Another visitor, and Maintenance

The other day when I went out of the bus, a hummingbird flew by as if to say, "Where's my feeder?" So, I put one out - our neighbors up the hill have a couple of feeders out, so I wasn't sure they would come to mine, but Dwayne got some great pictures of the hummingbird this morning.

Don't the pictures look almost Christmasy, with the red feeder and the green pine and green hummingbird?

This afternoon, we decided to get some maintenance items completed on the bus. We had talked to my brother Jimmy, and he gave us a recommendation on how much play there should be in the belts that we tightened a few days ago.

Dwayne had all of his wrenches out and ready for use.

We measured the tension - Jimmy told us that about 1/2" play (1/4" each side of "at rest") was what we were looking for. We checked it, and it was more like 3/4"-1" of play... so we decided to tighten it up a bit more.

After tightening, we checked - from rest, about 1/4" up...

At rest...

About 1/4" down.

 Then we decided to check the oil level.

We have a *very* long dipstick...

The oil level is a little low...

Miss Doozie has a bulk oil supply tank that allows us to easily add oil.

Dwayne had made a label with specific instructions on how to use the bulk oil fill.

He wants to add a note for future reference that we need to turn on the orange stop-cock to allow air to build up. When we had Miss Doozie at National Indoor RV for service, Mike found that there was an air leak around the bulk oil delivery mechanism, but was concerned that trying to find a replacement and then change that fitting might be more time and effort than worthwhile. So, instead, he put in a valve so we can turn off the air to the bulk oil fill and only allow air to go to it when we're wanting to use it.

After filling - the dipstick now shows it between Full and Low.

The meter indicates that we put in 13 quarts, or 3 gallons and 1 quart --- if we are reading the meter correctly!

Miss Doozie takes 39 quarts of oil, or almost 10 gallons, when we have the oil changed. So, she was about 1/3 low... note to self: check more frequently!