Saturday, June 08, 2024

A Sunset with Scarlett

I finished prepping Umarang the VRRV for storage and drove her to Buckley Space Force Base this morning.  I rigged a single solar panel to keep the house battery charged and then rigged a second cable from the house battery to the chassis battery to keep it charged up.  

There'd been rumors of damage to the RVs in the storage lot but I didn't see any.

This afternoon, I worked on lessening the lean angle Scarlett's tug.  I discovered that the front upper support arm was pretty much locked tight with rust.  Several applications of penetrating oil and lots of effort produced little gain in freeing the threads to do adjustments to the lean angle.

Much grunting, cursing and sweating in the 90 degree heat later....all I was able to get was a 1 degree reduction.  Sigh.  I didn't want to force things as I feared breaking the upper forked rod.

She felt fine as I rode to catch the sunset tonight as part of the test drive.  I might work on it more but then again, perhaps not.

It was hot and sunny today, with a brief period of severe thunderstorm warnings in the afternoon.  They proved much ado about nothing for our area.

Update: June 9

Found a spare "Rod with Fork", and realized that I could remove the seized one on Scarlett's front upper support arm.  I couldn't screw it inward you see, due to the threads having seized.

rod with fork

Took some effort but finally got the old rod out and the new one in.  Now I could "easily" adjust the lean out of the tug!  

I think I have the leanout correct now and it doesn't look like I'm leaning to much to the left!

2 comments:

RichardM said...

Wow! I didn't expect the Ural to show up in any blog posts. Why was the adjustment needed after all the miles you've put on?

redlegsrides said...

RichardM, I had adjusted the lean out mistakenly some time ago, before I noticed that the rubber bushing for the top end of the right side rear shock absorber had failed.

I put in another bushing but then did not correct the lean out at that time.

In the very few times that I have ridden the rig this year the tug had seemed to be leaning too much to the left.

She seemed to feel fine before and she feels fine now, I'm probably overthinking the whole thing as usual