[Brittany Dogs]

I was considering the purchase of a TST 507 tire pressure monitor this year. I am waffling on the idea since I really only make one trip a year that is 6 hours of travel each way. Most or all the other trips tend to be an hour or less travel time.

My TrailManor 2720SD is still in my backyard in winterized condition. After all, it did snow in Buffalo NY yesterday when I was working on the tires. Since the unit is jacked up fairly high already, I wanted to remove the tires and take them to the local shop to replace the stems with the Napa 90-416 metal valve stems and to do a real good rebalancing again. By the way, the tires are the factory 15" marathon on aluminum wheels. The factory tires were balanced already given the weights on the tires. So I'm glad TrailManor took that level of care balancing the tires.

The first problem was trying to remove the tires on a collapsed (shells down) unit without removing the white skirt (which you can't remove collapsed). Boy oh boy what a job that is. My back hurts! I thought that if I raised the whole unit that is static, using the jacks and raising each corner a little at a time, that if I gave a lot of ground clearance to rotate the tire out, that it would be possible to do with the unit with the shells down. I was able to do it with a lot of time and using really bad language. The bad language worked best.

The second problem was that the metal valve stems I purchased would not fit on the aluminum wheel. The outer metal washer that places the sealing force on the rubber washer under the nut, the diameter of that metal washer would not fit in the valve stem cavity. Since I felt the metal washer was absolutely necessary and did not want to just use the metal hex nut to place direct contact and pressure on the outer sealing rubber washer, I elected to abort the TR416 stems and go with the tire dealer's high pressure truck stems. After all, what was I suppose to do? The tires were nicely re-balanced again and I was out the store ready to bloody my knuckles again putting the tires back on the unit.

Even though the TST507 tire pressure monitor system uses lightweight sensors, I'm thinking of ditching the idea for the time being until I figure out what I want to do with the metal stem delema.