GMC Motorhome Tour After 1 Year

all right so a new tour video today and this is a special tour based on us owning edna for one year so welcome to the the one year of ownership tour our last tour video was done about eight months ago we'd already had the coach for several months but this is just about one year since we originally brought her home and so we thought it would be a good time to do a quick tour talk a little bit about the motorhome the audio was not very good on the other video and so hopefully the audio will be a little bit better on this one so that people can get a better feel for what these motorhomes are all about um it is kind of windy here so i'm sorry there's always just going to be some wind noise and that's just the way it is where we are um but uh give a little bit of background for anybody who's not familiar with the the gmc motorhome this particular example is a 1977 kingsley and gmc made these motor homes for five years in the 1970s they made them between 1973 and 1978 and over those years they made a little over 13 000 of these motorhomes and estimates are that there's something like 8 000 of them that are still on the road and so they've held up very well they're i mean i think they're a very cool design so um pretty fun to actually own one but they are a pretty interesting vehicle and i think that's why people have kept them on the road there's a huge community of people who continue to repair them and do upgrades there's lots of parts available and so it's a it's a pretty cool hobby and way to get out in nature and do some camping all right so we're going to start out on the outside and just walk around the vehicle a little bit i'm going to open up the uh the hoods here so a couple of access panels to get to things in the front we've done led headlight upgrades and a few things of course our grille is broken that's a project for for another day but up front here really it's things like the brakemaster cylinder and the windshield washer fluid a unique feature about this vehicle is that this is the windshield wiper motor i'll say it's actually a hydraulic system and so there are hydraulic lines that come up from the power steering pump and then this returns the fluid back and this is a hydraulic actuator basically to move the windshield wipers back and forth so pretty interesting design there are modern versions of this you can replace all of this with an electric motor and then have modern intermittent wipers and all of that but so far this has been working pretty well so i think it's kind of interesting and i plan to keep it unless we end up with some kind of problem this coach also has an upgrade here this is a vacuum pump and it's connected into the brake master cylinder actually the brake booster back there and the idea is this has a little pressure sensor if the engine dies when you're going down a hill this will turn on and run on battery power to supply vacuum to the brake booster so if the engine dies you still have boosted brakes that help you stop the vehicle and so this is kind of a nice safety feature it's an add-on that i've seen on lots of of these coaches and there are a few other ways of doing this but i think this this vacuum pump is is a pretty nice solution we can move over to the other side here a few other just things under the hood here um the radiator fill is down here we've got engine oil fill here one thing i'm kind of excited about we fixed this light and so this is an original let's slide it out here this is an original drop light that came with these and we put an led bulb in it so it's nice and bright there's a little switch here that turns it on and off when you open the hood but there is wire coiled up in this and it's about 25 feet of wire and so this thing can unspool and you can take it out and you know put it back by the back tires if you're needing to do some some repair on the side of the road at night so pretty cool feature of course you know i probably have flashlights and lanterns and things like that if you're if you're camping but i thought it was cool to get this working it wasn't working when we first got the coach but i thought that was kind of a cool thing to to get working um a few other things here we've we've added on a battery combiner we replaced some of the wiring and things like that you could watch some of the other videos to get some details about some of those repairs that we've done and i think that kind of wraps things up up here in the front and so we'll just do a little walk around and see some of the other outside all right so we'll walk down the side here um not a lot to talk about right here so we'll come over we've got a nice little add-on step which is a nice feature to have and then there's the door we'll go inside in a little bit and check things out there our coach came with aluminum wheels and there are a few different styles of aluminum wheels i think the most the ones that people like the most are alcoa these ones are another brand i think they're ultra or american eagle but it's nice to have uh kind of an upgraded wheel and a little better tire size so these wheels use a more common tire size and we put new tires on it last year um needs to be done every few years as we move back we've got airbags here so this is one of the really unique features of these gmc coaches is they have the airbags that are mounted between the two rear wheels and so as you air the airbag up the wheels go down and it lifts the coach you can also air the let air out of the bags and basically lower the coach so it's a really cool leveling system it also gives it a really nice ride down the road it just kind of floats down the road not i mean it's still kind of rattly because it's a 45 year old vehicle but really it drives more like a modern minivan or car or something like that in large part because of this air suspension in the back and then when you get on site you can adjust the level and level things out to accommodate whatever kind of site you're parked at right here we have the propane tank and we'll just open this up and take a quick look at it so this is a really large propane tank we've had the coach for a year we've gone camping a few times uh we've barely even seen the uh the gauge move we've used maybe a maybe an eighth of the tank um but we've added a plug in here for uh propane grill we ran lines into the fridge and a few other upgrades along the way but this is a really nice