Don’t You Just Love It When A Plan Falls Into Place

I’ve been procrastinating now for about two months on tackling that messy automatic water hose reel in my water bay. When we purchased this motorhome the reel was in pretty bad shape. It was real rusty looking at the mounting base and left rusty stains around the base. The hose was eight years old and needed replacing and the only way to do this is completely take the reel out. So, Friday morning Sandy and I were up early as we wanted to tackle this in the cooler morning than later in the day when it would be so hot.

The evening before I had sprayed the mounting screws with a rust penetrating spray so hop0efully it would make it easier to break the mounting screws. With Sandy’s help we identified the type of screws they were and I went to loosen them and the heads were so rusty they crumbled. As luck woul have it the reel was still mounted solid to the floor of my water bay compartment. The only thing I knew to do was get a drill with a small grinding wheel and grind the bolt heads off. This didn’t work as I could not get the wheel in the area needed to grind the heads. BIL James just happened to be here that morning working on his brush hog. I went over to ask him if he might have a smaller grinding wheel. The next thing I knew he and one of his helpers walked over to the motorhome to take a look. James instructed his helper to go get a large screw driver and small sledge hammer. Bang!…bang! and the reel broke loose from it’s mounting.  Their solution was quite simple.

Once we were able to remove the reel Sandy and I got busy and cleaned out the rust marks and the entire bay. In the photo you can see where the reel was mounted as we were not able to remove all of the rust stains. So the next step was to figure out how I was going to connect a 25ft water hose. As you can see I installed a short piece of hose to my check valve coming off the house water filter.

In this photo you can see the final results of our effort. By not having the reel in the compartment we have so much more room. Don’t you just love it when a plan falls into place. Thanks to BIL James and his helper our job went a little easier. I was to embarrassed to show pictures of the before we took on this project.
(Click on pictures to enlarge)

Until next time…. MtnAire Travlers.

PS BIL James said they could cut off the old rusty base and weld on a new base. Going to have to think about this or as my sweet wife would say “process it for awhile”.