Day #16 - Saturday June 17th, 2019:
After spending the night in the parking lot of the Loves Travel Stop, I continued on to Loomis Ca to visit the guys at
Ruffstuff Specialties.
Forum member ben10 came by while I was there with the 'manger'. This truck was first built by forum member legoms013, and was featured on this site as '
legoms013 2000 Ford Ranger'. It started life as a 1996 Mazda B4000, but after a rollover, it was fitted with a 2000 Ford Ranger cab. ben10 eventually became the trucks owner, and posted on thread about titled '
Bringing back the manger!'.
Forum member (and former TRS Banner Across America participant) '2004xlmiller' works at Ruffstuff, and gave me a tour around the shop.
Guys were hard at work making beefy parts for your truck builds
.
You know you want one of these Ruffstuff diff covers for your truck ?
The guys also brought out a
Tuff Stuff roof top tent for me to check out.
I eventually left so the guys could get some work done, and headed south. I didn't want to drive in a lot of traffic through California cities, so I ended up heading east a little, and following Route 49 (Golden Chain Highway) along the Yosemite National Park for a while.
I I eventually cut back towards Fresno, and got this alert on the Rangers navigation screen. This was the first time I had seen an urgent message displayed.
I eventually arrived at the Visalia / Sequoia National Park KOA Journey campground in Visalia.
This flyer in the office window caught my attention. I think it's the first time I've seen a campaign that says you can trade the vehicle for the one you really want, if you don't want this one. How can you not want a new Ford Ranger? Come on!!
When I stopped at a KOA campground in West Wendover Nevada on the 9th, I had experienced a problem with the Yakima Skyrise tent. When I went to open it, the top layer of the tent acted like it was going to flop over and fall off of the truck. I looked it over, and found that the bolts that holds the hinges on were loose, and that a couple of lock nut were missing, as well as one of the bolts. I searched in the cover, but didn't find the missing hardware.
I tightened the nuts and bolts that were there, and used a vise-grip to hold the tent together so I would have a place to sleep for the night.
I went to the only hardware store in town the following morning, but they didn't have any metric nuts and bolts. I purchased a couple of 1/4 inch nuts and bolts, and set out on the days adventure. I figured the next time I tried to use the tent, I would fix it. SInce I had arrived at a campground early enough in the evening, today was finally going to be that day.
I struggled getting all the holes lined up, and the hinges were tweaked a little, but I finally got it all bolts back together.
Here you can see me using my
Pelican 7600 rechargeable flashlight and the optional wand as a diffuser to light up my campsite.
It was nice to finally get to sleep in the tent. I love this thing when it's working, but I really don't understand how the locknuts came loose.
Yakima says I need to:
You will want to make sure that you are checking the bolts, making sure that they are tight, on a regular basis. Especially since you seem to be "off roading" a lot.
So I guess if you travel on bumpy roads looking for those remote places to use your Yakima tent, you better be checking all of the bolts regularly.
This was my reply back to them:
I would say the tent has been subject to a lot of vibration driving down gravel roads. I wouldn't call that off-roading.
HOWEVER, the type of customer that buys a roof top tent likes to travel and camp remotely, and uses a lot of gravel roads and forest roads. I still think this needs to be brought to the attention of your engineers. Maybe they need to be using steel nuts, bolts, lock washers, and some blue locktite. I wouldn't think you would want to be telling your customers that they need to keep checking the bolts to make sure it's not falling apart.
Thanks.
Honestly, I don't know if Yakima is using poor quality hardware, or if the problem rests with the company that installed the tent on the truck (it wasn't Ford, and this is not a Ford related problem).
Yakima said they would send me a new hinge and hardware kit. They also emailed me instructions on how to fix the tent coming out of the track, and offered to send me a new ladder since the rubber feet wore out prematurely on the current ladder. So I can't really complain about the customer service.
At least for now, I'm not having to sleep in the front seat of the truck.