• Diagnostic and Repair Nuggets

  AMANA BITES THE DUST

  Posted by David on December 3, 2019 at 1:05 am

  AMANA BITES THE DUST

  Two days into a two week trip, the Yasso chocolate ice cream bars in the freezer were pudding. The freezer was at 34F and the refrigerator about 45. Played with the breaker and saw the refrig drew 10 amps for a few seconds, then clicked and shut off. Ordered capacitor and start relay on Amazon, built a platform onto which I slid out the unscrewed refrig and installed the parts a couple days later. Refrigerator started up fine, then hummed along drawing 3 or 4 amps like it used to, hopes were up. I set thermostats to max cold. Next am about 20F in freezer 40 in refrig. I decided time to get new refrig. Got to keep those Thanksgiving goodies and leftovers cold. Found a Samsung side by side RS22HDHPNSR at Lowes in Phoenix our next destination. Ordered it online for pick up at the West Phoenix Lowes. How you say am I going to replace a refrigerator on the road while staying at the Cave Creek Regional Park? I had a plan.

  I called Prevost Fort Worth and they said “Take out the locking strips and push on the outside lower corner and windshield will pop out.” To put it back in “set the inside lower corner in place in the gasket and work the rubber molding around the rest of the windshield and put the locking strips back in.” Turns out this leaves out a few steps and key points but is essentially what happens big picture.

  I call a former coworker at Ford who happens to be the general manager at a large dealership in Phoenix and explain my situation. He says sure , will have his glass company come in pull the windshield, will have one of the dealership forklifts at my disposal to out and in the refrigerators on Tuesday. All is looking rosy. Monday I get a little U haul trailer – also get a 6 pack of rental moving pads – use cited later, go to Lowes, pick up the new refrig drop it off at the dealership Monday. They plug it in overnight to be sure works. I will come back Tues with the bus to do the swap.

  Monday afternoon the plot thickens. The glass company guy calls me says “I talked to my boss who has been in the glass business for 60 years. He says we have to pull both windshields and replace the one piece gasket to do this job so you won’t have any leaks or glass breakage. We want to just cut the front lip off of the old gasket with a razor knife and the windshields come right out and then we reinstall with a new gasket. ” I think bull doo doo, but say “well everything I found in my research says reuse the old gasket or the job will be harder. “ We reach a compromise, they will come to the dealership at 1300 Tuesday “look at the bus take some measurements and order a new one piece gasket from a company called Coach in Phoenix and do the job on Wednesday.” After hanging up I read some more posts on this website and I decide to take out and reinstall the windshield myself. I figured worst case, if I break it, it will still be fine to get home, and I’ll have a new one put in at Prevost Ft. Worth. It is laminated and just cracks not shattering as a tempered side glass could. I got to the dealership at 1130 on Tuesday and by about 1330 the windshield was out. The glass guys never showed up. Turns out putting it back in went way faster than taking it out – only took about 15 minutes. After I got the windshield out, I called the glass guy told him I had it out on my own and would not need their services unless I could not get it back in the hole. To their credit, they did call me Wed AM to be sure all went OK. They said they called Prevost and they were told was best after all to reuse old gasket at all cost, as the supplier for the gasket no longer provided them.

  GATHER YOUR TOOLS AND SUPPLIES

  Go to Harbor Freight buy two of these to give you handles for the outside of the windshield

  Photo 1

  4-2/3 In. Dual Suction Cup Lifter, 125 Lb.

  and one of these

  Photo 2

  4-5/8 In. Aluminum Suction Cup Lifter, 110 Lb.

  for the inside of the windshield. This one kind of helps when putting the glass back in, it lets you tug in, sideways, and down on it helping to force it back into the gasket channels.

  Buy a set of these to pry and “work” the gasket around the glass.

  Photo 3

  Nylon Pry Bar Installer Kit, 4 Pc.

  Go to Home Depot buy a sheet of ½” plywood and a 12’ 2×6. Cut the plywood in the parking lot of Home Depot with your DeWalt 18v cordless trim saw (you do carry one of these with you everywhere right?) into a 3×5 foot piece and and a 3×4 foot piece – which fits in the back of the Jeep. Tie the 3×5 piece on the roof of your Jeep with rope and drive slowly back to your campground. The 1×5 foot piece left over is scrap. Cut the 2×6 into short lengths for the platform you will later build. These will fit in the back of the Jeep too.

