Sunday, June 1, 2014

Slide Motor Replacement…

broken tooth on smaller gear - Note broken piece near shadow

As I had mentioned some time ago we had an issue with our large wall slide. We first noticed it the day we were about to leave Lockhart State Park when I was retracting the slide in. As the slide was coming in I heard a loud “klunk” and wondered what the heck that was!!! I stopped pulling in the slide and checked outside but couldn’t find anything (My first thought was maybe one of the grandkids had placed a rock or something in one of the tracks).

Once satisfied nothing was amiss I began to retract the slide again and noticed that the slide would come in a bit, make a loud “thunk” noise and come in a bit again. This noise pattern continued till the slide came all the way in. By then I pretty much suspected that I had broken a tooth off of one of the gears in the slide motor but since we had to move on I decided to wait until our next location to investigate since we would be close to some larger towns. After we settled in at Canyon Lake I put the slide out and it again made the same repetitive noises.

bolt on tube insertinsert tube on new motor "nub"

I went under the slide to locate the two slide rails and inspected them to see if there was any damage on the rails. Seeing no damage I located the slide motor and after consulting with Tiffin I unhooked the slide motor from the chassis. This required me to cut the wires to the motor, then I removed the bolts from the inserts (left photo above) and slid the bars off the motor. I removed the four bolts holding the motor to the chassis and it off it came.

I opened up the slide motor casing and took apart the slide motor and indeed found what I had suspected. The smallest gear in the motor had a broken tooth on it (Note broken tooth on smaller gear in header photo). Also a washer and a nut had split as well. So I called around San Marcos and New Braunfels Texas to see if anyone had the motor and what it would cost (you can’t simply buy the parts of the motor you need). I also asked Tiffin for the same information.

left side of motor right side of motor

PPL in San Marcos informed me they could get it for me in 2-3 weeks for over 1100 bucks! Yikes! Camping world beat that price but not by much and could get it in about the same time. Thank goodness for Tiffin as they had it for around $650.00 and they had it in stock! Way to go Red Bay Alabama and Tiffin Motorhomes ....so I ordered the new motor from them and got it in four days!

splice in wiresWhen I received the new motor I checked with Tiffin again to ask if their were any tricks to installing the new motor. The only thing they told me was that it would be best to pull the slide in about half way before installing the new motor. Also they wanted me to make sure before I installed it that the slide was extracted the exact same distance on both sides so I measured how far the slide was out on each side.

Since the slide out distances were equal I began the process of installing the new motor. I reinserted the square tubes on the new motor once it was bolted in place. Note, you may have to have someone push the button to retract the slide a bit to match of the holes of the new motor to those on the bar inserts (see photo below).  Lastly I had to use wire nuts to splice in the wires of the new motor (above photo). I plan to replace these wire nuts with something more permanent later.

align holes Once installed I tested out the new motor and the slide worked perfectly then and still does now. I waited to pen this blog until I was totally satisfied the repair would hold and it has.  I am glad I took on this repair by myself as I probably saved quite a bit of cash and really this was a quite easy do it yourself repair!

15 comments:

  1. Nice. Did you search for a used motor? You could have probably got one for under $300, provided you could find the right one. Nothing wrong with used parts if they've been tested. After all, the parts on your own motorhome are all used!

    When I worked two summers at an RV dealership, the two most common problems in the service department were to do with slide outs and leveling systems. Because we bring our motorhome to a lot of out of the way places, we're glad we don't have either of those things to worry about.

    www.travelwithkevinandruth.com

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  2. We loved our Tiffin MH. Always great service from them. Glad it all worked out. Good job.

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  3. Good job! That happened to us on our bedroom slide a couple years ago. We were at Brannon's in Red Bay at the time it broke. Brannon just jumped in his truck, drove over to Tiffin and came back with the new motor :) I think he charged us 15 minutes in labor :) We were very lucky.

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  4. I am more that impressed. That is a huge job.

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  5. WOW John that doesn't sound easy at all. So glad you were able to get it at the Tiffin price rather than the inflated one. Nice job obviously. Maybe someone will tell you what the shop charge for it would have been so you can congratulate yourself on saving some big bucks.

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  6. Two years ago we had to replace ours. After searching could not find a used one but our dealer came up with a new one, 50% more than the cost of yours (thats Canada for you). The price quoted was cash and carry, but I asked them to install. Because I had them install it we got a discount equivalent to the labor price, so nice to have that done.
    Good deal for you and not really a hard job.

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  7. great job on doing the install yourself. . .being handy definitely has it's rewards!

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  8. A great reminder to not just accept the first quote.

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  9. Way to go John! Good post on replacing the motor too....very informative and well done. As Marsha stated above, we sure loved our Tiffing and always got great service.

    Hope you have good luck with the new gears. We had to do some "fixin" on our Cameo slide motor. Always something with these beasts. So far so good!

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  10. Great job, having a handy guy around is wonderful, I know-been married to one almost 29 years.

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  11. Having just replaced our rear slide out gear, via mobile repair guy, I am impressed you tackled the motor! Tiffin was able to overnight the gear after counting the teeth and photo sent to them. The $13 part was here on the west coast the next morning. Love the Tiffin parts folks!

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  12. I'm so impressed you did the repair yourself. Good job.

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  13. Steve is patting your back right now for a job well done. You are quiet a handy man.

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