Sun at last! Some real repairs!

We finally got 3 consecutive days of sun, warmth, and low winds on the family farm!  We were able to get some work done on several RV projects.

We have a pretty great view from inside the RV on the farm.

With rain ever on the horizon, Aaron decided patching the skylight over our shower was top priority.

View from inside the shower

The skylight is a 2-layer deal with an inner clear flexible layer (you're looking through it in the image above) and an outer semi-opaque harder plastic layer.  Both are shaped (a shallow hump along an irregular edge), so replacing the whole shebang wasn't an easy option.  The outer layer had numerous cracks and leaks in the seal.  Aaron managed to delicately extract the shell without damaging it further, scrape off all the gunk resulting from various individuals' various attempts to patch the cracks, fix the cracks, and reattach the skylight with fresh sealant.  Whew!

Patching the cracked edge

Adding foam between the inner and outer layers

The inner layer surrounded by cleaned up foam and a new
bead of sealant

All done!

While he was on the roof he also added fresh sealant to many of the seams - this is a regular maintenance activity for RV owners.  Over time the sealant cracks and lets water in.  Our favorite sealant for the roof is Self-Leveling Dicor.

Fun on the roof

We attempted to get our ice maker working - we'd never really tried to before so we weren't sure whether it worked or not, but we had to cut the feeder line while fixing the refrigerator, so at a minimum THAT needed to be fixed.

Installing the feeder line extension

Re-installed

After hooking everything up properly and waiting several hours for the freezer to cool back down, we still had no ice.  It took some creative searching but I finally found the manual for our ice maker in our Norcold 1200LRIM refrigerator.  We ran all the tests except the one that had to be run while everything was warm and dry, and so far everything has checked out.  We managed to accidentally turn off the water pump after re-securing the wiring, so after we got everything put back together we didn't end up actually testing it out.  Fingers crossed it will work soon!

Next up: fixing the damage to the engine compartment from when we accidentally backed over a post.  At the time we thought we had only bent a bit of the back grille, but when Aaron pulled it off to repair it we discovered things were a bit worse...we had broken the sunken bolt holes in the plastic case around some kind of wiring box.

Those four screws were supposed to be holding
the plastic box on...

Close up of the plastic box with the mounting
holes sheared off

Neither of us was very surprised at the damage - it seemed miraculous at the time that we hadn't done any more damage than the grille - and we were lucky that even this damage wasn't very major.  Aaron fixed this by running longer bolts through the apparatus and using washers on the outside of the plastic box.

So what was I doing during all of this you might ask?  Well, a lot of the time I was monitoring the ladder, grabbing tools, etc.  But my one main accomplishment for this time was to staple up insulation inside many of the cabinets at the ceiling of the RV.

Insulation installed

As you can kind of see, many of these cabinets act as a pantry for us, and got unhappily hot when we got any kind of sun.  We've seen from other RV channels that adding insulation like this can help, hope they're right!

One thing I don't have a picture of but did want to mention because it took us FOREVER to find this video...we have a Winegard Togo Roadlink to provide internet via AT&T.  It has been a fairly constant headache for us, though when it's working it's great.  Our latest error was a "no SIM installed" error, and no amount of restarting was working for us.  Aaron found this video on YouTube.

This actually worked!  I'm linking it here just in case it can help someone else...  Now, unfortunately, about 12 hours later the same error popped up, but we did it again and again it worked immediately and lasted until we left the farm the second time.  If nothing else this gives us something that seems to be reliable that we can do when we get these errors on the device.

And FINALLY...since it is Star Wars Day … once we finished working on the RV I went back to the kitchen and baked up some fun sugar cookies!

Happy Star Wars Day!