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Old 10-02-2003, 07:15 PM   #2
Jon Kabbe
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 11
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I have a 1977 coach with 190,000 miles. The interior and drive train were updated prior to my purchase more than a year ago. According to the previous owner he had been everywhere from Alaska to Guatamala in it with few problems. I've had two problems, the fuel injection system and corrosion on the lower body side panels. The injection problems were due to aging of the hoses causing hose particles to screw up injectors and the pump. The hoses didn't look bad but were slightly stiff. I wasn't having problems with the generator so the problems had to be on the drive motor.

After driving this March over salted roads, I have had some of the body panels at the wheel wells get holes corroded completely through. I took the following actions. I put a heavy blue shrink wrap film used for boat storage between the aluminum side panels and the steel wheel wells. Then I ordered some of the matching anodized aluminum from the Newell factory and cut nice looking patches to cover the "holey" areas and glued them on using high strength double sided trim tape from 3M. While not perfect it looks pretty good. I had to do some unriveting and reriveting to really do the job right, but even then I only had about 8 hours total in the job plus a little money.

Other than those things "Da Bus" runs, drives and performs amazingly well and I have few doubts it will run a very long time. Everything is solid with no rattles. Like any vehicle plus a house there are things that happen with aging (damn, even my body is giving me similar signals), but nothing catastrophic that I can see. All you can do is check to see the previous maintenance pattern and then make a judgement about what you will spend to get it up to your standards and keep it there.

I hope this helps.
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