RV Slide Out Trouble

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On our trip last week, we got parked and leveled and went to put out our slides. Bedroom went out fine, the living room, not so much. The slide started out fine then all of a sudden there’s this grinding, crunching noise. I let go of the button quick

 It sounded like it was going over glass. Uh oh

Wayne says he’s sure it’s fine and keep going and he’ll check it out once he gets set up. He’s a great mechanic, I trust his judgment. So out it goes. Then I see this on the tile floor.

The tile wasn’t scratched but something was clearly dragging across it leaving these lovely black streaks. Luckily, they came off with my magic eraser. (That thing is great for all kinds of RV clean-ups) So anyway, Wayne finishes hooking us up and comes in for a look. We lift the corner flap of the carpet only to discover, what anyone who has replaced their RV flooring already knows, it’s glued and stapled down

So, with a little tugging and a lot of cursing, we pulled the carpet up in the noisy corner. We did actually tear it a little but it’s ok since it’s leaving soon anyway.

What we found was not good. The roller in that corner was completely off its adjusting screws and was laying sideways in the mounting. The bracket was bent and all but two screws were ripped out of the wood subfloor.

Well, crap, not something we want to fix in this campground.

So Wayne screws it back down as best as he can. When it’s time to bring the slide in to go home, I’m, of course, freaking out that it will break completely and we’ll be stuck. Not that I mind being stuck in Monterey, but still. But it comes in with less noise than when it went out so that was good. I still heard the glass crunching sound though and when I looked behind the slide trim I could see something shiny in there.

A couple hours later and we got The Phaeton Menace home. I was nervous the whole way.

We got leveled at home and put the slide out part way so that the roller was up off the floor. The slide goes back at a downward angle then the rollers roll down a ramp into place. There’s a bit of time where the roller wheels don’t touch the floor and there’s some room to work.

We again pulled back the carpet and this time we removed the black plastic flange thingy since it’s cracked anyway.

Wayne took the slide roller bracket off to see what could be done. I’d already looked online so I knew the replacements weren’t very expensive, about $30, so I wasn’t terribly worried about it if we needed a new one. But Wayne is awesome and had the steel bracket flat and straight again with some pounding  in no time

The problem we had now was the subfloor of the slideout. The hole for the roller is a little too wide at one end so the screws were too close to the edge and had broken out the wood so we couldn’t put screws back in the same place.

We decided to add some holes between the other ones and to make sure we caught enough wood to hold the screws when we put it back in. *Note, Wayne says the bracket is hard as hell and that drilling through it was a pain.

Anyway, we found some screws that would work and got the bracket back in place. It feels good and secure now. While we had the carpet pulled up, I looked at the next roller bracket, there’s 6 or 8 under there, and noticed it had a missing screw too. Luckily it wasn’t bent and the wood wasn’t broken so we just screwed it back down. Wayne put the roller back in and used the one at the opposite corner as a guide to set the height with the adjusting screws. We ran the slide out and back in and adjusted it to roll smoothly on the floor and the ramp like the other rollers.

A job well done

Well not quite. We still had the glass crunching sound. So I stuck my finger in that little dead space behind the slide trim only to come away bloody. There was indeed glass in there. Not sure where it came from, but a good vacuuming took care of it.

No more crunching and no more black streaks, or blood drops, on the floor.

I am so luck Wayne is handy! The slide roller is fixed and Cristine is a happy camper!