I do search the archives before I start my own thread and they are a great resource.
Of course you do Jon. And so does everyone else who is "tuned in".
VansAirforce has been going for many years now...the archives are just absolutely bulging with information.
Like you, my first stop is always the archives. If I cannot get the answer there, I'll post a question....but that is rarely, because the archives are so powerful. The truth is that there are very few issues about building RVs that have not been raised previously and discussed in great detail. Not much is likely to be added to the primer wars.
I take the point about the social issue of having chit chat, but what I'm suggesting to newbies is that they can generally get more, and better, information from the archives than from posting a question. This is simply an issue of efficiency.
As for the reliability and quality of the comments in the archives....well the posts of today ARE the archives of tomorrow. In all cases on VansAirforce it's buyer beware. I constantly see people posting advice that is patently erroneous, and often downright dangerous. All the more reason to refer to the archives for a larger range of opinions and cross comments.
From my perspective the best outcome in this specific case would have been for the original poster to do a simple search with "Making Hoses". That would have brought up the thread "Hose Assembly Woes", a three page thread with 23 posts that ran recently from 17th December, 2012 to 20th December 2012.
That thread alone would probably have answered all his questions. But in the case that it did not, he could have appended any additional questions onto the end of that thread. That would have brought the old thread back into currency and invited further responses from others. That in turn would have strengthened the thread as a more valuable ongoing resource (archive searchers are always drawn to larger threads for obvious reasons).
I just don't think that a lot of people here on VansAirforce understand the importance of raising questions on old threads thus returning them to currency, whereupon they become larger and re-envigorated with new information (ie. they become large "definitive" threads).
Instead what they do is simply start a new thread and so the archives get filled with hundreds of piddling little threads on the same topic which dilutes the effectiveness of archive searches.