RV Vibration

The wife and I went to pick up the rig tonight. While there I checked the genny and found a switch called Summer/Winter… ugh, no mention of this in my documentation and the dealer walk through didn’t include this and when I checked the oil I missed this little lever. I flip the lever to winter and press the start button, instantly it starts, no priming needed, go figure. The good news is, I now know about this little switch and will incorporate it into my checklist.

So I get the rig onto the road and and notice a harsh vibration around 20mph and it got real bad over 40mph. Bad enough to make everything inside shudder….. I was thinking here we go again, I drive this *#%$& thing every two weeks for nearly 6 months with no issues what so ever. Pick it up to go on vacation and that’s when something goes wrong, but of course. Possible tire flat spotting? You would think that would have happened during the –18f days that I drove the rig during the winter but it didn’t.

I call my wife on the two way radio and ask her to pull up on the driver’s side and see if anything looks strange. Sure enough, she says the drivers wheel is bouncing up and down. We pull it over at a gas station and everything looks fine, the wheel simulator looks like it may not be perfectly round anymore (could be the light) but the tire itself looks fine? It’s dark out so I run my hand around the tire and feel a bulge so it must be a separating tire belt. I call Good Sams and ask if I should get road side service to bring a tire, there is nobody available to do so but they have a 24x7 number for a chassis shop that it turns out I have done business with before.

I call them and leave a message explaining what’s going on and then carefully drive the rig home. It’s now almost 3 hours since I called and I haven’t heard anything yet. Technically it’s not “RV season” yet so I don’t know what to expect. I wrote an email to my boss explaining everything because there is no way I’m going to call him this late at night asking him if I can hit vacation a day early. He has a sail boat but I don’t know if he has issues or not because he’s not the kind of guy to complain about it, where I, clearly am.  

I’m hoping these guys call and tell me to just drop it off and they’ll take care of replacing the tire(s), hopefully it’s just one but I have a feeling they need to be changed out in pairs. We’ll see what happens in the morning, for now I’m going to go take some Excedrin and try to get some sleep.

I’ll update in the morning when I have more information.