One of the selling points of our used toy hauler was the inclusion of a Honda EV6010 generator, which is a liquid cooled, two cylinder engine with separate 30 amp/20amp outputs. This is a major upgrade over the Onan 4000, which is a single cylinder air cooled generator that was offered when this trailer was purchased new.
One red flag: no hour meter was installed, and this is a 17 year old toy hauler. Eric was ordering regular tune up parts, and discovered that it also had a timing belt and water pump! It is a Honda, of course it has a timing belt… The decision was made to replace all wear items and create a new baseline with our new hour meter. This included all filters and fluids, spark plugs, brushes, timing belt, and water pump.
The genny was unbolted and unhooked from the rig, and rotated to replace the brushes first. This would give us an indicator on overall use. The brushes are a pain to access, and surprisingly they were near the new brush lengths. That likely means that this unit has low hours, which would coincide with the overall good condition and light use from the previous owners.
One thing we ran into on our maiden voyage was a problem shutting the generator off. It turned out that the grounding wire for the ignition coil had broken, and this was repaired as well. This would have been tough to diagnose, as this sits under the covers for the timing belt; which can’t be removed with the generator mounted in the trailer.
Brushes were replaced, and it was time to tackle the timing belt. All efforts were made to repair this in place, but that was foiled by the location of one water pump bolt.
Here is the culprit, hiding under the exhaust manifold. Out she comes.
The generator weighs almost 200 pounds, and has no handle points. Eric moved the trailer to make room to access the compartment, and we used our tractor to move the set to the bed of our truck to work on .
Now we have room to work, and we are in the shade! While it was November 2021, temps were still in the upper 80’s in the afternoons. Every effort for comfort is welcome on projects like this.
The radiator assembly needed to be removed to access the bolts for the exhaust shroud, which needed to be removed to access the exhaust itself.
There was no way to cheat this bolt, and nearly every engine peripheral was removed or unbolted to make the room needed for this repair.
The intake manifold overlaps the exhaust, and off it comes.
With the exhaust removed, we can finally get to work…
Here is evidence that the weep hole is doing it’s job, but it also means the shaft seal has degraded to some extent.
The timing belt was in fair shape, but was worn nonetheless. It takes a lot of experience to “feel” the belt, and this can be accomplished by making a small radius and checking how much resistance the belt gives back. This one indicated it was worn out.
The old pump versus the new one. There is some erosion on the impeller, which is expected.
The new pump is on, and the timing belt is properly tensioned. Honda is proud of these parts, as they cost as much, if not more, than comparable parts for a Honda Accord 2.2l.
It was slow and steady, but she is completely assembled and ready for installation.
I mentioned in the beginning that this generator has two outputs, and only the 30 amp circuit was being used. Due to the inaccessibility of the wiring, another decision was made to add wiring for the 20 amp circuit. In our case, a dedicated 20 amp plug was added in the generator bay to make use of this output. If we ever wanted to make use of this circuit in the rig, we won’t have to un-mount the gen set to access the wiring.
All of the wiring is finalized for this part of the project, and we have since rewired the 12 volt supply during the addition of our Victron inverter.