big tank that i think typically with just average camping will last a few years well coming around the back here we've got a ladder to go up on the roof we'll take a quick look up there in a minute spare tire we replaced this along with the other tires we also have a through a through bumper hitch on the back here which is a pretty nice add-on of course we could do some towing i don't really expect to do towing with this but it would be nice to put on a maybe a platform to carry a you know a scooter or something or bicycles so having a hitch back here is very nice okay so let's take a look up top and i'll kind of point out some of the the things that we have up there all right so up top here um if you watched our other video you would see that we now have a air conditioning unit and so that's a a nice upgrade we're looking forward to having that this summer we've got a couple of other vents the rails up here we may carry things on top but i think for the most part from our experience we haven't had to carry anything big and so we just pack things inside but some of these have a cargo carrier up top here and a way to store other things you might be able to put some solar panels or other things up here i've seen that on a number of these coaches but pretty pretty straightforward on the roof we've done a few maintenance and repair things to seal some of the seams up here to make sure that we've got a a nice seal uh it's pretty cool that overall this is just a really big piece of aluminum on the on the rear so other than where there's a penetration there's not much that can go wrong with it all right so we'll go up the driver's side in just a moment but i do want to point out this seam in the back and all of these screws it's pretty interesting that the whole back of this can come off and when they were manufacturing these originally uh there are cool videos of how they had the back off and basically were taking all the the appliances and the bathroom and the closet and all of those interior pieces in through the back here so pretty pretty interesting design and just one of the things that the gm did as they were making these um thinking about just engineering a motorhome rather than you know kind of assembling something on an existing chassis or frame they designed it from the ground up so let's move around to the side here and keep going so right here we have the potable water fill and just a little door here um basically unscrew this put a hose in fill up the water tank inside um i think the water tank holds something like 35 or 40 gallons so that's been pretty good for us uh for like a weekend of camping that's been plenty of water especially if we're a little careful about it don't take a lot of showers um down here we have the generator uh if you've seen our other video open this up in its storage unit but one of the projects we've been working on is getting a generator installed and so we've got the generator now we don't have it all hooked up and working yet but this is a 6 000 watt generator this is the type of generator that would normally come in a motor home like this and so pretty excited about getting that set up and running so stay tuned for some more videos around that we've got the house batteries back here and these are two six volt batteries that are uh wired in series so you get 12 volts we installed a tray so we can pull those out if we need to do some work on them but this is now more like what you would expect to see with the motorhome like this with the generator and the batteries um back here there are a few different configuration based on the year but for a 77 kingsley this is the the type of setup that you'd normally have all right we can move up here this is the electrical panel so this is where you have your plug-in this is what we use around the house so this is about a 20 amp plug-in the original and what came with it from the factory is this big giant 50 amp which i think is kind of overkill by modern standards so you know we have replaced the in the air conditioner we have just one unit up top if you have an electric water heater if you have two air conditioners and you're using lots of power maybe you need that 50 amps when we're camping we usually use this 30 amp connector and then when we're at the house we can run everything off the the 20 amp so typically when you're driving down the road you would plug this in inside of this little cabinet here there's a plug in here and then this connects to the generator and so if the cable is plugged in here and the generator is operational while you're driving down the road you can turn on the generator you can run the air conditioning um and have some of those nice amenities while you're driving down the road this is the city water connection so if you have you know basically an rv park where you've got water you can screw into this we got a pressure regulator and a filter just to make sure that we don't over pressurize the system we don't really need a lot of pressure in this and we don't want to accidentally create any leaks so we've already talked about the airbags obviously there's one on this side also this is for the furnace so there's an intake and exhaust for the furnace it has a propane furnace to warm up the interior that was not working but now it is so we've got a video about getting that working windows are tinted more or less on this there is probably a project that we want to do sometime in the future is uh re-tint the windows um we haven't used this very much in the summer but a lot of people say that it's nice to have really good tint on the windows because there's so much glass and so much window space you do want to try to keep that heat under control unless you want to run the air conditioning all the time which you know can be a little bit of a noisy thing to do up front here we've got the gas fill so pretty pretty easy to find there the the gas tanks are actually in the back and so there's a very long hose that takes it back to the back and so we found as we fill this up you have to go really pretty slowly as you fill up the gas to make sure that it doesn't back up and kind of burp out of the the fuel fill so just maybe uh something to get used to if you're if you're new to the gmc motorhome and i think that pretty much takes us to the front uh i'll just mention the lighting here i mentioned the headlights but pretty much all of the other clearance lights and marker lights and things like that we've changed out to led just like the the lower energy use there lower current draw a little bit easier on the batteries and especially with headlights a lot better lighting and better performance from those so it's another one of those upgrades that we've done all right well let's go inside and check things out in there all right so as you come in we're going to take a look in the back first and then work our way toward the front just a little different approach than we did last time and we'll just point out some of the things we've been working on and some of the features of this motorhome so back here in the back this one has a little bit of work that we need to do back here usually there would be kind of a blanket drawer back here a little cabinet that you keep things in so that's on my list of things to repair there's a little bit more side paneling and things like that that needs to be cleaned up this coach has had a little bit of water damage over the years and so we just want to um you know fix up some of those things that have had a little damage overall though it's in really good original shape and so the previous owner has found a lot of the same furniture even if it wasn't from this coach originally and so they started to do some of the restoration and our goal is to keep it as original as we can but still maybe do some of the mechanical upgrades and that's part of why we really liked this coach is that it had already had a lot of the mechanical upgrades and some of the interior things to to keep it pretty original we didn't want one that had been completely gone through you know maybe you know 15 or 20 years ago and didn't really look like the 1970s motorhome that it was originally but we wanted to be reliable we wanted to be safe we wanted to to be relatively comfortable and so we are doing some upgrades to to do that all right so talked a little bit about things are going on back here um there's some nice storage up top so we've got some blankets and towels and things in here there's also some nice storage over here we've got some more sheets and blankets and things like that many of the coaches do have some storage like this and we'll have a little more once we get this cabinet back here these two benches fold out into a basically a double sized bed so i'll kind of fold them out and then we can take a look at what that looks like all right so folded these out um we put a little bit of uh you know maybe a wood here just to keep the pillows and things from falling off the bed space once i build those those spaces on either side that will be much more finished and you know much more comfortable place back here this bed is pretty comfortable not perfect so i'm 6'2 and i fit on it pretty well we actually like to put a couple of roll up kind of mats on it to help smooth things out these buttons are not particularly comfortable to sleep on and so nice to smooth those out and then make it up with some blankets and it's a great place to spend the night okay now we've moved into the hallway so on this side we've got a closet and we've got some drawers and a couple cabinets and we have a bathroom over here and so we'll talk a little bit about this i'll open up the closet first but first i'll mention these cabinets and drawers here um these are you know basically just storage areas um originally when we got the coach these were starting to kind of fall apart this is a formica over particle board type of material it's 45 years old and so it was showing its age and it looked like there'd probably been some water damage at some point and so we found another coach and a lot of these have the same interiors with the same kind of materials and even though it had been pretty much completely gutted and was being scrapped because the the frame was rotten and there really wasn't much to save on it this closet module and the cabinets were in great shape and so we were able to get those install them in ours and now have much nicer better condition cabinets so go into the closet here so nice little mirror for you know doing a little dressing or anything we've got some storage uh we've got some organizers things you know towels and jackets and things like that when we're camping so when we camp we try to put our clothes and things in here just to keep them out of the way while we're you know doing other things around the around the coach for these cabinets i won't go through all of these but this top one is storage so we keep some of our grocery type things dry goods up here these two are drawers and so these two we just have you know miscellaneous supplies camping gear uh you know fire starter stuff like that if we're going to be doing some camping these bottom two are more of the kind of mechanical and electrical parts of the coach and so i'll open this one up so we can take a look inside this one has all of the electrical service so we've got the circuit breaker panel here this is for the 120 volt electrical system so main circuits air conditioner water tank the 110 outlets around the coach we have the control the switch for the hot water heater there's also the battery charger and converter there and so that is what supplies all of the 12 volt systems so pretty much all of the lighting and everything in here is is 12 volt the refrigerator runs on on 12 volt when it's on propane so this manages those electrical service things there's a couple other we have a usb charging hub and things like that just to you know kind of manage power while we're camping so i'll close this and do a quick one down here so in our last video we had we've been putting a little mint in here to keep mice away in our last video we had a much smaller compressor this is an aftermarket air compressor system and this is basically kind of a remote control to adjust pressure on each side of the airbags and so the rise raising and lowering of the airbag system the pre the compressor we had originally was much smaller and would overheat and shut down and it took quite a while to to really air the bags up or down this one has performed great so it never shuts down it has all the air supply we need and works out great so we've been very happy with that upgrade all right so now we'll take a look in the bathroom and as we come in here we've got a nice little medicine cabinet we put in led lighting on both sides so it's nice and bright in there of course got a sink got the the toilet