-
PDI, things I NEED to know….
-
Wow, that original labor cost shocks me! Why do the bags and valves need replacing already? Is it just that you want a fresh start?
I was thinking if I bought new, am I going to have expensive replacements in less than 10 yrs.? Thought the whole purpose of buying a ‘top-of-the-line’ coach/chassis, would eliminate the issues a ‘plastic’ coach would have.
MM.
-
Jim,
By the time we see you in Branson, you’ll have some miles under your belt and you may be teaching us a thing or two!
-
Mr. Mark,
We all have our standards including Prevost for maintaining our coaches. The problem is that for some things there are no standards except what we determine them to be based on experience.
Since the discussion relates to air bags and Norgren valves I’ll add brake chambers because what is common to all is rubber, or rubber like components.
From experience I can tell you that air bags can last for decades, or they can fail within 10 years or less. There is no guidance from Prevost who suggests replacement only when they fail. I have had one fail due to leakage out the bottom of the metal bottom “can” at 10 years. I know of an owner than had one blow out like a tire. Age unknown. For me, 10 years and as far as I am concerned they are junk. I replace them at that age. But that is a personal choice. Norgren valves I treat the same way. They won’t fail catastophically but can start leaking and creating the leans. So I replace or rebuild them every 10 years. I do that because I just prefer to not start chasing leaks.
Brake chambers have rubber diaphragms. Nobody ever thinks about them, but we should. A brake test needs to be a part of our pre-trip inspection. The are so important Prevost has them listed as a maintenance item that should be replaced every year or 100,000 miles, which ever comes first. I use 5 years for my coach. So you can see on some things I replace items when even Prevost is silent on including them in a routine maintenance schedule, yet my personal choice is to ignore the brake chamber recommendation in lieu of my own.
My point is simple. Everyone can and should develop their standards for coach maintenance and acceptance. It has to be based on the owners preference usually determined by their tolerance for risk and willingness to trade dollars for peace of mind. Bottom line however is since our coach is a mechanical assembly of parts at some point everything is going to break or need replacement so as owners we just have to sort out what we feel comforatable with for schedule.
-
labor is about the same as parts I replace brake chambers at 100,000 miles if you use it replace it air bags on big trucks every five years and bus
-
Jon,
I just find it disappointing that the bags and valves shouldn’t last 20 yrs. if driven regularly without question. What does the term ‘2,000,000 mile’ chassis mean? If I have to spend a fortune to keep all the parts together I might as well keep my coach that cost 25% of a Prevost.
Reading the many threads here doesn’t sound any different than RV.net. Always something going on and needing attention.
I have a collection of cars to drive and one of them being a new Bentley convertible that I bought 4 yrs. ago. I expect and have received excellent service and reliability of a car that cost $250,000. The car has been flawless in the 4 yrs. I’ve had it. I would expect the same out of a $2M Prevost but I’m not reading that.
MM.
-
Mr. M,
I was told and now full subscribe to the saying, “If you are not working on your RV then you are falling behind.”
By chance are you a member of the RROC?
-
Air bags are air bags are air bags. We have no choice but to accept them and whatever their service life is because that is the suspension our buses use.
Mine rusted because I drove my coach throughout the year in the snow belt and that translates to salt eating away at everything metal. Your Bentley wouldn’t do so well either.
The other failures I have known also seemed environmental with some areas of the country much harder on components than others. One air bag i was given by an owner had severe cracking at the bottom where it rolls over the piston. He could have driven the coach until it failed and he might have gotten some more time out of it, but if it failed on the road he was either on a trailer or on the shoulder awaiting parts. The point is we don’t know how long they will last but my choice is to not find out.
If you want a trouble free, no maintenance coach Prevost or any motorhome I can think of is not for you. Neither is your Bentley. Complex machines such as our coaches are going to outlast every one of us, but that does not mean working components do not have to be serviced or replaced. Compared to my planes our coaches are cheap and easy to own and maintain. Compared to a car they are a nightmare to maintain because there is so much going on. We start with a very reliable chassis that is a commercial quality and with maintenance will literally last millions of miles. There is no doubt in my mind it will last, but the owner has to service it or it won’t. Then our converters build a house inside it. Then we as owners run it up and down the highway trying to shake the entire assembly apart. I’m just amazed how durable our coaches are.
