While at 1st Class Glass I wandered across the road to the Bob Tiffin Service Center, where new owners of Tiffin motorhomes can get servicing done. (We are not eligible, since our coach is a 2017 model; we use third-party vendors instead.)

I wanted to visit the parts store to pick up some items. It’s a huge area; I wasn’t sure where to go (and they don’t have great signage). I stopped by the Tiffin Allegro Club office, and they pointed me in the right direction:

The service center customer entrance is hidden halfway down this building:

Inside, they directed me to the customer parts area, though I had to ask again to find it. It’s a small caged area with a few parts on display, and a counter where one can ask for other parts:

Apparently it used to be much nicer, where people could browse the shelves for parts; now you have to request them. I could find all sorts of goodies if I could explore, but alas, this area beyond the gate is off limits:

Just a few items available within the cage:

Stay tuned for one bonus find, though, coming on tomorrow’s Tweak Thursday.

A periodic maintenance item for any vehicle is to replace the cabin air filter, for the dash AC.

I must admit, I thought our coach didn’t have a replaceable filter, until pointed out on my Tiffin Allegro Bus 2016-2018 Owners Facebook group. Oops.

Here’s a picture of where it is located in the generator compartment, for context:

It’s rather difficult to get out:

Ours was definitely overdue for replacement:

A new one from Amazon:

As followers of this blog may recall, we had a fuse between our solar panels and the solar controller:

I had an issue where that fuse blew a few times, possibly due to our extra solar panels putting out too much power. The most recent time I replaced it with a 30 amp fuse:

That didn’t end so well — a few months later, that fuse melted. Perhaps cheap junk, I don’t know; it should just blow, not melt. It set off our smoke detector, so could have been much worse:

I considered replacing the fuse holder, but figured I needed a better solution. I decided to replace it with a circuit breaker, so if it is over-current again it’ll just pop instead of blow or burn.

I needed a short length of wire to connect it, so went to the nearby Lowes for wire, using 8 gauge wire, the same as used elsewhere in the coach:

That was an adventure in itself; the guy who helped us wasn’t familiar with wire cutting, but he figured it out.

I connected a short length of that wire to the breaker:

I then drilled some holes for the wires above the solar controller:

And reconnected the controller to that wire:

Here’s the breaker installed, and preparing to re-mount the controller:

The completed breaker and controller (with the solar pulling in 14.4 amps):

Here’s hoping this solution will prove satisfactory!

A big expense, but an important one: new tires. Motorhome and truck tires don’t wear out like car tires, but instead age out. Tires can last up to ten years, but the advice is to check them starting at five years, and aim for about seven years to replace them, or sooner if there are signs of cracking.

Our 2017 coach had the original tires, made in 2016, so were about due. And when we recently had our brake seize up, raising the temperature of the tire over the danger zone of 200°F, we decided it was time.

These big tires are over a grand each, and we have six of them, so it isn’t a trivial expense, but good tires are very important for the safety of the coach.

We went to Bay Diesel in Red Bay to get this done:

While there, we also got them to look at our generator, which had misbehaved earlier, but of course was working perfectly while they looked at it:

The rear wheel without the tires:

New tires:

New tires installed; they were all manufactured in late 2023, so they should be good for another 5-10 years:

We also did a test drive with a couple of techs to tweak the alignment of our Safe-T-Plus steering control system:

Yay for new tires: