Not gonna lie, with regard to our blogging activity here, its been a bit demotivating not having our bus, thus the relativity paucity of posts of late.  But now we have him back and we are rolling, so expect more frequent entries.

We picked up The Big Kahuna from Ted at Coach Maintenance Company a couple of day ago and parked him in front of Rosemarie’s sister’s house in Concord while we made preparations for continuing our journey around the country.  Ted had repaired our reverse gear transmission problem by replacing the nearly stripped reverse clutch gear, and dealt with a number of other maintenance issues for us as well.  He switched our the transmission fluid from ATF to 10W40, apparently a much better option for the Allison VS2 transmissions, but warned us that we need to keep a better eye on the fluid level.  He also suggested that the change in fluid at the proper level should eliminate the long standing and very aggravating difficulty of getting Kahuna to transition into top gear on anything other than a down hill grade.  Sure enough, we had no problem at all during the 95 mile return trip to Concord.

Unfortunately Ted did not have time to trace down the charging failure issue that keeps killing our starter batteries, but we have made arrangements to return next week for a full line up of repairs and improvements, which we will get into on a later post.  In the meantime we wanted to hit a couple of places here in central California, so we are nursing the batteries along until we get back to Ted’s shop.  That is proving a bit more challenging that we anticipated as the charging failure seems to have gotten worse, or at least it is now consistently failing to charge rather than just occasionally failing to charge.  Ah well, we will lick it eventually.