We took our coach to the Oregon Motorcoach Center in Eugene, Oregon, for them to fix a few issues, most importantly the broken hydraulic slide-out.

Our front driver-side slide-out got stuck back in mid-June, when we were staying in Youngstown, New York. You can read about our adventures of diagnosing the issue and manually pushing the slide in. In late July we also went to HWH in Moscow, Iowa, the manufacturer of the hydraulic piston, but while they weren’t willing to do the repair, they did sell us the needed part.

All the way across the other side of the country from New York, and many month later in mid-October, the Oregon Motorcoach Center (OMC) was able to fix the issue.

We dropped our coach off at OMC, and stayed (with Paladin) in a nearby hotel. A hassle, but much nicer than hanging out in their waiting room. When they said they’d need a bit longer to fix all of the issues, we headed down to Ashland, where we had planned to camp, and stayed in another hotel.

Here’s the piston we got from HWH:

Disconnected hoses, which I labeled to enable to the techs to reconnect:

Here’s our coach in the OMC workshop:

HWH had thought that we’d have to drop the fuel tank in order to replace the piston, but OMC determined that that wouldn’t be feasible, due to the shape of the tank and how it was positioned above the front axle. But they came up with an alternative (and better) solution: they removed our house batteries, and cut a hole in the back of that compartment, and were able to reach the piston that way. They added a plate over the hole when they finished.

Since they had to remove the batteries, they plugged our fridge directly to the shop electricity; very nice of them:

The working slide when we picked up our coach:

So nice to have that working again! Much bigger inside now.

While there, they also replaced the entry step motor, as previously mentioned, and replaced a connector in one of the headlights. Both good fixes, but the slide was the big one. Four months without that working was frustrating, but at least we were still able to travel.

While preparing to leave the Four Mile Creek State Park campground recently, the big front driver-side slide-out started to come in crooked — the front side didn’t move, but the back side came in. This is very bad — apart from a potentially difficult and expensive repair, we could not move our coach with the slide unable to retract.

Here you can see that the front side of the slide was almost fully extended:

But the rear side was mostly in:

Looking underneath, the arm was twisted:

That was the end result of our efforts: we stopped after a moment when we realized that it was coming in crooked, and tried re-extending and re-retracting a few times, to no avail; we stopped when it got that skewed, and we couldn’t re-extend it again.

Time to call for professional help! I looked on the RV Help site, and found Brian Villa (Villa Mobile RV Tech). He was enjoying some Sunday time with his family, but was willing to come help us, arriving within an hour or two. We spent some time investigating, trying to narrow down the cause, and eventually discovered that the hydraulic reservoir was empty, and when we added more fluid, it immediately leaked out over the top of the fuel tank:

Unfortunately it isn’t easy to see the front hydraulic piston, as it’s above the big 150 gallon fuel tank, but we’re pretty confident that the piston seals have failed.

The next day, the tech got some caps for the hydraulic hoses, and capped off the two hydraulic hoses for that slide (here’s the first one capped):

He also disconnected the slide from both the front and back pistons (this is the back one):

Little bolts that hold the slide to the piston:

We were unable to push the slide in manually with just the two of us, so he used two jacks to raise the slide a little (as it has to go up before it goes in):

We also recruited some extra “muscle” from the campground maintenance staff and other campers, and between six of us we were able to manually push the slide in — once we got it over the first inch or so, it slid in the rest of the way very easily (with a little gravity assist by tilting the coach using air leveling):

With that in, Brian built some bracing out of 2×4 boards to hold it in, since the hydraulics were disconnected. On the front side of the slide, there was a very sturdy structure on top of the slide:

Even screwed into the slide itself:

A simpler but still sturdy bracing above the slide on the rear side:

Plus a board bracing the bottom on the front side:

Thanks again to Brian for getting us back on the road!

To make it even more secure, I later added a heavy-duty ratchet strap on the rear side of the slide in the basement:

Plus a board under the couch feet, so they’re not hanging in the air (they sit on the floor when the slide is out):

And finally a couple of cabinet jack support poles adding extra bracing on the rear side:

Perhaps overkill, but we were continuing to travel while awaiting an appointment to fix it.

I initially made an appointment at NIRVC in Tennessee, which is coming up next week, but I discovered that the manufacturer of the slide cylinders, HWH, is not far off our planned route in Iowa, and they said they would be able to repair the cylinder and restore the slide (plus check the other slide and jacks), much cheaper than NIRVC would be able to (even if NIRVC had ordered a replacement part in time). So we’ll be heading to HWH in a couple of weeks. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix it as easily as they indicate!

Update: it turned out that HWH wasn’t willing to fix the issue, as they thought we’d have to drop the fuel tank to reach the piston. But it wasn’t a wasted trip, as they were able to sell us the required part. We later took our coach to the Oregon Motorcoach Center in Eugene, Oregon, and they were able to successfully fix it, accessing it through the back of the battery compartment.