More hydraulics

[Motor31]

We had an interesting situation last Friday afternoon. We had just parked at Fairchild AFB Fam Camp near Spokane. While setting up I saw some fresh hydraulic fluid on the driver side rear stabilizer jack. I figured it was a loose connection at the top of the distribution block where it connects to the power side pf the ram.

I got my 9/16 and 7/16 wrenches to tighten the connection. As soon as I touched the wrench to the connection it failed completely. The factory installed the distribution box and it is secured only by the 90 degree nipple at the top of the ram. As a result after a while of bouncing down the road the connector between the 90 degree nipple and the box gets fatigued and fails. We were lucky as it did not fail while moving. That could have allowed the ram to drop.

Of course it was Friday afternoon, after normal business hours. There are no MS dealers in the area. There are no Lippert dealers in the area. There are hydraulic hose fabrication companies here though and 2 of them had Saturday hours. Lippert shows the connectors on their web site. The straight one was different than what was installed on my rig. The 90 degree connectors were the same but kinda pricey. The hydraulic supply company sold me 2 straight and one 90 degree for less than $10.00. Installation was a snap taking a couple minutes to make sure there was no trapped air in the ram. The system is back up and I have a spare of each type connector just in case.

Since the rear jacks are on a different line than the front landing gear we did not have to worry about the nose dropping.