Ken Tiede is a friend of mine.
The guy lives in Scenic, Arizona, just across the Virgin River from Mesquite, with his girlfriend Nancy. Ken is an ex-mine worker from Montana who knows how to fix just about anything mechanical. He’s also a veteran RVer who has owned a variety of rigs and is adept at fixing just about anything that can go wrong. If you own an RV, you know that stuff is silently going sideways at all times and it is just a matter of time before you end up at the side of the road totally screwed.
Ken’s been there, done that just as have Charlie and Craig.
I typically amass a list of “fix it” items during each year’s RV road trip. Sometimes the list is lengthy, and I’ll take the rig to Temecula Valley RV (in So Calif) and let them have at it. This year, however, the list was small and there were a few items that I could probably take on myself if I had the cojones to do that. Instead, we had Ken and Nancy over to the house awhile back and I mentioned one of the fix-it items to Ken and he said, “Bring it over to my house and we’ll look at it!”
Music to my ears.
My fancy 40’ Class A motorhome has a number of labor-saving devices including an electric water hose reel. The device used to work great, but then started jamming up to the point that it was useless. I thought the motor was ruined. Ken got down into the undercarriage bay (that was accessible by a midget back at the factory) and, with great effort, removed the entire reel and motor assembly. He then took the motor apart and repaired the mechanism that engages the chain drive. After two hours of Ken’s sweat and tenacity, the automatic reel was functioning again.
Hooray for Ken!
In between showing me how to engage my inverter and hook up my TV to a streaming device, I had the audacity to request help on “just one more” of my fix-it items: the café slide that makes a lot of noise.
This is something that an RVer never wants to hear, because if a slide (and I have four of them!) goes tits up, the owner/operator is screwed until one of those mobile RV repair pirates shows up to fix the thing at $150 per hour. I had a slide repair done one time in Northern California where I had to wait five days for the repairman to show up, he spent two minutes under the coach to assess the problem, and then solved my problem with a $1.90 hardened steel bolt. “That will be $451.90, Sir.” Charlie and I were so anxious to leave that RV park that we actually THANKED THE GUY FOR BENDING US OVER A LOG.
Anyway, my screeching slide (going out) was a puzzler to Ken for a while. It appeared to him that some plastic rollers may have been flattened out a bit (from being installed too tightly). We relaxed the torque just a bit and put some lithium grease on the rollers and, voila, no improvement. “Hmmm”, Ken said, “It looks like this slide hasn’t been lubricated in a long, long while!” So, he slathered on the lithium grease and sprayed all of the slide mechanisms with Deep Creep penetrating lubricants. And, miracle of miracles, the infernal racket subsided when the slide was opened and closed.
Yay, Ken!
Before I left the Tiede estate, Ken was nice enough to take a look at my aging tri-fold sofa that needs to be reupholstered and showed me how I can get the heavy sucker out of my rig. I think I will tackle that task when I return from out holiday vacation to Yuma because Mr. Tiede definitely wasn’t volunteering for that one.
Yes, I was a wuss for not doing these things myself, but, as the saying goes, “Don’t send a child to do a man’s work!” I know my limitations. However, I do observe pretty well and now I know how to fix a few more things than I did before… thanks to my buddy Ken.
I am lucky to know several guys like Ken. My neighbor Dale is an RVing expert, who specializes in boondocking and is quite handy. Another neighbor, Al, is also quite knowledgeable about all things motorhome. And, of course, my friend in Yuma, Dan, is capable of fixing most RV problems by himself.
It’s nice to know guys like that.