But for our coaches to do all we ask requires complex systems, miles of wires, hundreds of connections and relays and valves and fasteners and we can expect relays to quit, valves to leak, connections to leak all in addition to needing to lube the moving parts, change all the rubber parts that age, and yes replace some parts that someone used because it was cheap. But despite having to deal with some stuff that doesn’t have to be dealt with such as our CAC issue affecting a number of us, if you want a motor home there is nothing out there that comes close to the reliability of our coaches. A lot of folks on here had other coaches, boat and planes and I suspect with rare exception they will agree our coaches are the best there is.
I suspect like you a lot of us have owned a fair share of products and devices ranging from our expensive cars to sophisticated appliances but if it gives you any comfort I use Prevost and my converter (Liberty) as the gold standard for product support. For 23 years the one thing I could count on with my coaches was Prevost and (in my case) Liberty would stand behind my coach and nobody I have ever dealt with before or since has matched that level of service. I rarely need help, but when I do they always meet or exceed my expectations. I imagine every owner, whether their coach is a Millennium or a Marathon or a Vantare will say the same thing.
-
My goal is, if I am buying an 8 year old coach and I don’t know the service history, I want to get all the “recommended” maintenance and replacement items done in year 8 when I buy the coach instead of chasing issues that may arise between years 8-10. Rubber (of any kind) falls on my list of potential issues.
I want a clean slate so I can begin a maintenance schedule now following the wisdom of folks who have owned for a very long time and what prevost lists as short term and long term maintenance. Another part of me would rather spend the money now while I’m dropping big dollars instead of buying a used coach and doing these things piece meal. I live in a rural area so any work done on the coach will mean at least a 6 hour trip to the shop. In my mind it seems less painful doing this all at once. I’m not quite as concerned with the “house” portion of the conversion because that won’t stop me from going from point A to point B to get something fixed. The chassis however is a bigger issue….tires, batteries, slides, suspension ect……that COULD stop me from getting to point A or B.
I dropped down a few years to a 2005 coach vs. an06 or 07 so I had the resources to invest in making the coach “new” again instead of stretching on the price and then “hope” and “wait” for things to or not to go wrong. I don’t like to finance toys so I set a budget that I could pay cash….everything I’m doing so far still keeps me at or below my original budget with a few pennies left to be able to come to branson and learn more. As I’ve said before this is the first used coach I have bought of the 7 and I take comfort in knowing I’ve done everything I could to get the coach in great shape.
I may have sent the wrong message to service when I said I wanted all the bags and valves replaced….I meant the norgren valves only and they may have had prevost quote it to replace every valve on the chassis..and I don’t even know what or how many that is…will be clearing that up today so Brandon and I are on the same page. Maybe I’m being foolish and overly cautious, but I guess time will tell.
-
Mr. Mark,
Looks to me like you have seen the light.
-
BTW…..I’ve looked at over a dozen coaches in the last 3 months and when I inquired about service records none of the dealers or brokers could provide them…..that’s interesting to me. Either they don’t want new buyers to see any “issues” that have been corrected with the coach or is it because lack of good maintenance records would most likely affect the sale and the price.
I’ve asked each salesperson if they where available. Brandon is the only one who said HE doesn’t have them but will ask the owner to provide them to me. Since I will be the 3rd owner of the coach, that only helps a bit since we don’t know what the original owner did or didn’t do.
On the coach I just sold the buyer got a nice binder stating every time the coach went in for maintenance or repairs as well as a print out from freightliner showing all the vital stats for the engine. Needless to say, he LOVED the fact that he could visually see everything done on the coach since I picked it up at the factory. I also think I got a bit higher price than I expected because of this.
-
Yep, a bit of a miscommunication……..prevost gave legacy the price to change every valve on the coach including the norgrens. Ooops, guess I wasn’t clear and Dodi in service is very relieved. So, that $14K figure was for the bags, norgrens, every other valve (whatever that is) brake lines and raidiator hoses, flush, pressure check ect…..Now I figure the bags and norgrens are south of $5K.