and this is a wet bath so the shower is just right here so you close those curtains kind of across the sink and across the door and then take your shower it's got a floor drain a little more storage there under the sink but not exactly a a huge bathroom but it's big enough for for what we need and pretty nice to have when you're camping and want to clean up all right now we'll work our way forward a little bit start with the refrigerator so this is one of those things that we replaced a few months after having the coach we got a norcold refrigerator it's got a nice big freezer up top and refrigerator it works on 120 volt so if we're plugged in at a campsite or if we have a generator that's running um or if we're at home we can run it on 120 and uh cools things down works great it also runs on propane so if we're camping dry camping we have propane that we can run it on and we've done that for a long weekend it was like two or three days and it did great made ice in the freezer kept everything cold in the refrigerator so that was very nice we've got a little storage down below here so just uh there's a storage video that we did where we talked a little bit about the storage and that's just a little extra space if you have a vacuum so these originally came with a vacuum that bottom space would be filled up with some of the vacuum stuff but that's been removed probably many many years ago and so now we just have a little extra storage space um kitchen here we've got some nice cabinets up top which is where we keep uh most of our dishes things like that pots and pans we've got the cooktop this works great i mean a gas cooktop like this puts out a lot of heat it cooks things pretty quick so that's our kind of biggest challenge is not burning things it cooks so well um there's also an oven and i didn't really think about the usefulness of an oven in a motorhome because we're kind of used to tent camping before this but we've cooked some things in the oven my wife has made some cookies and it's kind of fun to have some of those conveniences at home when you're out camping there's a double sink so it's covered up here half of it has this cutting board on it exhaust fan and some lighting and things like that um most of these drawers and cabinets here are going to be for um silverware and some dishes and things like that this one is actually the furnace so this is the gas furnace there's a thermostat in the back that we'd kick this on if we needed the heat and it heats things up pretty quick the furnace works works well all right a couple more things here so this is the control for the generator so if we had the generator working we'd be able to just push this button right here to start or stop the generator very handy if you're going down the road and you want to run the air conditioning which runs on 120 volt so that's a nice feature and then there's this control center which gives you your level of the liquid propane house batteries your water tank and the holding tank and we made a video where we got this working so it works which is very nice there's also a little more storage here so this is where typically you would have vacuum parts but because the vacuum's been removed we've got an extra fire extinguisher can't have too many of those and some storage so we put canned goods things like that in there and also some switches here so you've got the porch light outside some lighting inside and then this is the control for the potable water pump and so if you're not on city water if you're using water in the water tank and you want to use that you turn on this this yellow switch here to to get your water okay a couple more quick storage things uh nice storage cabinets up here um we keep these ones pretty empty so this is a place where we put uh you know camping gear and supplies depending on where we're going and what we're doing there they're separate there's a divider here so you know things that you put in either of those uh will stay separate there's storage underneath the the seats for the dinette there's a little bit of storage a little kind of cubby underneath each of the driver's seats and so uh so far for us we've been able to manage the storage space pretty well and you know be able to carry what we needed to go camping all right so something we're pretty excited about because we installed this last year is the air conditioning and so if we were on 120 volt power or if we had a generator running we'd be able to turn this on either get just air circulation with the fan or air conditioning we haven't used this in really hot weather yet but we think um it seems like this one ac unit is probably going to do pretty well for us especially if we get better tinting on the windows that will probably help out too and then there's fans in the front and the back that can help move the air around so with this floor plan one of the things well there are lots of things that we like this is the floor plan that we thought would be the best for our family but we liked that there was a dinette so some of them just have a couple of chairs and a small table but we like this full dinette it's nice to be able to sit down and play a game have dinner you know kind of hang out as a family if the weather's not nice and this also folds into a bed for some more sleeping um the couch on this side turns into bunk beds and this out of the entire coach is probably the favorite thing from our teenager and he really likes sleeping on the on the bunk bed so i'll show what that looks like set up we'll move our pillows out of the way here and so this bottom one just stays in place there's storage underneath this if you want to see what that looks like you can check out some of the other videos but then this back part folds out it has brackets that are attached to the walls and then basically there's a bottom part that's hidden when it's in couch mode that folds out to make this a more comfortable size for a bed and then there are these straps that are a seat belt material that hooks in to the roof and i'm going to find the right spot there basically just a little hook up there that it snaps on to there it goes and get this one on this side and then once those are strapped down this is built into the framing of the roof and we have these brackets back there in the back this makes a very nice bed kind of a cool position if you're in a secluded area you can be looking outside while you're falling