Paul Smith of HWH Corp. gave a fantastic seminar here at the GNR and I made some notes. Just uploaded them to our web site. Here is the document.

Edit: The silicon spray with no oil that Paul recommends for gaskets is 3M 08897. I updated the document with the number.

A bit of sad news - the restaurant where HWH treats all service customers for lunch is closed!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: John_Canfield,

Good info....thanks for your efforts

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To make sure I understand (which sometimes takes repeated attempts) - Your build your air pressure up BEFORE you retract your jacks? That procedure would in most cases mean the air pressure buildup has already lifted the jacks off the ground???
Richard

Thanks John, great write up.

John--thanks for that write up. It answered a couple of questions that I had. Hope you are having a great summer.

John

quote:

Originally posted by dmason:
To make sure I understand (which sometimes takes repeated attempts) - Your build your air pressure up BEFORE you retract your jacks? That procedure would in most cases mean the air pressure buildup has already lifted the jacks off the ground???
Richard

The airbags won't start filling until a valve(s?) is/are closed by you punching store on the control panel.

The idea behind this is to have air in the tanks before you hit store so the bags won't be pinched with retracting jacks due to a large inrush of air from the tanks. With no air in the tank, it will take a while to fill the bags and they could get pinched early-on in the process.

This shouldn't be an issue if you are moving every day or even every week. If you do sit for a while and your tanks are low on air, then you want to run the engine until the spitter goes off.

Looks like GNR is winding down. It has been quite a bit of fun and just getting things fixed here for free (thanks to the generosity of the vendors) was worth the effort and money.

My MH is one of those rare examples without air but may I presume that all of your wonderful notes not related to air will otherwise apply to my HWH jacks and slides?

quote:

Originally posted by Rockhouse:
My MH is one of those rare examples without air but may I presume that all of your wonderful notes not related to air will otherwise apply to my HWH jacks and slides?

Absolutely!

John, did HWH elaborate on why not lift the front wheels of the ground? With air brakes I understand why not to lift the rear wheels. But I have lifted the fronts to get it level.

Also, is jack body movement something found on the newer units? I have never noticed this on our 2004 Journey 36G.

I am assuming sharing the same leveling board is suppose to help reduce flex? I use to carry boards with the trailer but have not done so with the MH. No room! Do sometimes use blocks when a jack is parked over a hole.

Our MH has no slide straps and so far, thankfully, have never had the two slides noticeably move.

The comments regarding cooling hydraulic oil and some jack retraction is something that I have recently experienced. So that was helpful as I could not understand why the jacks seem to retract a small bit sometimes and not other times. Thinking about it, "other times" would be the second day.

Thanks for posting. Your notes are helpful.

Steve - I have had my front wheels way off the ground at times also. Don't like to do it though.

I suspect Paul's concern is you have a pretty long lever with fully extended jacks supporting 12,000+ pounds (or possibly 2/3rds of the total coach weight) and there is more of a chance of lateral movement since the tires are in the air and not in ground contact.

We have experienced the coach shifting sideways in extreme leveling situations and it is startling to say the least !

I'm pretty sure Paul said all jacks have 7 degrees of movement, but you would need to run that by HWH.

One board across the pair of jacks is to keep them sort of 'tied' together so one jack doesn't slip off at a a dangerous angle in difficult leveling scenarios.

This situation in particular is encountered here at GNR due to the rolling terrain. Mike (DriVer aka 'Sparky') had fun leveling - go up to the GNR/iRV2 topic at the top of this forum and read Mike's early posts. He had a time getting setup!

You're welcome