[VAC] Simple logic or lucky guess?

[Terry Tyler <tylerbears@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Airstreamers,

Here's one for those of  you who haven't been there, done that --- yet.

The brakes on our Airstream worked fine for the last two months and 2500
miles. Two weeks ago,  they didn't work at all after going over a set of
rail road tracks. By the time I had pulled off the highway to check them,
they were working perfectly.

Several days ago, the brakes were working fine until we pulled into a
shopping mall parking lot.  Suddenly, no brakes. Again, I checked all the
wire connections. In the process, I touched and moved wires in dozens of
places. None showed any indication of not being exactly as I had intended.
When I got back in the truck and moved the Airstream, we had brakes again.

Based on these two experiences and rightly or wrongly, I decided there was a
transient problem with the ground. That meant I could look for it and check
again and probably check again - and not find the place where the ground was
almost established but neither was it noticeably loose.

Instead of playing cat and mouse, I chose to locate the bundled brake wire
(blue) and ground wire (white) under the Airstream where it fed the junction
box.  

After opening the bundle (by cutting it back two inches), I peeled the white
casing down to bare wire (with my leatherman micra), attached another white
wire (from my "stash") to it with a butt connector (everyone carries a box
of those), unraveled enough white wire to reach the support frame for the
water tank, attached a circular connector (a dozen of these last a long
time) to the end of that wire and then, with a self tapping hex head screw
(same ones I used to connect my BAL jacks to the frame) going through the
circular connector, I drilled it into the frame (with my Makita 14.4 volt
portable drill), thereby establishing a new ground (undeniable).

With that, I cable tied the new ground wire in place and wound black tape
around the connections to keep dirt out, put all my tools away and climbed
back into the truck - fully confident of having brakes again.

The brakes have functioned flawlessly since (even going over railroad tracks
and into mall parking lots). Time on task for this job? 15 minutes. And none
of that was wasted trying to find the culprit ground connection.

Was this solution a matter of simple logic or a lucky guess? I think it was
because my high school physics teacher badgered us to find obvious answers
to simple problems even when they looked like complex puzzles.

Terry
mailto:tylerbears@airstream.net