Saturday, October 4, 2014

Oil Pressure and Water Leaks

Earlier this week I was driving the motorhome around on some errands and when I looked down the oil pressure was completely gone. The gauge wasn't registering anything. This freaked me out, but up at the next stop light the pressure went back up and stayed there to my next destination. On the way home it started to dip low again. I installed a new pressure switch and changed the oil. It was a quart low, but I don't think that would have caused it. Just running it in the driveway has the pressure where it's always been since the new engine. Fluctuating between 40psi and 20psi. Doesn't seem great, but I never paid attention to where the gauge was before I changed the engine. Soon I'll have to take it for some more drives to see if the problem was fixed with the new switch and oil change, or if I'm going to have bigger problems.

Originally I was feeling like if it's a bigger problem (i.e. bad oil pump or pick up) that it  would pretty much mean I'd be sitting through another season for sure. Now that I've put some thought into it, it wouldn't be too bad. A pain in the butt, and a decent amount of work, but not impossible. I would have to pull the exhaust, transmission, starter, and raise the entire engine again so that I could take the oil pan off. I'm practically a pro at all of that now. 

It's been cold and rainy. We got a couple inches in 24 hours yesterday. I noticed water in the motorhome again. Yuck. It seems to just be coming from the window. I don't know if it's just old weatherstripping or poor design or something else I haven't figured out yet but definitely the channel on the bottom that the window slides along seems to get very wet, and I think it's just overflowing to the interior.

I took that window out last year and redid all the "monkey poop". Maybe I'll run a bead of caulk around the edge anyway. My other thoughts are to drill some more drainage holes in the bottom of the channel, and possibly make a metal guard along the top of the windows. Both the motorhome and my old travel trailer have that sort of thing above the doors. 

Either way it's better than it used to be. I used to have a small pool of water along the bottom of the wall after it rained. Of course, it could just depend on which way the vehicle is leaning and maybe I have a pool collecting somewhere else I haven't found yet.

2 comments:

  1. With my windows its seems to leak from those channels overflowing as well, when I looked at it it seems be be from the brushes in the channel being worn out, I was figuring on going the route of rain guard type thing on the top of the windows, looked to be a giant pita to take the windows apart and try to install new brushes.

    hopefully the oil pressure issue isnt that bad

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    1. I did some research online last night and it seems to be a pretty universal problem, even on newer rigs. I still haven't gone back out to examine the windows to see how hard it would be to replace.

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