[VAC] Another soul lost to the AirStream Gods

[rlb <blammo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, (Beware, long post, can't help it, I'm excited)

    I bought the '73. The 31' Excella 500 is sitting in my driveway
right now (man, my wife's gonna kill me, she went outta town).

    What an adventure. It was only 200 miles away and took until 1:00 in

the morning to get home (We left the house at 7:30).  There were a
couple of short side trips for visiting before we got to its old home
though, serves me right I guess.

    I'm taking photo's of everything, so if anyone's interested, I could

post them to a web site.

    I found out that its been sitting for about 6 years, and under some
pine trees, that means sap all over I'll bet. The first thing I did was
get it out of its shady, mushy parking spot. Took a bit of doing, but it

came out OK, lucky things were downhill. Got it out onto level ground,
and took one look at the tires out in the sunshine, and told the seller
I wasn't going anywhere with those tires. He mentioned that he had a set

of other tires that would fit the pattern, they did, but after tooling
along the road for a few feet I noticed that one of them that had been
put on before we got there was wobbling, so I backed up, into his
driveway,
and proceeded to take the wheel off. Seems the pattern fits OK, but the
center hub is too big for chevy rims to seat squarely on.  Since we only

had one jack, we decided to replace two tires
at a time, since the tire shop was a ways away, I made the decision to
take two rims with us and get them replaced and put one on each side,
and then take the trailer to get the other two. This worked great, I did

go kinda slow though while heading there.

    Well, on the way to the tire shop (Fleet Farm) I went around the
first sharp turn onto the main road and promptly snapped a load leveling

torsion bar, boy did that thing snap loud. I think that it had a crack
in it, but still, that thing was about two inches in diameter where it
snapped. I'm not sure but I think that the chain actually broke first
and that the bar didn't break until it flew downwards from the lack of
any thing holding it back and snapped off, either that or the bar got
twisted under the trailer, remember I was still going around the turn
onto a busy main road, and had to at least complete the turn before
stopping. This all happened about 1000 feet from the sellers driveway.
Well, I still had one load leveler, let's keep going.

    An interesting device, that I'm sure has been around for a while
that was included with the trailer set-up was a friction pad sway bar.
I've never seen this kinda thing before up close, or if I did, I didn't
know what it was. Simple device really, just a sandwich of a bar of
steel and two brake pads with a hand bar that tightens or loosens the
set-up. I don't know if it helped or hurt, it sure was loud when it did
moved through its range of motion, it needed (still needs) some major
cleaning of rust to get it working smoothly. It was still working pretty

rough when we left on the trip home. I didn't once get into any kind of
sway problem with the trailer though, and I had it up to 65 mph in a
couple of
 spots.

    The trip itself was uneventful (Thank goodness) and I got home OK,
the next task was how to get the thing situated in the driveway. After
turning around and doing a few loops of the yard I managed to get it
situated. Sure looks bigger in my yard than it did in the sellers.

    Well, in order to finish this installment, suffice it to say that
we've gotten through the first pass of hosing it off , no soap yet, geez

is this thing dirty, pine needles everywhere.

    I did notice that all three roof vents are broken on the top, I
guess I'll need to inspect them a bit closer to see if they can be
repaired. They look to be some kind of plastic, maybe at one time they
were clear

    So long for now.

bobb

P.S. the Wife gets home today, if you don't hear from me by tomorrow,
you'll know why. She may even come to the conclusion that you're all
some how responsible, so beware.

:-)