When we left City of Rocks I thought the wheels were sitting low on the passenger side but we were on a an uneven dirt road and I attributed it to that. Had I looked underneath I would have seen a broken leaf spring. We drove to Hatch, down to Las Cruces and on to Alamogordo. When we were leveling at our campsite in Alamogordo we could not fit the leveling blocks between the wheels and that is when we discovered the problem.
I was able to order a spring online and found a mobile RV tech who was willing to fit me into his schedule. We had to stay an extra two nights in Alamogordo but other than that we got off pretty easy.
One of the fun parts of my job was to evaluate broken metal to try and figure out what happened. In this case it appears that there were some surface defects on the longest leaf that allowed cracks to initiate and repeated cycling caused the cracks to slowly propagate through the spring. The shiny parts radiating out from the defects are called beach marks and show the extent to which the cracks propagated. When the cracks got about halfway through, the spring could no longer hold the load and the rest failed suddenly.
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| The rear portion of the spring. |
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| The forward portion of the spring, still part of the spring pack. |
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| New leaf spring |
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| JP arrives to install the new spring. |
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| Ready to hit the road again. |
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