Slides are no fun!

2019 Tiffin 32SA Class A Gas — By the way, the second edition of my book, Your RV is Broken, is available now on Amazon!

Despite what you might read below, we are still quite happy with this RV. As I told someone the other day, 98% of this RV is good, but the 2% will sometimes really piss me off.

The Problem

So, we needed to move from one spot to another in this same campground. So we packed things up, moved and when we

went to put the slides back out. The rear slide (passenger side, bedroom) went out a foot or so – and stopped with the rear (left from outside) dragging. We looked underneath the bed – nothing in the way. We pulled it back in, then out – it stopped even shorter. Tried again – stopped only a couple of inches out. Rule one – if the slide stops part way out – don’t bring it back in. This is a Schwintek slide, by Lippert. The motors and mechanism are reached from OUTSIDE. If you can’t get the slide open at least part way, you can’t get to anything. I tried sitting on the floor and pushing with both legs while Deb held the extend button – nothing. We were screwed.

The slide has a central storage area under the bed, but also another area on each side on the head side of the bed. It has a

heavy piece of plywood, covered with carpet. There is also a small storage cabinet, but I didn’t want to push on that because it didn’t look that sturdy. I got the scissor jack out of the F150 and a handful of 2×6’s and other boards. One went from the jack to the slide floor and the others went to a stack of boards across the front of the cabinet on the driver’s side. I tried to spread the force out as much as possible. Then I turned the jack screw by hand, and eventually a small crescent wrench. That forced the slide out enough that I could see the lower bearing block behind the rubber seal. It was twisted and the guide was

sticking out of the guide slot. Not good. I got a small piece of scrap oak and a hammer and knocked the bearing block back into position. From there I was able to jack the slide farther out. Note: when I started using the jack, I measured the distance and could see that the slide was moving. If you are using a jack and the slide doesn’t move – if you keep jacking, something WILL break. An alternative, if you have it out enough is to take all the screws out of the column (extruded frame that covers the parts) and then move the slide out. Be careful of the motor wire and connector.

A bit of relevant history:

After we picked this RV up, late November of 2018, while we were packing for our first trip, we noticed light coming in under the back wall. What? We had planned to head south for the winter, so our plans were quickly changed to make Red Bay our first major stop. Since they were going to be shut down over the holiday break, we timed our departure so we could be in their lot just before New Year’s to get in line when everyone came back after the first. The techs at Red Bay said the wall was “bolted down, not a mechanical issue” and they sprayed the crack from outside and said “all was well”. We had a few other things, like really crooked drawers and a mirror issue, but most everything was taken care of in an afternoon.

Before the next winter trip down, we noticed the seals not touching on the rear side of the slide (left when outside facing the slide). Red bay techs moved the seal over so it touched the slide. We also had them replace the DC power panel next to the batteries that had melted on an earlier trip.

I’m not going to try to give a detailed itinerary of all the things I did to learn about Schwintek slides, just the useful portions. I spent a dozen or so hours over three days looking, measuring, reading Lippert install manuals.

One of the first things I noticed was that the left column was mounted WAY too far from the slide at the bottom(nearly an inch farther out than the top – way out of

Previous and correct position of the column

Lippert spec). After lots of looking and measuring – I got a square and put it against the inside of the back wall – and the wall was anything but square. The bottom was pushed out compared to the top. 5/16 over 1 foot.

Square held against back wall - 11/32 gap for 1 FT square — Square held against back wall

Funny, the bottom of the rear (left) slide column was also shifted to the rear to match the end of the wall. (they used the crooked wall as a guide to cut the slide opening!) Not funny. I presumed this was the problem and proceeded with a solution to move the column to the correct position. Since the wall was tilted toward the rear at the bottom, there was nothing but air behind the column once it was in the proper position. I got a piece of 1.5 inch 1/8th steel stock, cut it to two feet and beveled off the top edge and screwed it to the frame. Then I positioned the column over that and drilled holes, tapped them and mounted the column to the stock. Very solid. Still didn’t work.

After figuring out how to disconnect the stepper motor and disassemble and remove the rest of the mechanism, I discovered what I feared – the lower bearing block (part that holds the gear and fits into the gear track) was damaged. It has a plastic guide on it (called a shoe) – which was broken, part missing and the metal was damaged from being forced out of the track. Time to wait for parts. (Stepper motor details below).

