The hookup of the Jeep to Miss Doozie

I told about our "losing" the Jeep during one of the tech sessions at the Bluebird gathering at Quartzsite. (the blog documentation of it is here: http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2015/11/excitement-for-day.html )

I realized that I had never taken pictures of it all hooked up and posted them, so I did that this morning as we were preparing to leave WalMart.

The two diagonal bars have give to them when we're hooking up (they slide in/out at the silver colored bars) but they then lock in place once we pull forward with Miss Doozie, so it keeps the Jeep at a standard distance away from the back of the bus. The lighter blue cable is plugged in to the electric receptacle on the back of Miss Doozie, and goes through the further arm to be plugged into the Jeep. The brighter blue are the safety cables. There is one on each side. It has a clip that attaches under the bus to the frame, and then a knob that attaches in at the part that is attached to the Jeep.

This is the Jeep end. We have padlocks in place at the point where the tow bar came loose back in November. Dwayne has built up the area under the shackle so there isn't give there, and he checked them this morning and did not find any wear. You can also see the knob end of the safety cable where it is hooked in.

Maybe a better side view. The black coiled cable is the air connection to connect the braking on the bus to the M&G Engineering brake system on the Jeep.

This is again the top part of the component that came loose - the two locks that we had on it before evidently shattered the shackle, and the horizontal "quick disconnect" bar came off of the vertical pins that it sits down upon. It then dragged the half-round pieces that the extension rods of the tow bar connect into - and those half-round pieces dragged on the highway while the safety cables kept the Jeep behind the bus. In this picture, you can also see a thin red coiled cable - that attaches into a fitting on the front of the Jeep. If the safety cable had failed, and the Jeep had totally disconnected from the bus, the red cable is supposed to pull out a safety on the Jeep that will cause the M&G brake system to cause the Jeep to come to an immediate stop. Thank God that didn't have to happen!!!