[Photographs related to this work will appear in a separate gallery post.]
In contrast to yesterday, we had a beautiful day today weatherwise and otherwise. Jim, Kevin, and Joe removed our four fogged awning windows with some minor assistance from me. It turned out that the window frames hang from an open hinge and are attached to the lift mechanism arms on each end by pins with grooves that accept retaining clips. Once the clips were removed the pins were slid out, releasing the lift arms. The window frame was then free to swing high enough for the hinge to come free from the mating piece (attached to the bus). Not only was this relatively easy to do, it will make it much easier for Suncoast Designer’s to remove the thermopane glass sandwich from the frame and reinstall it once it is repaired. It also means that once the windows are reinstalled in the coach we can leave without further waiting as the adhesive will have already cured. Kevin covered the openings with pieces of cardboard and plastic secured with what appeared to be green Frog tape.
I went to the office around 11AM to see if/when I could meet with Jeff, the general manager. While I was there I picked up their informational brochure and discovered that they do a plant tour at 1 PM every day. Customers are curious about the process and equipment used to repair the windows. The daily tour allows Suncoast to schedule this into their workday and take care of everyone at once, minimizing disruption to the work in progress. Fritz was our tour guide and did a good job of explaining the steps in their process and the equipment, tools, and techniques used at each step. Linda took notes while I took photographs for a possible future article.
As soon as the tour was over I started working on the article draft. At 3 PM I returned to the office and met with Suncoast general manager Jeff Heyen to get some additional info about the company and the process they have developed for repairing thermopane RV windows. Jeff also confirmed that they were not going to install the windows back into the coach until Friday. That allowed us to firm up plans to get together with Michael and Donna tomorrow in Dunedin for lunch at the Serendipity Cafe and a visit to Honeymoon Island State Park.
I finished the article draft before dinner time and had Linda proofread it. After dinner I offloaded the photos from the camera and spent the rest of the evening selecting and post-processing images for the article.
As I was wrapping up for the night I noticed that I had received a server maintenance notification from Scott at QTH.com. They had installed patches to fix the Heartbleed bug discovered two days ago in OpenSSL and would be rebooting all of their servers to make sure the patches were applied. I also received notifications from the recently installed Wordfence plug-in regarding this issue and its possible effect on WordPress sites while assuring their customers that the Wordfence cloud servers had not been compromised. I shut everything down and went to bed.