But it gets better. With the lower bearing block removed, I tried to reinstall the column to fill in the open space while I ordered parts – and the screw holes were off by over 1/8^th of an inch. By prying up on the bottom of the column (and lifting the slide) I was able to get the screws installed. The plastic on the lower bearing block was quite worn. This means both the lower and the upper bearing blocks were exerting upward pressure on the slide. Yet another problem. Schwintek slide parts are not supposed to bear any weight – just push the slide in and out. All the weight is supposed to rest on the slide rollers under the slide. But not even this was all. When the slide parts are originally installed, the whole side kit is assembled and the lower track screwed to the bottom of the slide, then the top track is screwed into position as determined by the slide column (the extruded aluminum part that bolts the the RV side). There are guides in it that determine where the bearing blocks go and thus where the tracks go. I screwed in the top track first and went to screw the bottom track and – nope, didn’t fit where the holes were. The guides wanted the tracks farther apart. I didn’t want to redril the dozen holes that held the top track in place and the bottom track position is determined by the bottom of the slide. So, in frustration I moved the lower guides up to match the track position as they are pop riveted in place and only needed to be drilled, a bit of dremeling and reinstalled).

As for the outside wall being crooked: I got a 1 1/4 by 1/8 piece of steel and tapered off the top end. Then drilled holes and screwed it into the wall. Then I drilled and tapped holes where the column overlapped. It seems pretty sturdy. I just hate having to go all shade-tree on an expensive RV. If you have to work on a Lippert Schwintek slide, do find the installation manual on LCI1.com and read every bit of it.

So, to recap:

1. Rear wall not installed square to the floor at the factory. Factory Fail.

2. Slide column installed to match the rear wall, not the slide, making the lower column tolerance way out of Lipper spec. This was done because the slide hole was also cut to match the rear wall, so there wasn’t enough material (frame) to mount the column in the correct place. Factory Fail.

3. The slide mechanism was carrying some of the weight of the slide. Factory Fail. Tracks were installed incorrectly putting more pressure on the blocks.

All these things are factory defects. Yes, I’m out of warranty, but Tiffin used to have a reputation of taking responsibility for their problems.

Now I need to look at the other side of the slide and see if it is weight bearing too.

At the very least, I need a bearing block kit (block and shoe). I would like to replace the lower track. Ideally, I would replace the left column as well as it has several sets of holes in it from mounting in different positions. I’ll upate this when I get parts and put this all back together. Meanwhile, below are some details on the Stepping motor and other parts.

I’m sure a qualified RV mobil tech would not have taken as many hours as I did to “learn” this slide’s mechanics, but there is no doubt in my mind that he/she would come to the same conclusion and we’d be waiting on parts and I’d have a bill for several hours of work. I did consult an RV tech, and he gets thanks for letting me discuss the situation, but being on the other end of a text session is somewhat limiting. I “should” be able to understand and repair a slide mechanism – it just takes me longer than a fully trained tech would.

Update 20210504 – Yesterday Lippert answered my email with a part number and phone number to call and order. The parts, including second day air came to $90. However, those parts are “make on demand”, so 7 to 10 days to ship. Tiffin answered my email today – they don’t carry parts, only the whole mechanism, which they didn’t offer to send to me, thus were no help. Not so much like Tiffin used to be – whether it be Covid or Thor, it doesn’t bode well.

Update 20210515 – Received a box from Lippert – right size. I opened it and found this inside…….. And a packing list that was

Not Bearing blocks1 — Not Bearing blocks!

for someone else. Apparently when slapping shipping labels on, someone mixed up the boxes and mine ended up who knows where. I called Lippert, emailed and a second call and they promised to rush make another set of parts and ship them out the same way as my original order. So now we are waiting for parts again.

Update 20200520 – AAAAAHHHHHHHHHRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!! I got the box with the bearing blocks today. Look like the correct parts. But no shoes…. the shoes are the plastic parts that go between the bearing block and the slide gear track. They are absolutely necessary. No one would be replacing the blocks without the shoes. In my original conversation with Customer Service on the phone, I asked and was told “The shoes would come with the blocks.” No mistake about that because the shoes on my blocks were in pieces so I wanted to make sure they came. No shoes. I called and was told that the shoes don’t come with the blocks. What? They come in a separate kit that costs $165. I just paid $90 for the complicated metal blocks plus shipping, now I have to shell out $165 for some plastic and a couple of wheels? I had no choice at that point, but to order the parts (after I looked at pictures on the web site to make sure they looked right so I hung up, then called back). Another 5-7 days I was told during the first call. On the call back – I was told there might be one in stock so it might ship sooner…. So another 2 or 3 days, or maybe as many as 10 and I’ll finally have all the parts I need so I can fix the slide so we are in a condition were we could move. The first contact with Lippert was 5/1. Today is 5/20. Maybe I’ll have it fixed by June.

