Hitch Work

This morning we decided to skip breakfast at Angel's. Steve and Jan have their friends, CE and Joannie, visiting, so they weren't sure if they'd be there or what time. Hardy was in Dallas at a meeting. We took the opportunity to sleep in a bit and have a home cooked breakfast of bread pudding made with fresh pineapple.

We have had some issues with our PullRight fifth wheel hitch. It's a great hitch, but ours evidently had a manufacturing defect. After we had to disassemble and fix it twice, we called the company and they sent out a replacement part. This was in August 2009. We decided to wait until it malfunctioned again before going to the trouble of installing the new part. It worked fine for over a year, but when we tried to trip the latch after we arrived here, it refused to close, so we knew the time had come. Today we finally fixed it.

That involved taking the hitch apart so we could work on the underside. The thing is solid steel, so it's darned heavy! Then we had to pry off a pressure fit retainer holding a lock washer in place. Unfortunately we didn't receive any instructions explaining how to install the part, so we just had to wing it. I nearly lost a finger when the latch suddenly sprang shut--we hadn't thought it could do that while the parts we were replacing weren't installed.... Fortunately all went well and we got the hitch back together and functioning smoothly.

While we have the hitch apart we're planning to remove rust and repaint. We steel brushed the rust and applied Bull Frog Rust Remover, but it's going to take more work before it's ready to repaint.

We happily left that job behind when it was time to leave for Randy's C-1 dance at La Hacienda at 4:00 p.m. We don't usually attend that dance, but this week we'll be going to a potluck on Wednesday and will miss Jerry's workshop.

Well, now we know who will be playing in the Super Bowl. We watched only the final quarter of the Jets-Steelers game, since we were dancing earlier and forgot to TIVO the games. We'll get plenty of football watching at the Super Bowl party.