  Later you will strap ( using 2 ratchet utility straps also from Home Depot) the 3×5 foot piece to the back of your new refrigerator with a rented Uhaul pad in between to protect back of refrig (the power cord and icemaker plumbing are back there) from the forklift forks. Use the 3×4 foot piece and the 2×6 pieces to build a platform to slide out the old and new refrig. Make this platform as big as you can but be sure to leave clearance in your measurement or you will be cutting it twice to get it to fit. Mine ended up being trapezoidal in shape.

  While at Home Depot, buy furniture slides Model # 804424Store SKU #1001571015 Put three of them in a triangular pattern under the platform and you can slide it around on the bus floor – assuming you have a wood, tile, or linoleum floor. Who has carpet these days? I mean, I did have shag carpet in my first house in the early 1980’s, but it was already there, I did not put it in. Why three? If you use four on the corners one will inevitably slip out and that fourth corner will drag.

  Get a spray bottle for the dish soap/water mixture described later.

  DETAILS OF THE JOB

  • Remove the windshield. In my case the task was mildly toughened by some prior owner or service provider putting the windshield in with some sort of sealer. Fortunately they did not use urethane or some other nightmarish material, rather some rubbery material that did not stick much at all to the gasket and only mildly to the glass. I got 80% of this off using a popsicle sticks from aforementioned Yasso bars. These are strong enough to pry back the gasket and have enough “tooth” to scrape off the errant sealant, with little risk of damaging the gasket or glass. The remaining 20% was so stubborn I gave in and used the Harbor Freight nylon tools to get the gunk off. I was trying to do the whole job with the popsicle sticks so I could ridicule the glass guy saying I did the job myself using popsicle sticks and dish soap.
  • Remove passenger seat – stick it somewhere, I carried mine down the steps and set it on the ground. It is heavy. While working over the area where the seat bolts come up from the floor, try not to step on the bolts. In my case they were welded to little steel plates that “floated” inside the frame cross members and were held up so you could start nuts onto them by C clips, some of these got bent and dislodged during the mayhem and had to be fished out of the channel with a hemostat, flattened on an anvil with a hammer and reattached to hold the bolts up to get the nuts started and the seat fastened back down.
  • Remove sofa, stand on end wrap in rented Uhaul moving blankets, slide into hallway middle of bus.
  • Unfasten refrig, slide it out onto platform. Slide platform forward and rotate it so the back of refrig faces front of bus.
  • Slide the platform with the refrig on it to the front of the bus
  • Position forklift so forks stick as far into bus as possible.
  • Tip refrig towards front of bus onto forks. Lift bottom of refrig up and push it rest of way onto forks.
  • Tell forklift driver to “do his thing” and get that boat anchor out of bus without doing any damage.
  • Reverse for putting new refrig in place.
  • Put the furniture back in place
  • Put the windshield back in.

  SOME KEY POINTS OBSERVATIONS AND LESSONS LEARNED

  • Plug in the new refrigerator and make sure it works before installing it in the bus. If you are unsure if it will work with your inverters MSW vs pure SW etc, run it with an extension cord off your inverters before putting it in. In my case I read some posts here which said Samsungs are happy with MSW so just tested on utility power to be sure works.
  • Wear rubber gloves when working with the gasket while getting the windshield out and in or your hands will be black for days afterword. Mine still look like I work in a coal mine.
  • Mix up some dish soap with distilled water – about 1:5 is what I did and spray the crap out of the gasket and glass while peeling back the gasket to where you can see the edge of the glass, get all the sand, grit, bugs, who knows what out of there until everything is real smooth and slick. Why distilled water? Soap is slipperier when it is used is water without minerals – think soft water in the shower. We need every edge we can get when forcing this glass out past the rubber.
  • To “push” outward on the right lower corner of the windshield, I stuffed a folded bath towel between the dash and the glass and just kept jamming more towel down in the space with some sticks – in fact, the sticks generated when I had to shorten the platform to match the height of the refrig platform in the bus, see item below.

  Photo 4

  • I kept gently increasing the outward pressure on the bottom right corner of the glass while going outside, prying the gasket back, spraying some more solution, repeat, repeat . . . You know you have it licked when the gasket starts bulging out and the outer side of the groove rolls over to horizontal, work this horizontal orientation across toward the center of the bus on the bottom of the gasket using a combination of pressure, spray, and the nylon pry bars from Harbor Freight – or popsicles sticks, and the glass keeps coming forward. Keep stuffing more towel between the glass and the dash. The right side edge almost pops out by itself due to the curvature of the glass but you can work that a little too. Fortunately when it finally did pop only about a ¼ of the right bottom of the glass came out and hung in the air. The rest held the windshield loosely in place and I was able to summon my helper to pull it the rest of the way out (comes out easily at this point) and catch the glass and set it on the awaiting cribbing on the ground.
  • As a side note, I threw a rope over the air horns and spotlight – seen in the picture

