready to move, and have her off the leveling jacks -- so we got everything closed up inside, and got her ready to move. Then we started working on getting the lug nut covers off.

Let's just say that our hand strength is nothing close to Jimmy's. We tried various techniques to get them off -- non-slip material with a channel lock wrench (one challenge with this is that you are squeezing down on the covers which makes them tighter while you're trying to pull them off), using rubber mallet to try to move the cover sideways a little and then a screw driver blade to help to pry them off (this worked pretty well), and, what I finally found worked the best is to just have on nylon gloves (to give a little more grip), use an adjustable wrench that was just barely large enough to get over the cover, work the cover back and forth to make a little edge at the wheel, and then work the screwdriver blade under the edge and pull with a gloved hand. I could get all 10 covers off a wheel in about 5 minutes with this technique.

We checked 4 of the wheels while at Paul Wolff, but decided that we needed to head out and we'd do the rest once we got to Pine Country.

I don't have any actual pictures of our efforts, but I have a couple of staged pictures...

Here Carl is demonstrating the torque wrench on a lug nut, ready to check the torque. When we actually were checking the torque, I held the head of the wrench with one hand and the bar going to the socket with the other hand, to ensure the socket stayed on the nut, while Carl exerted about 150 pounds of force downward on the wrench until it clicked, indicating the desired torque was achieved. Then I moved the socket to the next nut needing checking. Since I was actively holding onto the wrench, I couldn't take a picture of the activity at the same time!

You can see that the length of the torque wrench is about 3 feet -- to get 450 foot-pounds of torque, we need to apply about 150 pounds of pressure on the wrench -- let's just say that is a little challenging to accomplish!

We did check the torques on all of the nuts. The nuts on the wheels which had not been removed earlier this year were all solid (they did not move at all). The lug nuts on the 3 wheels that had been removed and replaced earlier this year did move a little, but not much. We figure that we will re-torque again after we drive to Idaho (about 1700 miles), and anticipate/hope that none of the nuts will move then. In preparation for that, we've left the lug nut covers off for now, so we don't need to replace and remove them again. We might leave them off for the trip to Alaska because it might be that, if they are at all loose, they would get lost while we're on what we anticipate to be rough roads on our journey. We'll discuss later what we think is best to do for the trip.