Biscuit's Chip, and a Bad Jack.

Lets see, Lake Conroe Penny asked an important question, "Is Biscuit microchipped?"  And the answer is yes absolutely.  I think she was routinely chipped when her litter was first seen by the vet.  But, it is not registered until you pay the money when you purchase the dog.

Since we got her at a pet store, we registered her right then and there.  The pet store gets something out of the deal too, and perhaps it  cost us more, but we just couldn't take a chance on her not being registered.

But what I do not know, is if the chips are routinely read when dogs are presented for treatment.  I know that no one in Arizona checked to see if she was our dog.  So if she was kept by someone that was not her rightful owner, would anyone ever check or know?  I don't know the answer to that.  She does have a collar tag as well that has Loyce's name and address and telephone number.  But that won't help if someone tosses it in the basket and decides she is theirs.

We have both vowed to each other, that the dog needs to be hooked up when the grandkids are over here.  And we know that she is young and needs way more activity than we are able to provide in our senior years.  So the older kids have taken her on several walks this past week which will help keep her challenged.

Today, it was back over to the storage yard after setting up a series of calls with Tiffin.  It took most of the morning to get past the busy signal on their incoming phone line, but once we got thru, they helped almost immediately.  Seems that jacks that won't function strand folks in bad places, so they are used to helping as almost an emergency.

I do know that we have Atwood jacks, and that Tiffin has made a decision to not use them any more because of higher failure rates.  They have guided my test procedures all day, and the outcome is that it appears that we have a bad jack on the right rear of the coach.  I may go over and test that conclusion with a booster battery later in the week, but for now there is voltage on the wires going to the jack and it doesn't move.   Bummer!

After pressing the buttons with the tech on the line, and then testing the voltage in the control board, I needed to have an assistant press the buttons while I was head long in the electrical locker.  So Loyce had to come over to the lot for a while too.  It was in the 90's so we fired up the generator  and ran it for the entire time we were working on stuff.  The dash air was also on when we had the engine going, but it was on and off as part of the tests, so the roof air units were the main AC.

I had to crawl under the back of the rig with a battery drill to manually spin down the jack.  Once it is not parked in the up position, the system should sense that it needs to retract it.  That didn't happen.  There was power on the wires to the jack but not long enough to actually run it.    So I need to put another battery on the jack and see if it will run normally.

It was getting late and I was way too hot, so we just gave up for now.  If the jack needs to be replaced, I am certain that we will go back to Red Bay and get it done.  They have the expertise, and the parts in stock to handle this fairly quickly.    Having the parts on hand is the biggest part of this, as they can switch out controller boards and jacks until they have it corrected.  If I go to a local shop, we will wait parts, and then find that we need different parts and play the waiting game again.  Still, it will be expensive to drive the coach down there again.  You can't win.

I can only hope I can get into the shop for these repairs, as there might be quite a wait, remember there were so many callers that it was a constant busy signal all morning.....

Retired Rod