Final update. It seems Lippert had a set of parts in stock because they did come fairly quickly. Since I was worried about how fast they’d come, I wrote back to the original customer service email to ask them to hurry this order up. They did, sort of – and shipped me another set of bearing blocks, which I did return along with the “not bearing block”. I wrote to Tiffin and they agreed to pay for the parts if I submit the paperwork, which I did, and expect to receive a check (I did). So, this was a learning experience. In the end, Lippert was reasonably helpful, though I’ll never understand the “we don’t always keep those in stock” thing. Tiffin does stand behind their mistakes – and they got off easy because if I had had to use a mobile tech or dealer, it would have been very expensive.

Schwintek slides use two stepper motors, mounted up above, on either side of the slide accessible only from the outside.

There are many variations on this on older RVs but this is the only style I have experience with. What is a stepper motor? Most DC motors just spin when you apply power. One direction only unless you switch the power leads. A stepper motor, moves a fixed rotation step each time a power pulse is sent down a pair of wires. There are three pairs of wires and by pulsing them, in sequence, the motor steps around. The controller thus can send pulses to both motors and in theory, they move at the same speed and move each side of the slide the same. In theory. If one side has a much bigger load on it, it will slow down, miss some steps and they will get “out of sync”. The controller monitors the load the motor is under and stops driving it if the current gets too high – which is how the controller “knows” when the slide is all the way in or out. There is a “manual override” in the controller. It isn’t really an override. The procedure is usually printed on the controller (mounted somewhere inside storage or a cabinet, under a seat cushion – somewhere. On mine, the procedure is to press and release the button 6 times, hold on the 7th until the lights blink. All this really does is encourage the controller to move the motors, not necessarily synced up. With our problem being a physical lock up – manual override of course did nothing for us. Press the button again to exit manual mode. Resync the slide according to instructions.

The motor sits high up, behind the white column. There is a single screw that holds it down onto the upper bearing block.

In that block is an adapter that connects the flat keyed motor shaft to the hex shaft that drives the upper and lower gears. You take out that screw, lift up the motor out of the block and it is disconnected. To remove it, you need to pull the column out, disconnect the motor connector and pull the motor up and out. Putting it back in is tricky as you must not only like up the flat key on the shaft but set the motor down into the upper bearing block with the four pins on the motor. Once the motor is disconnected, the bearing blocks and shaft should move freely. When reassembling, it is imperative to make sure the bearing blocks are all in the same position – measure from the block to the outside slide edge. You might have to lift the shaft out of the lower block, rotate the gear and/or move the block to get everything to line up and be the same distance. Also – the only way to actually remove the bearing block from the track is to remove the track from the slide. Fun? no!

Lower Bearing block with shaft from above.

October 22, 2020October 22, 2020

Rambling in the West

So, these blogs are usually written over a several day stretch, sometimes a week or more period because it seems sometimes like there isn’t that much happening. Then days like today, things happen that make me want to sit down and write a bunch. More on that later.

Capital Reef From Boondocking — Capital Reef

We’ve finally made it to a decent boondocking spot. We spent much of the last few months moving among Thousand Trails and related parks in Washington and Oregon. When we left (driven out by smoke), we spent a few days at Iron Springs, near Cedar City, UT. It was a fairly new, standard design park – with pretty good WiFi – which is unusual, and some real cool iron sculptures. They are worth driving out and seeing them. Before that, we spent one night at a place on the other side of town that, in our rush, we didn’t get around to researching cell signals, and thus we had to bail. There was none. Well, not none – with my directional antenna I got a full 6 bars, but less than 1kbit per second of data. That’s not even good enough for email. At least the smoke that is here, is a couple of levels better than Cedar City and way better than the Bend area in Oregon. The day we left, ended up being a really long day. On top of being a 7+ hour trip, we had to deal with one of the towed cars not charging. Stopping and running it and letting it charge for 10-15 minutes would get us a couple of hours of tow time, maybe. In the end, we just unhooked and drove it.

