Month: June 2025

Everything’s going wrong at once

The Truck

When we first bought the truck, there were a couple of small niggles – the sunroof doesn’t open and there is a bit of trim hanging off. Actually, there was a near disaster which we didn’t discover until we’d towed our new travel trailer home, which is that there was no power coming through the 7 pin plug to the trailer’s brake lights and one of the turn signals. Turns out that was just a couple of fuses, and now I carry a bunch of spare fuses in the truck for both the truck and the trailer.

At the time I bought it, I told them repeatedly that I didn’t care about the sunroof as long as they got it fixed before spring. Well, it’s summer and it’s still not fixed, but again I haven’t been bugging them. That should change.

My truck has these neat little boxes on the sides called “RamBoxes”. They’re kind of like saddlebags where you can toss tools and parts and stuff. They lock and unlock with the key fob, but I’ve discovered twice now that the locking mechanism uses these little plastic pivot points to transfer the movement of the servos from one direction to the other, and they’re fragile as hell. First one broke I think because I tried to unlock it when it was frozen, and the second one I might have hit the fob and pushed the button at the same time. First one I fixed by buying a replacement from the dealer – which took some faffing around and visiting two dealers. There are plenty of videos showing how to do this. Second one, I discovered a Reddit post saying you could use a metal throttle linkage instead of the fragile plastic, and that’s what I tried. So far, it’s working.

Last week, I had to replace both rear tires, when it appears an old patch that nobody told me about seemed to let go.

Today, I noticed that there was a cable hanging down. I had no idea what it was, so I posted it on Facebook and my brother identified it as the emergency brake cable. And lo and behold, there are literally dozens of videos, reddit posts and Ram forum questions about this, and it appears that there is a part of the emergency brake that seizes and needs to be freed by hand. One video I watched suggested using penetrating oil, another suggested baby oil from freshly squeezed babies, and my brother suggested lithium grease. I’ll have to give it a try.

The Leaf

We’ve had a problem, it started off intermittently and now it seems to be permanent. When you plug in the charger, it would beep and flash the charging lights in groups of 3. Googling found dozens of hits that suggest this only happens with Nissan Leafs. But some people were blaming the chargers, and some were blaming the Leafs. A lot of suggestions to take the charging handle apart to make sure the clamp is working right. The clamp on our charger didn’t seem to failing, and there wasn’t any way to take the handle apart.

We tried charging it once using the trickle charger plugged into the plug socket in the garage. Vicki was not satisfied with the speed, because in about 16 hours it only charged about 3/4 the way. Which is about right, because the manual says it should take 24 hours for a full charge. So we were looking at a future of having to charge it every day or every time we used it, instead of once every 3 or 4 days. But the second time we tried, we discovered that there was no power anywhere in the garage. More about that later.

After some reading and some experimentation, I discovered that if I put the charger handle in, then go into the car settings and change the “EV Charging Lock” from “Automatic” to “Locked”. It appears I’ll have to change it to “Unlocked” when it’s done charging so I can remove the charger handle again.

That’s a work-around for now, but I really want to fix this. And my research suggests that the problem is that there are some plastic bits in the locking mechanism that can wear out. And some suggest Nissan will admit that there’s a problem and replace them, but others suggest Nissan will charge up to $700 to fix it. And one person provided some files to 3d print replacements. If only I had a 3d printer, and knew how to replace those parts. Sigh.

The Garage

As stated above, we’ve got no electricity in the garage. This is unfortunate because we’ve got an electric lawnmower to charge up, plus when we bring the trailer home to load up, we plug it in so we can run the air conditioner. (We don’t have a big enough inverter or enough battery to run the A/C off the batteries.) And we’d still like to keep the trickle charger as an option for the Leaf if our current work-around stops working.

Of course, I tried resetting the breaker for the garage service. Also one of the outlets on the outside of the garage was a GFCI, so Vicki tried resetting that as well. I’ve done all these things multiple times, and no luck. Our next step is to call an electrician, which in Vicki’s mind means “invite an electrician she knows, his wife and children over for a special halal dinner” which I’m sure means there will be lots of productive work being done towards our problem.

Being cheap is so expensive

The low point drains on my RV trailer are two PEX tubes, one red and one blue, with a threaded adaptor on the end and caps on the adaptors. The red one is the hot water system, and the blue one is the cold water system. After removing the caps a couple of times when it was freezing cold outside I read with interest about people who installed taps on the adaptors instead of the caps.

I ordered two of these taps, also color coded for hot and cold, and attempted to install them. The cold one worked fine, at least it did after I also ran out and bought some teflon tape. Before I put teflon tape on them, the water pump would run every 12 seconds or so, and the tap was dripping. The hot one, on the other hand, was a disaster. The tap got slightly cross threaded, and because the tap is metal and the adaptor is plastic, it basically dug it’s own thread pattern into the adaptor and I was unable to rethread it so it would go on properly. Fortunately the end cap still went on just fine with no leaks, so I was able to kick the can down the road a bit.

When I decided it was time to do something about it, I thought that what I’m going to have to do is remove that adaptor, and replace it with something else. But in an effort to be cheap, I didn’t want to buy the specialized tools you need to remove and replace the crimp ring/clamp ring that was holding the adaptor on. I read somewhere that you can remove the clamp ring with a pair of pliers, and there was something called a “shark bite” fitting that would go on without tools. Score!

I ordered two of these “shark bite” taps – actually these ones are called “press to fit” because “Shark Bite” is a trademark. These ones are pretty big compared to the other ones I already had. And after spending a couple of hours on my back under the trailer, I discovered that you can’t remove the clamp ring with just a pair of pliers, but a pair of diagonal cutters might do it. So off to the hardware store and got a pair of “dykes”.

With the dykes, I was able to get the ring off, but the adaptor wouldn’t come out of the pipe. So I went home for the day to have a think.

The next day I set off to the hardware store, only to find a gigantic hole in my tire, but that’s a story for another time. So the day after that, with new tires on my truck, I set off to the hardware store and bought a PEX cutter. I figured I’d cut off the pipe below the adaptor and put in the new tap. But at the store, I was having a sudden sense that I’d got the size of the PEX pipe wrong so my new taps wouldn’t work. So I also bought an adaptor that would let me use the tap from the first set if the PEX pipe ended up being 1/2” instead of 3/8”.

Back at the trailer, it turns out the second set of taps I bought fit fine, and so I didn’t need the adaptor. But after getting the one tap working, I didn’t see a reason to cut off the perfectly working first tap I put on, so I’ve got unmatched taps. And I’ve got the adaptor, and the cold tap from one set and the hot tap from another set rattling around in my truck. I wonder if having different taps is a faux pas?