-
One thing I realized with my 91 is have it all done at the same time if you have the capital. Probably would have been cheaper (if there is such a word with Prevost). Had it in Prevost Ft Worth and Houston several times for coach leaning problem. Have ended up with just about everything under it changed including all bags. One thing I noticed after all work was done was it handled better at road speeds. No swaying or hard to keep in lanes .It felt mushey before. I think a ride height valve or two were bad because it seem to ride higher. My one owner coach only had 51,000 miles on it when I bought it a few years back.
-
Is RROC a Rolls Royce club? If so, no, I’m not a member.
I do have a ’64 RR Silver Cloud III so I belong to a Classic Car club which I enjoy as I love all different old cars, not just the RR.
Getting back to the original topic, I would never drive a new Prevost (or older for that matter) in severe cold weather. Living in Southern California I have never winterized my current coach in 64,000 miles (6.5 yrs.) and would probably do the same in Prevost.
And my 2,000,000 mile chassis statement, I’m just referring to the chassis and not the ‘house’ so much. I know with anything mechanical there can be issues but on a Prevost, I was honestly thinking it would be rather rare. I thought the heavy duty bus chassis would be made with such robust parts that generally, it would be a lower maintenance chassis.
Maybe if I used a Prevost the way I’ve used my Dynasty, the parts would last longer as we go where the weather is nice.
Mr.Mark
-
Mr. Mark, I can assure you the heavy duty items ranging from the engine, transmission, axles, bearings, brakes, steering, etc are durable as you can make them. But the devil is in the details. We expect our coaches to do things beyond what a typical bus or truck is expected to do. For example, we use our suspension to level the coach. Prevost created a system called “level low” to raise or lower each corner about 4 inches in each direction to compensate for uneven parking sites. That way our adult beverage won’t spill if the glass is too full.
But to get that capability we have a system that contains about 8 Norgren spool valves almost all of which are pneumatically operated. Then the converters add automatic leveling to that system, adding even more complexity. So to level our coaches we end up with probably 100 air fittings, with almost every single one being the push in type. As they age, they begin to leak, just like the air bags and the Norgren valves. But wait……….(they say that on TV a lot) if that was our suspension we would have less potential problems but it isn’t the whole thing. In parallel with the leveling part of the suspension, running in parallel with that using some of the valves, and all of the air bags is the driving suspension that determines the bus height when driving. That portion of the suspension uses ride height valves which also can need future replacement and which also use air fittings.
My point is we the market expect our coach to do so much more than just drive up and down the road. We want it to level itself also. And as a result we add significantly to the complexity and future maintenance. I would guess however that on a new coach it is unlikely you will even need to consider repairs or maintenance to the systems described above for at least 10 years, maybe more if the environmental conditions the coach is exposed to are not harsh.
But that does not mean you have a maintenance free coach. It needs lubrication, oil changes, fluid changes, filter changes, and periodic parts replacements such as shocks and brake linings. The air system needs maintenance and the house has its own unique needs as far as maintenance such as AC filter cleaning or replacement.
I spend a lot of time working on mine because it is cheaper than a mistress.
-
Mark,
It really comes down to failures related to those things that aren’t anticipated and those that may occur related to routine maintenance. Fan belts break, tires blow, bags blow, engines seize. In these examples, scheduled and preventive maintenance would reduce these possibilities to something we can generally live with. Dead chassis batteries and inoperative hydraulic pumps are two good examples of things that many Monaco owners know about and they couldn’t have easily been prevented. On many Monaco products they had house loads on the chassis batteries and didn’t provide for chassis battery charging from commercial or generator power. Monaco used Lippert pumps on many coaches with air leveling systems. These were crap. I replaced 3 in less than a year. Lippert was smart enough to have a way to manually turn the motor with a cordless drill, but Monaco installed the pump in a location that required the generator bay to be opened and it opened by the same defective pump. Although I miss the joinery and space in my quad slide 2008 Monaco Beaver Contessa 42. I prefer the reliability and ride of my old 99 Prevost Country Coach. I’ve done far less unscheduled maintenance with this 14 year old 100,000 mile coach than I did on the then 3 year old less than 20,000 mile Monaco.
It’s your money and your decision, so let those factors drive what you’re going to do.
Log in to reply.