We did manage to change the oil in both generators before we left Iron Springs. We are using them out here – along with our Solar. But the smoke out here is still quite noticeable and we don’t get full power from our panels. They DO however help with power and we are glad to have them. On a good day, solar provides the equivalent of two hours of generator time. Other, cloudy days, more like one. Our solar install details are here, here and here.

Oh, where are we? We are parked outside Capital Reef, on a hill, on BLM land and have already made several safari trips into and through this amazing park.

It is dusty here. No grass. We don’t need A/C most of the time – just a couple of hours in the afternoon on sunny days. Most people out here (this is a busy place) are considerate, but just tonight, some guy parked his Class C ACROSS a road. There is an alternate access to that road just past where he is parked, but sometimes I just have to wonder how totally unconscious people manage to drive across this country and stay alive. At least he didn’t park across railroad tracks.

Repairs continue. Today it was a little wooden stable for a granddaughter that had fallen apart. And a cover for my daughter’s diffuser. Before we left the last park, it was a connection in a fresh-water tank overflow. And here it was running a new power line for the towed connector on their RV. The car charged fine while towing for 6 months – then started to fail, then quit. We traced the pin to a wire, to the bundle of splices where it connected into the Ford wiring loom. No power there at all. The wire it was spliced into had an RV manufacturer-installed label: wait for it – “Interior Lights”. It looked like an 18-gauge wire. Black wire with a blue stripe. We checked EVERY fuse we could find in the RV. We looked everywhere we could for a black wire with a blue stripe – nope, none to be found. In the end, we grabbed an inline fuse, a spool of wire, and ran a new connection from the house battery compartment to the tow connector pigtail. The towed car uses an RVI battery to battery charger, so it’s a safe connection. Because the house is Lithium, and the care, of course, lead acid, you shouldn’t really just plug one into the other. The manufacturer, of course, Nexus, was completely useless as a resource.

Then there was installing an electric fireplace in the daughter’s RV – a straightforward job as one can be when you have to work with the tools and supplies that happen to be on the RV.

Next, we need to do some more work on the Kayak tie-downs. What we have is working, just a bit more hassle hooking up than necessary. My daughter had bought “j-hook”s for carrying their kayak. It never really fit well. In the end, we created a couple of carpet-covered boards that the kayak can be slid on from the rear of the car and tied down. Some tweaking of our kayak continues but in general, we really like the roller supports.

Yesterday some of us took a hike (Deb wasn’t feeling well) down the east side of Grand Wash at Capital reef. It’s cool walking down the narrow canyon with the walls a couple of hundred feet above.

So today? Well for some time I’ve been feeling like the power numbers were a little off. Sometimes the battery monitor didn’t show fully charged with the generator was topping off the batteries – and it was taking a little too long to charge. Things weren’t adding up, but it wasn’t broken so I didn’t pay enough attention to it.

So today, we are fixing lunch. We have the Ninja Grill running and the microwave. Should be ok, with the generator running, right? But the inverter/charger was also charging the batteries. The generator has two 30-amp circuits. The air conditioners were off, but the TV, Apple TV, maybe water heater, a computer and misc were also on. A circuit breaker on the generator popped off. And the Inverter tried and failed to pick up the load.

Ok, so I had made a mistake, or two. One – our Inverter is a 3k Victron – not the 2K that came with the rig. It has the ability if you limit its power input – to use battery power to make up the difference. But for that to work right, you have to set a limit on how much AC power it can draw. I had left mine to 50 amps because we were hooked up to 50 for so long. The generator breakers are 30-amp.

The two cooking appliances were pulling close to 30 amps by themselves, plus other things when the breaker popped. Yes, we should have been managing our usage better. But when I reset – nothing. I checked the inverter – no lights. I checked power at the infamous DC power panel next to the batteries – and the Inverter power switch was open/failed. As I was taking it apart (which necessitates removing the power in the buss bar from the fuse – I noticed the fuse bolt was NOT TIGHT! I replaced the switch (I had a spare because I still plan on replacing that entire panel). But when the Inverter switch was off – I’d get voltage through the fuse to the switch. When the switch was on – I’d get nothing. Then I realized the buss bar from the fuse to the inverter switch had been hot. Again. Same problem we encountered on the beach at S. Padre island that caused me to scrounge parts at a West Marine to bypass the fuse.

