Some thing are made to break, others just break because they can. I am not sure which category this falls into, but it caused me a few minutes of aggravation and then some giggles when the fix turned out to be so easy. It started with my walking around the coach and just sort of looking at things to be sure everything was “okay” sort of “looking for trouble” and I found it.
This is looking up at the underside of the living room slideout room behind the driver. The very one that was repaired last Fall in Red Bay. That bolt lying on the ledge is a stop meant to prevent the mechanism from pulling in too far. It broke off the mount above. Look at the next picture and you will see how it is supposed to look. This is the rearward arm of the mechanism.
I had several questions at this moment. Could I pull the slide in and go about our travels with no problem? Could I fix it or have it fixed somehow if necessary before getting under way?
I posted these pictures and concerns on a forum devoted to Tiffin motorhome owners, and within minutes I had my answers. As one would expect from any internet resource they came out as “yes” “no” “maybe” I even had emailed Tiffin Service and had to wait over the weekend for Tony to respond that I could indeed bring in the slide carefully and travel without fixing it and that the fix should be easy, unscrew the broken bolt and screw in a new one and set the length to the former one (a bit shorter to avoid breaking it again). Easy to say, I suspected a bit less easy to do.
I got out my socket wrench and backed off the jam nut from the broken screw, it was just more than finger tight! Next I fussed about removing the broken screw, fully expecting it to be frozen. I got a vise grip on it and discovered it too was barely more than finger tight. Too easy! I took the broken bits to a manufacturer’s distributor (Grainger) expecting to buy whatever I needed there. Wrong. They didn’t have it in stock and I would have had to buy 25 for $20! The counterman suggested I go to Jackson’s Hardware, about 2 miles away and there I found the screw and bought 2 for $.79. Since everything had come out easily, installing the new screw and jam nut was a simple matter. All that is left is to be sure that I got the length right so it functions as a safety stop. That will happen in the morning as we prepare to move on down the road to Lake Tahoe area.
Oh yes, my Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) has been causing endless aggravation for 500 miles. I have reset all the sensors and hope that they will provide timely, accurate, readings of tire pressure and temperature as we merrily roll along.
