2022 New Aire 3543, Cummins 450, bought through M&A out of a Phoenix lender yard (and my wife has her own account now)

nice coach, Ted. a couple of things while you get the numbers together. the L9 is what Cummins started calling the ISL around 2018, same family, so don't let a parts counter tell you they're different engines. on a 2022 it has the DEF system, keep the DEF tank out of direct sun in Yuma if the coach sits, DEF breaks down in heat faster than people think.

ask the selling side if there's any service history at all, even a printout from a Spartan dealer. if not, i'd do the whole first service on your own dime and start fresh: oil and filters, fuel filters, the air dryer cartridge, and an Allison fluid sample. a coach that sat in a yard isn't a bad coach, it just doesn't come with anybody's memory.

Tolleson to Yuma, so you could have driven up and looked at it. did you? and tell your wife the board is on her side until she tells us otherwise.

331 for a 2022 with under 20k is a number i'd have paid. those little Newmars hold their value better than most. one thing for a Yuma coach in summer. if it lives outside, get tire covers on the sun side the day it parks and leave a roof vent cracked with a cover over it. a closed coach in that sun will cook the dash and the fridge seals and the glue on the shades. ask me how i know, my first coach sat a summer in Lake Havasu.

and i'm with quartzsite. we'd like to hear from the wife.

Fine. This is Linda, Ted's wife. I made my own account because if I typed on his, you'd all read it in his voice and think he'd suddenly gotten reasonable.

I was against it and I said so. Here's my side, since he left it out.

The money first. That coach is most of what was left from selling the Ohio house after we bought this one. Ted calls it putting the money to work. I call it parking the money in the driveway where it gets hotter every summer. The Bounder was paid for. It had a list, sure, but I knew every item on that list.

Then the word repo. Somebody bought that coach new three years ago with a plan, and the plan fell apart, and now we were bidding on what's left of it from our kitchen table. That bothered me more than the money, if I'm honest. I sat up until two in the morning one night reading every page on the m&a website, the warranty, the delivery, all of it, looking for the catch.

And I've never once, in fourteen winters, wished the Bounder was bigger. He has wished it every single trip.

What changed my mind is a longer story and he doesn't know all of it either. Ted, you can read this one with the rest of them.

welcome Linda. for what it's worth, on the repo part. most of the coaches i work on that came back to a bank were bought in 2021 and 2022 at the top of the market by people who got caught between the payment and what the coach was suddenly worth. it's not usually a story about a coach that got abused. the ones i've seen were mostly babied and then parked. doesn't make it less sad, but it's a different sad.

also, we want the longer story.

All right. The longer story.

The week before the bid closed, I called the number on the M&A Auto Sales site myself, from my car in the Fry's parking lot so Ted wouldn't hear. I asked a woman there two things. Who actually owns this coach. And what happens if it shows up and isn't what the pictures say. She told me the bank owns it and they're the broker, and that the bank releases the lien before the title moves. On the second one, there's a 30-day money-back if the lot was materially misrepresented. She was careful to say what that means: not "we changed our minds," but the coach being something other than what was listed. I liked that she didn't oversell it. That was most of it for me, plus a six-month warranty on top.

So I told Ted to bid, and I told him the number he could not go over, and he went 4,000 under it, which is the first time in 41 years.

Delivery day. The driver and Ted walked around outside and I went straight in and opened every cabinet, because that's where a house hides things. Under the kitchen sink the bottom was damp and there was a little drip off one of the PEX elbows on the cold line, one drop every ten seconds or so. Ted wanted to call the m&a people right then. I said it's a fitting, not a misrepresentation. It was a loose crimp ring. Nine dollars at the hardware store on 32nd Street for a push-on fitting, and Ted had it done before supper. We dried the cabinet floor with the hair dryer.

I'll admit the coach is nicer than the Bounder. The bed is a real bed. I still say we paid for it with Ohio.

Different subject, and Ted is going to bring it up so I will first: the brake box for the Jeep. He wants to spend money on a new one.

moved the three posts about the Jeep brake box (Linda's, Ted's and Kirk's from the last two days) over to the flat towing thread, flat towing a new Wrangler behind a pusher, since quartzsite is asking the same thing over there. carry on with the coach here. Linda, welcome, you're the first spouse with her own account and i'd like more of you.

Linda, a question for you rather than Ted, if that's all right. my coach is a 40 footer, i wrote it up in the delivery thread. i'm a widower and it'll be just me and the dog. my daughter in Weaverville thinks i have no business driving it alone at 67. you said you were against your coach. did you ever drive it, or do you plan to? i'm trying to find out if her worry is about the coach or about me.

Not yet. I drove the Bounder maybe a dozen times in fourteen years, always on the flat, and once in a Walmart lot in Gila Bend that I'd rather not talk about. I've told Ted I'll drive the New Aire on our September trip, on a road I pick.

About your daughter. I was the daughter, in a way, for a lot of this. When I said no, some of it was about the coach and some of it was that Ted is 70 and I didn't want to be the one who said yes to something that got too big for him. Ask her which one it is. If it's you, take her along for a weekend and let her watch you back it in. That'll do more than anything anybody types here.

Ted, did you two ever get out of Yuma? one thing on the Allison in a New Aire since you came out of a gas Bounder. on a long downgrade, push the mode button to hold a lower gear and let the exhaust brake do the work, it'll downshift itself as you slow. gas coach habits are to ride the brakes and that's how people cook them coming off the Mogollon Rim.