Slide Motor Replacement…

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.

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.

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!

When 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.

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!