What a weekend- a whole lot of RV-ing around town! We picked up the Brave from its West End resting place and drove it quite a bit through the city. We wanted to get a better feel for handling it and possibly encounter any problems we would cause with our RV inexperience in a close-to-home environment. Well, we really didn't run into much. The headlights are still flickering while driving, which is terrifying, but seems to lead to a loose connection sort of issue. We mostly opted to drive during the day because of this.
The brakes are a little bizarre. The pedal trembles when you rest your foot on it, it trembles all the time, really, but it feels terrible to push a pedal thats vibrating. They work well, but we did have a minor failure issue this weekend. At stoplights, while idling in drive, the RV wants to stall. The brake seems to lose power the longer you idle. However, if you anticipate a long stoplight wait and put it in park, its fine. Hm. The internet tells us that the brakes and the engine vacuum are very connected. The brakes are vacuum assisted, meaning that the vacuum of the engine system helps to boost the brakes power in regards to fluid, etc, effectiveness, you get the idea. So, while sitting at idle in drive, you start to stall because the engine is struggling to meet the demand of the brakes and its current GO! DRIVE! status of the transmission. It stalls. Or, if you have it in park, the GO! DRIVE! is not present and it sustains a great sounding idle. Either way, the brake light came on, we're taking it by a mechanic. I called ahead, you don't really just drive up a 23' bus to the local mechanic and expect him to park it on his lot, and next weekend he will save it a parking spot and check it out. So that is to be addressed.

Since the Brave is now in its everyday parking spot, I started looking at the interior and deciding what to change, fix. Little things first. Today I took down the carpet covered panels around the driver's and passenger's side window to recover at home this week. I'm thinking simple black vinyl. Marine grade, durable, cleanable, UV resistant. We have dogs that will be traveling with us and we anticipate mess, so the more the color of the interior hides dirt, the better.
Here's a picture of the original dash/cab area.



These all came down.





This is what was under it.





Before we bought it, and before the previous owner bought it, the Brave encountered a leak. It pretty much demoed the paneling on the passenger side door. That will be addressed soon as well. Because of the deteriorated panel, the below dash panel and the below window panel were barely hanging on to the wall there. It sure made for easy removal.



Check out the color of the original carpet! We found it in a couple hidden places this weekend. WOW.



Under the dash panel was the fuse box and this tremendous jumble of wires. UGH. This needs to be sorted out, or at least properly tucked away, but that is something we will tackle later.



We went to the junkyard on Sunday (it was so hot, almost 100 degrees, and we just sweated to death) to try and find larger mirrors. We walked around looking at the most amazing old conversion vans ever:




Until we found an old Ryder truck with perfect mirrors. Since the siding between the windshield and the passenger window is super narrow, we really needed something to mount below the window. So thats exactly what we found. $14 later, we were happier than ever.




So now we need to recover the removed panels. The below-dash panel was real hoopty, made of several pieces of wood stapled together, so we may re-cut one solid panel using the original as a pattern.
We measured the square footage of the carpeting and are going to order FLOR, this really rad modular carpet. We have dogs. With FLOR, you can replace a single tile instead of the whole thing. Yes. We are planning on replacing the bench with a dinette, so we took that extra open floor into consideration. We just need to calculate and make a decision on color/etc. Our projects this week are lined up and ready to go!