The inverter switch showed the same melted plastic around the input bolt and the buss bar show signs of having been hot. While the switch specs say – up to 300 amps continuous and up to 500 intermittent – should be ok for 3000 watts for our normal use, it has turned out to be insufficient for a 3k inverter. The specs for the inverter say to use a 400 amp fuse. The specs also say that continuous output is 3k – but can burst up to 6000. That would be 460 amps – which is still under the switch’s specification. The buss bar however showed signs of being hot – insulation was bubbled. The nut holding the bar to the fuse was barely hand tight, so it seems to me that again, the fuse had again gotten too hot. I couldn’t remove the fuse – it seemed glued (melted) to the underlying buss bar. The way this is constructed – a bolt has a plastic washer that insulates it from the underlying buss bar. The fuse is slipped over the bolt. Then the top buss bar that passes current to the switch goes on, then a nut that holds it all together. Power passes bar to fuse to bar via flat surfaces held together only with a 7/16 nut and tiny bolt. Steel bolt. Aluminum bars. Who knows what the fuse it made out of internally – externally, structurely, it’s a form of plastic, with probably copper parts. I suspect over time thermal changes work it loose. The higher currents associated with Lithium batteries and 3k instead of 2k inverter exacerbate problems built into inferior quality equipment.

When we were at Red Bay and had them replace the entire panel – I had them leave the cable and fuse we had created as a bypass. They just heavily insulated the end of the cable and left it. So, I again, bypassed the failing fuse and used the makeshift cable+fuse to provide power to the new inverter switch.

It’s scary when things break in the middle of the desert, an hour or more from any decent hardware store. Even scarier when these parts are simply not available in most hardware or even RV parts stores.

We did get some rain today – just enough to raise the humidity a tiny bit and cool things off, but ten minutes later, there was no evidence of rain at all, except the dark clouds receding to the east.

And a few days later….. It started to get pretty cold up there on top of Capital Reef. So we headed south again – to northern Arizona. We had reservations at a Thousand Trails campground outside of Cottonwood, AZ. They had nice large 50 amp sites up on top of the hill and not so nice cramped, 30 amp sites down the hill. Cell service was only marginal down the hill. We had planned to spend lots of time in this park, but despite a number of the 50-amp sites being empty, none were available to us. Generally, we’ve had good experiences with Thousand Trails, but this is the second time we’ve left a TT park early because of our experience there.

We found a nice, new park just a mile away with an attractive monthly rate and plan to be here for a month or two. Cell is great and we hear good WiFi is on its way. A Thousand Trails membership is a significant investment – and we need to be able to use them a lot to make it pay. But here at least, we are better off paying a monthly rate than staying in a substandard TT park.

More repairs: The driver’s side mirror was loose at its base. What a nightmare. It is held in by four bolts (actually three bolts with nuts inside and one sheet metal screw). One bolt/nut was buried under 6 inches of spray foam in the engine compartment. Another is hidden somewhere in the dash, also in the engine compartment. A third is inside, under the dash – all of those have a loose NUT on the inside. A fourth self-drilling screw also was used – I never found just where it entered the coach on the inside. Did I mention – that spray foam was full of wiring, so it had to be removed very carefully. Hours later, the mirror was fully tightened down and resealed. I’m sure the design engineers at Tiffin didn’t say “Just bury that entire corner in the engine compartment with spray foam”. Nor did they think about how hard it would actually be to ever replace or even just tighten the mirror. Just an inch or so different position and a little more care running wires and foaming would have made the job so much easier.

Kayak’s again – we’ve had several more outings and we are all getting better and launching and paddling We’ve taken the dogs with us. Murphy is still a bit anxious but getting better We also realized that putting our kayak on the truck with just four mounting points was starting to push the bottom of the kayak in – so we created two carpet covered rails to hold the kayak just like we made for the k

And forest fires seem to follow us. This one at least was about 50 miles away from us. In this photo – it’s still 0% contained.

We plan to head to Texas at the end of this month (Oct-2020).

Mike

Tag: repairs

Slides are no fun!

The Problem

A bit of relevant history:

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Rambling in the West

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The Problem

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