asleep at night and pretty comfortable place to sleep and then of course there's the bottom bunk for whoever's not lucky enough to be on the top bunk okay and when you're all done with this it's also pretty easy to to put away we will sometimes at night kind of store other supplies or things down in the bottom bunk but we don't really like to leave it set up during the day it's nice to have the extra seating so it's just a matter of unhooking the two straps and i get on the side here and this holds back underneath and folds back down and then these these straps just tuck underneath we've got seat belts here also so there are a couple of seat belts of the dinette a couple of seat belts here and then seat belts of course on the front seat and so this is set up to have six people as passengers with seat belts so now let's take a look at the dinette and we'll just move some of these pillows around for the dinette there's a little latch on this leg here before i do that you just fold these in a couple little supports um our son actually kind of prefers when we're driving down the road to have it more like this so he's got a little more space to spread his things out you can have a cup of soda or something here and kind of nice to have that not slide around if you go around a corner or hit a bump but then there's a little release button so you can fold the leg up and then this comes off the wall and just lays down there pretty nicely um you may notice that this wall has a little bit of water damage that's something that the coach came with and so a future project now that i think we have all of the various leaks that that we've seen fixed uh will be to do some of the interior walls so look forward to a new video on that but then for the dinette now that we've got the table out of the way there's a little latch on each side where this lifts up and basically just slides down same thing on this side pull the latch and slide it down of course we could push that seat belt out of the way if we were going to sleep on it but and this makes a pretty comfortable bed and i've spent a night on this bed so far i think our teenager has slept on it um and pretty comfortable uh it's not really long but because there's a little extra space here you can put your pillow there if you're if you're a long person or your feet can hang off the bottom obviously a couple of kids fit in here really well and with an outlet close by you can charge your electronic devices if you have shore power so to put this back up basically the opposite thing they're kind of spring loaded and so just pull it up and snap it back down in place do the same thing here and then we'll put the table back up snap the leg out pull the supports for the table out and put everything back the way it was all right so let's talk a little bit about the front so we have these cool retro 1970s uh chairs up front here a really neat feature about these obviously they slide forward and back you know so you can be more forward or not we kind of keep them back the view out the windshield here is pretty awesome when you're going down the road but another thing that's cool is both of them will spin around so when you're in a campsite you can pull a release and spin this around and the driver's side does the same thing and you have a couple more spots where people can sit around and talk the arm rests on this come up if you want a couple of arm rests we use these when we're going down the road but kind of a cool feature to be able to once you're in a campsite and you're settled in you don't need these you know driver and passenger seats facing forward anymore you can spin them around and have have more of a family conversation all right so one of the things we really liked about this coach is the view out the front this panoramic view out the windshields is pretty awesome when you're going down the road and so especially the seating position being kind of forward there's not a lot of nose in front of you it's just kind of a you know a cool way to see scenery as you go down the road so i'm not going to open up the engine hatch but it's right here between the the seats so a couple of releases here this opens up we've done quite a few projects on the engine so if you want to see that you can check out some of the other videos but i was going to show a little bit about the dash here so this one is pretty much original it has the the original dash uh with the wood grain um it's got kind of the original 1970s ac control the old eight track we've got some village people in there if we uh we want to really live in the 70s this one has really pretty good air conditioning some of the earlier models didn't have great stock air conditioning but this one works well i think it's been upgraded a little bit so that it's using a more modern refrigerant from a gauge standpoint we've got fuel and oil and temperature over here we've got the speedometer so kind of the basics we've also got a volt gauge down here a lot of people will add additional gauges we haven't done that yet that might be something we'll do in the future but having like a transmission oil temperature having a tachometer things like that are nice we've got of course the windshield wipers and washers headlights this does have cruise control now ours is not working but i think that's something that we'll we'll be able to fix in the future it does have a tilt steering wheel so pretty straightforward kind of nice to have modern conveniences driving this is not the original steering wheel this is an aftermarket steering wheel i i kind of just like this you know leather wrapped a little bit more modern gmc steering wheel the one that was in this originally was very similar to what you would find on a 1970s cadillac i think but it had the gmc logo but yeah it's been been a great coach we've been very happy with it planned to be doing a lot more videos there's always more things to to fix and make better but it's already been a lot of fun and we really enjoy camping with it and so we'll probably do some some road trips this summer and continue to fix things up so thanks for the the watch and look forward to more videos

Channel: Mr. GMC Motorhome

Views: 48,266

Keywords: '77, 1977, GMC, Motorhome, RV, Vintage, classic, Tour, Edna, 1 year, One Year, details, Information, walk around, Review, Overview

Id: 9Z6hDiSWmWI

Length: 36min 35sec (2195 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022