  Photo 5

  • and tied it to the two outside double vacuum handles to support the glass in case it all of a sudden fell out of the hole coming out or while trying to work it back in neither of which happened. Whether this rope affair would have resulted in a broken windshield, torn off air horns and spotlight in a pile on the ground had the windshield uncontrollably popped out , we will never know, but the belay seemed like a good idea at the time.
  • Before putting the windshield back in clean the edges thoroughly of any remaining sealant, dirt, etc. Also clean out the grooves in the gasket and lubricate them thoroughly with the appropriate lubricant if you have it, or in my case straight undiluted Dawn dish soap.
  • Buy the Lisle 48600 locking strip install tool before doing the job, it makes reinstalling the locking strips go a lot faster than doing it inch by inch with a plastic putty knife https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N006N0D/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

  • All this dish soap, water, and black residue from the gasket makes a mess on your windshield. By the time I was done it was 1800 and I had to get out of the parking lot and head back to camp do did not have a chance to clean it. It rained like crazy Wednesday overnight and the windshield did not leak! And even cooler all the soap residue must have interacted with the rain and the windshield cleaned itself, spot free, cleanest I had ever seen it! Still had to clean the smudges, suction cup rings, and residue off the inside myself though.
  • If you have a Liberty of my vintage build your platform with 1/2 “ plywood and 2x6s. If you use ¾” like I did, the platform will be about ¼ inch too high, the refrig will get stuck half way out, and you will have to push the refrig back in the hole, drag the platform outside and rip ¼” off the bottom of the 2x6s to get it to the right height. Don’t ask how I know this. A little too low is better than a little too high in this case.
  • The top piece of angle that is screwed to refrig and the cabinetry in bus is glued as well as screwed to the top of the old Amana and takes some chiseling to get it off. May be easier to buy a new piece of similar steel or aluminum while at Home Depot. The folks who designed this seem to have known what they were doing and I would recommend gluing it to the new refrig. Construction adhesive seems like the right thing to use. A few small sheet metal screws in the thin metal of todays refrigerators will not hold very well against the considerable forces on the refrig as we bounce and sway down some of the roads we encounter.
  • The new refrig will likely be slightly taller in the box and or hinges than the old. I specifically chose Samsung because it was the same or slightly less width than the Amana, most other brands cited 36” wide and I did not want to have to trim the sides of the hole in the cabinetry as these are visible after installation. The top cut is hidden by a molding and the refrig doors.
  • I used one of these Photo 6
  • To trim the cabinetry to fit. Measure two or three times, cut the hole with a little clearance or you will likely be taking the halfway inserted and jammed refrig back out of the hole to make the hole a little bigger. Again don’t ask. My Samsung was a little taller in the front than the back, so measure both front and back, the hole has to clear the tallest part.
  • Figure out some method of fastening the bottom of the refrig to the platform. The old Amana used a couple short pieces of heavy angle iron, I managed to reuse these mounting them in a different configuration. I’m not fully satisfied with these, the screws into the platform are into end grain of the plywood, not ideal, but it was a field repair. I’ll come up with a permanent solution in the shop here at home, probably a strap that screws down onto the platform and connects to these brackets with a bolt.

  • I did the entire job, windshield removal and install, refrig in and out of the hole, etc. working alone except for three events:
    • Lowering the freed windshield to a resting spot on Styrofoam blocks (from the new refrigerator packaging) on the ground. The windshield weighs about 65 pounds according my calculated estimate and it felt about that when we were handling it. One tall strong guy or a small weak gorilla could probably do it alone.
    • lifting the windshield back in to place and getting it started in the gasket groove to where it would support itself
    • tipping the old and new refrig onto and from the forks from and onto the platform I built.
  • One skinny guy helped me with the lifting on these three events – a total of about 15 minutes help. He did also provide some moral support and commentary a few times when he walked outside from his regular work at the dealership to smoke a cigarette. I gave him the old refrigerator and a six pack of wobbly pops for his help. He would not take more beer despite numerous offers.
  • Oh yes there was also the forklift driver, but all he did was drive and work the forks. Had I been doing the job at home I could have done double duty as driver/operator with my own forklift. Don’t ask why I have a forklift, but a hint is I am a pack rat and have lots of stuff, much of which is heavy.

  DISCLAIMER

  This is not an all-inclusive tutorial and working on vehicles has inherent risks including serious injury and death from working on ladders, with heavy objects, and machinery. Your glass may break with all the handling. I got lucky, mine did not.

  David replied 6 years, 10 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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