Learn from my Mishaps

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john owens

john owens

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 14, 2015
Posts
509
Location
palm springs ca
Hi folks.. I will try and keep this brief. We just returned from a 3 week stay in Pismo Beach. Breaking down camp we have a standard order in which we do things. It came time to bring in the slides. Under the hood battery which is a year old AGM was too weak to do the job. Had to hit the boost button and started coach. Began bringing in passenger side and it was kinda slow and all katty wampus. This never happened before. Long story short the problem turned out to be the leverles had slowly bleed off enough to make the frame out of whack making the slides not operate as designed. NOW I know to either reset the levelers before bringing in the slides, or just release them all together and bring in the slides. I was worried about broken parts and stuff..did not have a pleaseant 7 hour drive back home. Today all is well...Ok until next time!! ;D
 
Hydraulic jacks will extend or contract some based on the temperature of the fluid. If you level the unit in hot weather, then leave in the cool of the morning, you might or might not be level. This is especially important if you have to extend the jacks a bunch to level when setting up, as you found out it's fairly easy to get the frame racked. What we do is re-level the coach after a cool down.

Once we had to overnight at a service facility and there was no way we could level so we took a chance and extended the slides while at ride height (air bags full). It worked fine.
 
Happened to us in our 5er a couple of years ago at Oliver Lee Memorial SP, NM.  The landing gear had to jack the rig up so much to get level it tweaked the frame enough so the kitchen slide would not go in (probably the heaviest slide).  It took us a while but we figured it out.

Glad all is well and thanks for sharing the experience!
 
I usually wait until I have started the engine before pulling in the slides. We usually just extend the bedroom slide if we stay at a Walmart and don't put the jacks down. I only extend the living room slide after leveling, but motorhome salesmen put them out and in all day long without leveling.
 
Seems like that would have to be a serious twist.  Are you sure your slide just didn't fail like everyone elses?
 
Brad all I know is when I got home I threw caution to the wind...and opened up the passenger side (the one acting up} and I could tell right away from watching the upper portion of slide that she was back on track. Took it out almost all the way then reversed. Perfect just like always. One side note my chassis battery lost charge because after my solar install the factory charger was disconnected. I usually keep my rear camera on all day and run the radio too. I guess I should of turned the inverter on even thou I was on shore power the whole time. After all these years I still learn something about these systems...
 
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